Commensality as Counter-Ritual: Prefigurative Mutual Aid and the Reconstitution of Ecological Belonging

Ecological crises increasingly displace communities into host societies that frequently conceptualize them as threats to social stability. This paper examines how host societies recast displaced populations as dangerous outsiders and justify exclusion through borders and social fragmentation. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s concept of dirt as "matter out of place," I show how dominant narratives code displaced people as intrusions within imagined national or cultural orders, rendering their suffering morally illegible. I analyze mutual aid food-sharing initiatives as counter-rituals that confront fear and indifference through radical hospitality. These meals identify fear, exclusion, and indifference as the real social toxins and use shared food to dissolve the boundaries that sustain them. By feeding people in public spaces, these gatherings meet immediate needs and model resilient, non-state forms of collective life that embody a compassionate ecological future in the present.