À mesa com o universoa proposta macrobiótica de experiência do mundo

Abstract

This study intends to identify the processes through which a social product, macrobiotics, was transformed into a significant leadership proposal in the world. Starting from the genesis and the development of this social product, this work describes the main agents involved in this social process, as well as the personal, social and history circumstances that lead to its spread. Therefore, focusing on the founder of modern macrobiotics, Georges Ohsawa, and following his trajectory of life, this thesis intend to explain how a vision of the world seeded in Japan, and with a strong oriental tradition, in philosophical and religious terms, now circulates through Europe and America, where it is used and regarded as a practice and an orientation discourse in the world. To highlight this process, we will refer to specific historical and social circumstances, particularly those following the II World War, trying to perceive the social environment that enabled the expansion of macrobiotics. The significant aspects of this social environment are those related with the critique of modernity, where the critique of science and of its multiple achievements takes place: industrialism, technocracy, materialism, but also the growing of an ecological conscience, joined by an attraction for new forms of spiritualism. Facing the disenchantment of the world, macrobiotics was regarded, for many following it, as a scheme of re-enchantment within which feelings of belonging and affinity were developed, mostly supported by knowledge networks. Given the sphere of identification that macrobiotics provides, it is used a notion of community to think the individuals that adhere to it. It is a deterritorialized, transnacional, unstable and open community, but, nevertheless, a space for identification. Keeping in mind the specificity of the Portuguese society, macrobiotics will be advocated here as a cosmological vision, incorporating a food system and a healing system. These two systems interact, and from such interaction they are thought of as an alternative to orthodox food and healing systems.