[Food manducation--psychological manducation]

Food "manducation" is the fundamental act of the living process. Through assimilation, the inert nutriment taken from outside the body will wind up as elements making up part of our living being. This merging, incorporating, assimilating process gets unconsciously translated into the everyday language, and provides a share of its vocabulary. It gets likewise translated into various social practices such as greeting and kissing. Those observations in basic anthropology will help substantiating the analysis of pedagogical techniques in the orality civilizations; and particularly--while following in Marcel Jousse's footsteps--in the civilization of that ancient people of the Bible. It comes to light that integrating, memorizing, learning, on the one hand, and teaching, on the other, have but one same psycho-physiological basis. This basis gives rise to a pedagogical system the end and means of which are, on their own plane, a perfect carbon copy of the eating act. Hence, in that ethic group, the analogical parallelism between the physical subsistence, maintained through food manducation, and the intellectual subsistence nourished and enriched through psychological manducation. Thus, such frequently used expressions as: "To eat the lesson", "To eat the teacher while he is instructing", no longer sound obscure. Going beyond, an attempt is made, and this, solely from the anthropological standpoint, to apply these data to the religious and mystical act of Eucharistic Manducation.