1

Introduction: A Proustian Introduction: A Proustian Introduction: A Proustian Introduction: A Proustian Introduction: A Proustian
Anthropology? Anthropology? Anthropology? Anthropology? Anthropology?
The Remembered Octopus
Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remember anything
they had eaten? This sardonic comment, made by an Oxford don,
seemed to sum up the response when I presented a paper on the topic
in 1996 at the department of anthropology at Oxford. Indeed, as I sat
with my fellow gowned colleagues surrounded by all manner of forks
and spoons, and experienced for myself the extreme emphasis on form
over substance at Oxford High Table, where a profusion of potatoes
and overboiled vegetables was presented and just as quickly whisked
away, I realized that this comment was not at all out of place. And
although my topic did not receive such derogation when I presented
it to US anthropological audiences, neither was there the normal buzz
of suggestions: Oh, if you are studying that, you must read . . . Instead,
when I consulted with the person who was most focused on the issue
of memory in the department of anthropology at the University of
Chicago on possible sources on food and memory, the response was a
hardly less sardonic Try Proust! My only encouragement came from
colleagues working in Greece or other Mediterranean contexts, who
would share with me their own anecdotes about tales of long-
remembered meals.
And then there were the Kalymnians themselves . . . From the first
time I visited Kalymnos as a high school senior on a study-abroad
program, clues abounded to the connection that existed on the island
between food and strategies of remembering. Kalymnian friends noted
and continually mentioned my dislikes (my complaints about the
predominance of eggs in our daily meals), as well as my penchant for
their Kalymnian version of beef stew. But they not only noted, they
remembered these likes and dislikes, and brought them up again on
2 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
my return trips two and eight years later. So it was not a total surprise
when I began fieldwork to hear the frequently phrased injunction: Eat,
in order to remember Kalymnos. I had my own ideas of what this
meant, and had collected fieldwork stories in the exotic mode for the
folks back home: from the sea urchins that I watched Kalymnians collect
with their bare hands, open with a fork and eat live, to the octopus,
pounded on the rocks and eaten fresh off the grill, to the roasted goat,
whose severed head was dangled over mine when someone decided
playfully to wake me from an afternoon nap. But there was a
difference here, because my Kalymnian friends did not have such, from
my perspective, exotic foods in mind. Any meal could potentially be
the object of this injunction. And as the comment was repeated, I began
to realize that this was not simply a suggestion made to a foreigner to
take back culinary souvenirs of his stay along with the photographs,
postcards, and in the case of Kalymnos, the ubiquitous sponges that
are the more common objects of tourist expropriation from the island.
In telling me to use the transitory and repetitive act of eating as a medium
for the more enduring act of remembering, they were, in fact, telling me to
act like a Kalymnian. As I listened to their own stories about the past,
as part of my research project, which focused on the topic of historical
consciousness, I began to realize the extent to which ordinary foods
permeated their memories. This was evident in fifty-year-old tales of
plump purple figs served to a fianc return-migrant from the United
States, as well as in more mundane stories that began It was during
the German occupation on Rhodes. I was eating a bag of apricots, when
my friend Yiorgos came by and suggested we investigate the abandoned
Jewish synagogue . . . Did Kalymnians really remember such far-off
incidental details of their lives as a bag of apricots? If not, what were
the apricots doing in the story? As I thought about these issues, other
questions began to swirl in my mind: concerning stories people would
tell about their own food-related generosity, as well as the reverse,
people claiming to steal fruit in memory of dead neighbors. And what
about the memorials for the dead that center around the sharing of
special foods? Was it the ordinary or the extraordinary meals that people
claimed to remember, or perhaps something in between? As I began to
think back over my fieldwork a whole battery of questions centering
on food and memory posed themselves. But how could I contextualize
these questions? Was there relevant theory to be consulted, or could I
only try Proust?
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 3
Scholarship-lite?
Food itself seems to be a topic in ongoing search of legitimacy, as
evidenced by a 1999 Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled A
Place at the Table, which refers to food studies as a hot new field.
This article, in fact, prompted an internet-sponsored discussion over
whether food studies was a legitimate academic pursuit or scholarship-
lite. At least for anthropology, this may reflect the fact that, unlike
other cultural domains, such as kinship, ritual and religion, exchange
or politics, food does not have its own well-developed specialist
terminology and tools of analysis. The uses and meanings of food can
on the one hand seem trivial to those who live by the maxim food as
fuel, while on the other hand it seems a topic where native exegesis
can be as perceptive as specialist knowledge, as indicated in the
following quotation from a British father on the meaning of meals:
I try to eat the evening meal with the household. My daughter doesnt
comply. Its part of her attitude to food, her attitude to freedom. Generally
she likes to please herself, eat what she likes. Ive tried to persuade her
eating isnt just about eating, its a social situation (cited in Bell and
Valentine 1997:83).
But perhaps the obviousness and taken-for-grantedness of food can
provide focus for research in itself: the fact that the Oxford don found
my topic absurd, while Greek and Italian colleagues instantly related
to it, is in itself ethnographically interesting. Yet this obviousness can
be deceptive as well, because food can hide powerful meanings and
structures under the cloak of the mundane and the quotidian. Some-
thing as seemingly innocuous and salutary as the rise of micro-brewed
beers and Starbucks in the United States in the 1990s, for example,
can open a window on to shifting American economic and class
structures. Beer and coffee, two of the most democratizing beverages
in American society because of their cheapness, ubiquity, and homo-
geneity, have been transformed into badges of class distinction, as well
as icons of the end of mass production and mass marketing. Drinking
beer no longer need be an identification with Joe six-pack, as urban
professionals sip beer from wine glasses (the change in glassware is
itself a symbol of the transformation in the status of beer; it used to be
necessary to switch from beer to wine to mark your class distinction)
at $9.00/six-pack. And the most humble act of American gift-giving,
the offer of a cup of coffee (Joe once again), must now be prefaced
4 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
by a discussion of preparation methods and bean origins.
1
The power
of food here is to mask these class issues under the guise of personal
preference and matters of taste, the unquestioned baseline of our
American economistic view of the world. Many other such examples
of foods symbolic power can be adduced. Feeley-Harnik, in her study
of biblical transformations of Passover, notes that the power of linking
religion to dietary rules was in the simplicity of its message as contrasted
to the arcana of scriptural interpretation: Food seems to have been
regarded as the most accessible, the best way of introducing ordinary
mortals to the ineffable wisdom of God (1994:166). Food, then, can
carry hegemonic identities through its very ability to connect the
mundane with the pleasurable and the necessary.
2
Perhaps there is another reason that the topic of food is met with
such raised eyebrows. That is that it seems for many in our culture to
involve the baser senses, instincts and bodily functions, not suited for
scholarly or mental pursuits. As anthropologists have argued (see
below), there is a hierarchy of the senses in the dominant cultures of
the West that ascribes vision to the more evolved cultures and taste
and smell to the primitive. Food is not generally seen as conducive
to thought. It always has the potential, in our puritan-derived culture,
to be labelled as a giving in to our primitive nature, the line between
the gourmet and the glutton being seen as quite thin; and the injunc-
tion dont eat like a pig can be found on the lips of many a parent
socializing their children into proper manners. Or as Jeanneret (1991:1)
puts it aptly:
All sorts of ideological barriers exist between sense and the senses,
between intellectual activity and the consumption of natural produce.
The head and the stomach are at odds . . . We have to choose whether to
speak or to eat: we must not speak with our mouth full.
Food Memories
These very associations of food with the primitive, as well as
anthropologists longstanding commitment to documenting the
quotidian, the everyday, suggest some of the reasons that anthropology
1. On micro-breweries, see Bertsch 1997; on the rise of speciality coffee, see Frenkel
1998; Roseberry 1996.
2. For examples, see Allison 1991; Cowan 1991; Rasmussen 1996.
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 5
has traditionally been in the very forefront of food studies. Anthro-
pological study of food can be traced back to the origins of the
discipline, witness the perceptive writings of Robertson-Smith on
commensality (see Meigs 1988, for a discussion). Since then, food has
appeared as a theme in diverse classics such as Morgans (1950 [1876])
depiction of Montezumas dinner as an example of primitive com-
munism, Boass salmon recipes,
3
Radcliffe-Browns discussion of food
and social sentiments among the Andaman Islanders (1948), Evans-
Pritchards (1940) analysis of cow-time among the Nuer, Richardss
(1939) ethnography of nutrition, agriculture and social life among the
Bemba, and Lvi-Strausss (1970) voluminous musings on things raw,
cooked and rotten. Anthropological work has produced a broad
consensus that food is about commensality eating to make friends
and competition eating to make enemies. Food, in the view of both
Mary Douglas and those working on ethnicity, is a particularly good
boundary marker, perhaps because it provides a potent symbol of
the ability to transform the outside into the inside. In more current
terminology food is about identity creation and maintenance, whether
that identity be national, ethnic, class or gender-based.
4
In the US
context food has also been shown to be about assimilation, and, for
the majority population, about tasting the other. As Kalcik (1984:37)
3. That Boas was on the road to an anthropology of diverse sensory experience is
indicated in his broad treatment of aesthetics in Primitive Art (1927). For a discussion,
see Forrest (1988: 22ff.)
4. On food and ethnicity see Brown and Mussell 1984; on class see Bourdieu 1982;
Goody 1982; Rasmussen 1996; Sahlins 1976. On gender see Counihan 1999; Meigs 1992,
Allison 1991; Caplan 1994. Food has also been examined as a potent source of kinship
symbolism, because of its ability to create shared substance. As Meigs puts it,
Underlying the Hua understanding of food and food rules is a world view that
emphasizes relatedness. All organisms are linked in chains of mutual influence; borders
between bodies are permeable; . . . Through his or her continual acts of food exchange,
both as producer and as consumer, the individual is constituted as part of a physically
commingled and communal whole (1988:3545). Similarly, Carsten notes that for
Malays, Food creates both persons in a physical sense and the substance blood by
which they are related to each other (1995:224), thus echoing a point made in
Robertson-Smiths classic work on the Religion of the Semites: . . . after the child is weaned,
his flesh and blood continue to be nourished and renewed by the food which he shares
with his commensals, so that commensality can be thought of (1) as confirming or
even (2) as constituting kinship in a very real sense (cited in Meigs 1988:353).
6 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
wittily puts it, The formula here seems to be not-so-strange food equals
not-so-strange people or perhaps, strange people but they sure can
cook!
5
Recent studies have focused on issues of power and hegemony. For
example, Cowan notes how women are taught, in the Greek context,
to consume sweet things as part of learning their sweet gendered
disposition. She registers the difficulty of challenging the association
of sweets with women, where to resist this formula is both to go against
ones desire, and to make something out of what is perceived as
nothing: The very triviality of many of the things people do . . . not
only blocks them from consciousness, since they constitute acts of utter
common sense, but also serves to trivialize any protest (Cowan
1991:181). In other words, food must not be seen as providing meaning
only through structure, through providing categories of clean and
polluted, edible and inedible, as Mary Douglas has well illustrated, but
also through the everyday practices that have increasingly come to
our attention as part of anthropological interest in hidden histories,
the practice of everyday life and the history of the present, to fold
recent theoretical developments into a batter of catchphrases.
This ability of food to both generate subjective commentary and
encode powerful meanings would seemingly make it ideal to wed to the
topic of memory. Memory and its oft forgotten alter-ego forgetting
generate popular interest and commentary while simultaneously
encoding hidden meanings. Like food, memory is clearly linked to
issues of identity: gender, class and other. Yet one roams far and wide
in scholarly studies of food to find discussions of the perception of
foods past. Feeley-Harnik (1994:xv) offers the following complaint:
Across major differences, from yada to gnosis, the biblical writers emphat-
ically insist on the mutuality of eating-speaking and remembering . . .
Yet despite the prominence of this theme in the arts, the hints of similar
5. An earlier generation of food studies engaged in debates over material vs. symbolic
approaches, good to think or good to eat, while most people recognized the truth
in both positions. Another version of this debate was between synchronic structural
approaches (represented by Mary Douglas) and historico-materialist approaches (repre-
sented by Sidney Mintz, Jack Goody and Stephen Mennell in various forms). Once again,
each position has its strengths and weaknesses, a fact attested to by Mintzs recent
collection of essays (1996), which attempts to inject more meaning into his earlier
approaches. But these debates, which stimulated the field earlier, seem to have run their
course (for a review of the positions, see Wood 1994).
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 7
connections in ethnographic monographs (Trobriand Islanders locate
memory in the stomach), and some attention to the memory-enhancing
effects of acetylcholine and glucose in rats and elderly humans, there is
surprisingly little research on this topic.
This in spite of the fact that it is evident to many that if we are
what we eat, then we are what we ate as well.
6
Recent concern with
transnational identities has put the issue of nostalgia on the theoretical
table.
7
Yet the obvious link of food and nostalgia has produced only
some intriguing descriptive material (Bahloul 1996), and Hannerzs
(1996:27) suggestive anecdote that the first thing a Swedish couple
did after a trip to Borneo was to drink a glass of cold milk at their
kitchen table: Home is where that glass of cold milk is. And while
Mennell, Mintz, and Goody have together injected a renewed interest
in history into food studies, none of them has shown an interest in
historical consciousness, or the understanding of peoples subjective
perceptions of foods past.
8
The one writer who brings us close to a consideration of these issues
is Mary Douglas, particularly in her work on Deciphering the meal
(1971). While this work is known for its famous structuralist analysis
of the meal as made up of A + 2B (meat and 2 vegetables), and the
many algebraic elaborations that she cooks up on that basic formula,
a second key insight she provides concerns not the structure within
meals, but the relations between meals. She sees these relations as a
system of repeated analogies. Each meal, to be a meal, must recall the
6. We are What we Ate is the title of a recent collection of short stories by various
authors working in a Proustian vein (Winegardner 1997).
7. See for example, Appadurai (1996:6685).
8. Mennell (1995) looks at changes in food practices and table manners in France
and England over several centuries, arguing for a shift in manners in line with Norbert
Eliass work on the civilizing process (Elias 1978). Mintz (1979, 1985) traces the
production and consumption of sugar as a key site for examining the links between
expanding capitalism and industrialization in Europe and colonialism in the New World.
Goody uses a cross-cultural examination of food practices in Europe, Asia and Africa
over time to argue for the relationship between production, social hierarchy and the
differentiation of eating practices. Mennell has discussed the subject of perception of
time in relation to food, using Eliass scheme to argue for a historical trend toward
rationalization and quantification of time (1996). But this leads him to a consideration
of changing time-allocation and foresight in relation to food, i.e. growing recognition
of the after-effects of gluttony, rather than a focus on memory.
8 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
basic structure of other meals: A meal stays in the category of meal
only insofar as it carries this structure which allows the part to recall
the whole (1971:67). At the same time, ordinary quotidian meals
metonymically figure the structure of celebratory or holiday meals,
so that these meals simply elaborate the basic structure: A + 2B becomes
2A + 4B. There are significant patternings of meals as well: daily, weekly,
and yearly cycles are the most obvious, but they can stretch out over
the life-course as well. Because of this, Douglas argues that linguistic
analysis is in fact often inappropriate to understanding meals: a
sentence can be said in a minute, but a food sentence takes a lifetime
to complete.
In her earlier work on Hebrew food taboos, Douglas argues that food
is used to state repeatedly the message of purity, of the perfection of
separated categories, which can be applied to religion, politics, or
territorial boundaries (1971:767), much like Feeley-Harniks argument
about identity above. But this argument partakes of a more static
structuralism current in the earlymid-1970s: thus its resonance with
Sahlinss (1976) discussion of US food taboos and class eating practices.
But in later work, Douglas develops this other, more temporal per-
spective: she sees the message of meals to be in their power to represent
experiences of time, development or evolution: To treat food in its
ritual aspect is to take account of its long spun out temporal processes.
It is an evolving system that can be a metaphor for any other evolution,
great or small, the evolution of just one marriage, and even of the
whole human species (1982:115). Further, in her discussion of meals
as metaphor and metonymy she seems to prefigure some of the tools
used to infuse structuralist approaches with history: history as para-
digmatic repetitions of key themes (History repeats itself) or as
syntagmatic chains of events (One damned thing after another).
9
It seems a shame, indeed, that these different structuralisms, of food
and of the past, were not brought into conjuncture, even in recent
explorations of the seemingly fateful voyages of Captain Cook on his
ship the Endeavour. One only has to wonder how history would have
been different if Captain Cook had not insisted on including sauerkraut
among his provisions: his voyage might have been prematurely cut
short by a bout of scurvy (see Lust 1998). Perhaps this theoretical
omission is soon to be rectified: it is encouraging that the revisionist
Obeyesekere refers to his own recent endeavor as his cook book
(1995:169).
9. See for example, Sahlins 1981; Hanson 1983, and the collected essays in Ohnuki-
Tierney 1990 for illustrative examples of this type of anthropological approach to history.
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 9
Among anthropologists of food, then, Douglas seems to take us the
furthest into issues of memory. And yet what tends to be neglected in
her argument is a remembering subject. Thus we are presented with
meals as metonyms, recalling other meals, carrying the meaning
of other meals, rather than people remembering what they have eaten.
Yet elsewhere she praises Maurice Halbwachs view of memory as
working by drawing on external stimuli which helps us to renew past
experiences: We remember when some new memory helps us to piece
together small, scattered, and indistinct bits of the past (1982: 258).
This seems a perfect description of the parts that Douglas sees as recall-
ing the whole of other meals. But if Douglas did not make the connection
fully explicit, her work still provides the best guidepost in the literature
on food to experiences of temporality, and we will return to these
insights into parts and wholes, patterns and structures, metaphors and
metonyms and missing structuralist approaches to history, in consider-
ing the work of remembering meals on Kalymnos.
If we approach things from the other direction, and turn to the
literature on memory in anthropology for discussions of food, we find
suggestive paths leading to similar surprising silences. Memory is a
much more recent anthropological topic than food. By and large,
anthropologists have been interested in the active, rather than the
passive nature of memory. That is, in the fact that memories are not
simply stored images drawn out of the brain at appropriate intervals,
but are very much formed as an interaction between the past and the
present, a point made by those working on memory in a number of
different disciplines.
10
To quote Lambek and Antze (1998:xxix):
Identity is not composed of a fixed set of memories but lies in the
dialectical, ceaseless activity of remembering and forgetting, assimilat-
ing and discarding.
Anthropological interest in memory develops concurrently with
anthropological interest in nationalism, since the mid-1980s. Anthro-
pologists have been attentive to questions of what is publicly memor-
ialized in writing and other official sources, as part of state projects of
10. See for example, Murphy 1986 and Comaroff and Comaroff 1992 on the way
memory uses tropes to condense and recontextualize experiences and meanings; see
also Carr 1986 for a philosophical discussion of the relation between group existence
and a group story; see also Sackss (1995:172ff.) discussion of the work of Bartlett and
others in cognitive psychology. As he cites Bartlett: Remembering is not the re-excitation
of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction,
or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of
organized past reactions or experience.
10 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
constructing national identities. They have also been attentive to
counter-memories, that is, what is left out of official histories and can
be reclaimed through the traditional anthropological recourse to oral
sources. As Lambek and Antze (1998:xvi) phrase the issue: the past
and its retrieval in memory hold a curious place in our identities, one
that simultaneously stabilizes those identities in continuity and
threatens to disrupt them.
Thus there has been considerable attention paid to the content of
memories, especially in political contexts. Somewhat less attention has
been paid to the form of memories, and how these forms might be
culturally shaped.
11
This is what makes Paul Connertons book How
Societies Remember (1989) such a touchstone for recent studies of memory.
Connertons slim volume is indeed often the only reference provided
by anthropologists in their discussions of memory (see, for example,
Stoller 1995; A. Strathern 1996). It is because he focuses attention on
the question of How, rather than What, that he has proved so useful to
those approaching these latter questions. Indeed, one could say that
Paul Connertons book How Societies Remember stands to memory as
Andersons Imagined Communities stands to nationalism in anthro-
pology (interesting that both books are written by non-anthropologists).
Connerton revives Halbwachss concern with the group spaces and
places of memory, that is, certain culturally determined foci for mem-
orial practices, such as religious ceremonies. As he argues, Halbwachs
focuses attention on the social spaces of memory and the mental
landmarks of the group. Anthropologists have taken off from this,
and from the work of Pierre Nora,
12
to examine culturally constructed
11. See Stoler and Strassler (2000) for a critique of the focus on event-centered
memory in post-colonial studies that assume that subaltern memories that will
challenge colonial histories are there waiting to be tapped. Stoler and Strassler suggest
that an attention to the form of memories often non-narrative and focused on sensory
experience provides a more complex picture.
12. Nora has edited several volumes on history and memory in France. The English
translation of the introduction to these works provides a useful entry point (Nora 1989).
While he has worked with the concept of spaces of memory (lieux de memoire), he has
also been criticized for his evolutionary perspective on traditional and modern societies
(i.e., the idea that modern societies have marked out spaces of memory because they no
longer inhabit landscapes of memory (milieux de memoire).) While Noras phrases are
evocative, they make a too radical break between worlds of tradition and modernity. As
Lambek and Antze (1998:xv) note: It is unlikely that there ever were untroubled,
homogeneous milieux de memoire, worlds of pure habit . . . or that such milieux were not
characterized by specific formulations of memory in their own right.
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 11
memory sites such as landscapes (Kuchler 1993), boundary markers
(Rappaport 1994) or particular ceremonial or personal objects (Parmentier
1987; Hoskins 1998). Food, we could posit, might be such an object or
place for memory practices in certain societies and not others, and
ethnographic work is beginning to describe the contours of such sites
of food memories (Bahloul 1996; Battaglia 1990), though this work
remains part of larger works on the architecture of memory or
memory and personhood rather than the foci of studies in their own
right.
But Connerton further argues that Halbwachs is less clear concerning
the actual acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible
(Connerton 1989:39). Or as Tonkin puts it, Halbwachs becomes vague
on the question of socialization itself, seeing it as a passive process of
reception of cultural materials rather than an active appropriation, a
problem that has long bedevilled social theory more generally.
13
Lambek makes a similar point in arguing that we must pay more
attention to different societies cultural means of inscription, storage
and access (1998:238). Lambek notes the more objectifying storage
mechanisms in the West, based on the technology of film and photo-
graphy, which go along with our passive and individualized view of
memory (1998:2389). One thinks, for example, of soap operas, in which
memory is depicted as scenes replayed from previous episodes with
echoey music in the background. This is an example of what Lambek
sees as characteristic of Western memory production, which freeze[s]
words and images, . . . put[s] frames around them; and . . . render[s]
remembering mechanical and impersonal (1998:238). Contrast this
to other cultural memory production that stresses the way memory is
created between people.
A less visualist approach to memory also means following Connerton
in moving us away from understanding memory, and culture itself, in
terms of written, or textual models. He notes that such inscribing
practices exist, but argues that hermeneutics has given too much
attention to them at the expense of what he calls incorporating
practices. Thus he is much closer to Turners view of culture as per-
formance than Geertzs culture as text. In focusing on performance,
he wants to see a different type of memory at work than that which
we call semantic, i.e., knowledge of how to do something. Thus he
13. See Tonkin 1992:105ff. Recent work on socialization and cultural theory includes
Gottlieb 1998; Pallson 1994; Schieffelin 1990 and Toren 1993.
12 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
coins the term habit memory for this more embodied view of ritual
performance:
An image of the past, even in the form of a master narrative, is conveyed
and sustained by ritual performances. And this means that what is
remembered in commemorative ceremonies is something in addition to
a collectively organized variant of personal or cognitive memory. For if
ceremonies are to work for their participants, if they are to be persuasive
to them, then those participants must not be simply cognitively competent
to execute the performance; they must be habituated to those perform-
ances. This habituation is to be found . . . in the bodily substrate of the
performance (1989:701).
Connerton does not want to dismiss narrative or textual memories,
and neither will I do so in my subsequent analysis. However, he draws
our attention to the importance of these other types of memories that
can be found sedimented in the body, in a way similar to what
Bourdieu, always cryptically, refers to as bodily hexis or the work of
culture through time on posture, gesture and other bodily practices.
14
The corset, for example, does not simply symbolize female constriction,
but actually moulds the female body to produce certain behaviors
and to associate certain habits as being natural and proper (1989:345).
Strathern notes that manners at High Table act similarly to symbolize
class differences and to resocialize the body through ceremony into
the naturalness of these proprieties and the difference that they
symbolize (1996:33). Thus we are close to Cowans analysis of gender
and sweetness here, but with the added component of memory made
explicit. Once again, it would seem profitable to draw out how food
might play into these types of memories, which are more embodied
than verbal or textual. In other words, in exploring the question of
why Kalymnians insist that I eat in order to remember I am drawn
to issues of how this process of ingestion takes place, how sensory
experience and cognitive processes can be analyzed in understanding
the evocative power of Yianniss apricots.
In framing collective memory in this way Connerton contributes to
current anthropological concerns with embodiment and a related
literature concerning the anthropology of the senses. These writers
wish to overcome the visualist bias in anthropology and Western
14. For a comparison of Connerton and Bourdieu in relation to embodiment and
habit memory, see Strathern 1996: Chapter 3.
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 13
culture more generally by avoiding Cartesian dualisms of mind and
body, expressed in symbolic approaches that reduce varied behavior
to texts that contain or symbolize linguistic meanings. Thus in the
view of Csordas (1994:10 ff.) much work focused on the body such
as that of Douglas (1966) simply reads the body semiotically rather
than attempting to get at embodied experience. Such an experiential
approach would not privilege mental constructions, but would see the
interrelation of cognition and bodily experiences, a mindful body
as Strathern (1996) calls it. Parallel work by Fernandez (1986) and Lakoff
and Johnson (1999) has looked at the way language itself, through the
use of metaphor, is deeply shaped by basic bodily experiences such as
balancing, and cultural experiences such as farming or forestry. These
insights lead to an attempt to recover and evoke such experience ethno-
graphically. Once again, note that they do not lead to a rejection of
symbolic or textual approaches in toto, but rather constitute an attempt
to supplement such approaches: The point of elaborating a paradigm
of embodiment is . . . not to supplant textuality but to offer it a
dialectical partner (Csordas 1994:12). Similarly Jacksons phenomeno-
logical approach still gives centrality to narrative, but acknowledge[s]
that discourse always belongs to a context of worldly interests and
influences grounded in the sentient life of individuals interacting
with objects and with others in the quotidian world (1989:18). Jackson
exhorts us as ethnographers to not forget the taste of Prousts petite
madeleine, nor music, nor dance, nor the sharing of food, the smell of
bodies, the touch of hands (1989:11). Here phenomenology joins with
the anthropology of the senses, and the work of Howes, Classen and
Synnott among others, which redirects our attention to the shifting
sensorium, i.e., to the ways that societies divide up the work of the
senses differently to make sense of the world, again criticizing the
visualist bias that they see as dominant in Western societies.
15
As
Classen (1997:401) summarizes: It is the task of the scholar to uncover
the distinctions and interrelationships of sensory meaning and practice
particular to a culture. This task is seen as political as well as intel-
lectual, since, as Classen argues, Western focus on the visual involved
a hierarchy of the senses, whereby the lower senses of taste and smell
15. To cite Howes (1991:4): The anthropology of the senses is primarily concerned
with how the patterning of sense experience varies from one culture to the next in
accordance with the meaning and emphasis attached to each of the senses . . . only by
developing a rigorous awareness of the visual and textual biases of the Western episteme
[can we] hope to make sense of how life is lived in other cultural settings.
14 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
were assigned in evolutionary fashion to the lower races of mankind.
In revaluing other sensory modes, anthropologists challenge this
hierarchy.
16
As yet those who see themselves working on the anthropology of
the senses have focused mainly on smell, hearing, and to a lesser extent
movement, with least attention given to taste.
17
This literature also
has not yet given much attention to memory, despite its popular status
as sixth sense in Western culture.
18
Stoller and Seremetakis provide
exceptions here. Stollers title Embodying Colonial Memories captures his
project of describing non-textualized counter-memories among the
Songhay of Niger. Once again, he cautions against transforming the
body into a text: For in its textualization the body is robbed of its
movements, odors, tastes, sounds its sensibilities, all of which are
potent conveyors of meaning and memory (1995:30).
19
Stollers focus
is on spirit possession and dance, and unfortunately he does not touch
on food, despite an earlier interest in sauce as social action (1989).
16. Relevant here also is recent work on materiality from a Marxist perspective,
such as Stallybrasss account of the development of the concept of fetishism in the West
to describe non-Westerners fixation on trifles, or other objects seen as valueless to
the Western mind inculcated into the ultimate values of market profit: What was
demonized in the concept of the fetish was the possibility that history, memory, and
desire might be materialized in objects that are touched and loved and worn (Stallybrass
1998:186). Pels (1998) also argues for a re-evaluation of fetishism and materiality in
terms of a less symbolic and representational approach to objects. As he puts it: the
material is not necessarily on the receiving end of plastic power, a tabula rasa on which
signification is conferred by humans: Not only are humans as material as the material
that they mold, but humans themselves are molded, through their sensuousness, by
the dead matter with which they are surrounded (1998:1001). On fetishism and
materiality, see also Cohen (1997).
17. On smell see Bubant 1998; Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994; Corbin 1986;
Rasmussen 1999; and for a harbinger of this approach see Gell 1977. On hearing see
Feld 1982, and on movement Farnell 1994. An exception on taste is the work of Howes
and Lalonde (1991), which plays on the double meanings of taste in Western society,
and suggests historical reasons for its development, without however examining the
actual experience of taste ethnographically.
18. Indeed, memory is not mentioned in Classens recent review of the field of sensory
anthropology (1997), despite her discussion of the works of Stoller and Seremetakis.
19. Some oral historians have been sensitized to such concerns. Even in narrative
accounts, Chamberlain (1995) argues that Barbadian men tend to tell their life stories
in terms of facts and figures, whereas women focus more on textures and sensory
qualities, which convey important information, at times counter-memories.
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 15
Seremetakis, working in the Peloponnese region of Southern Greece
the place where her ancestors came from captures counter-memories,
but of a very specific kind: the sensory-perceptual dispositions
embedded in objects such as peaches and other agricultural products,
and in gestures such as the drinking of the morning cup of coffee.
They are counter-memories in part because they are, according to
Seremetakis, under threat from the consumerization of Greek society,
and also because they challenge Western epistemologies along the lines
noted above by Jackson and Csordas: sensory semantics in Greek
culture . . . contain regional epistemologies, inbuilt theories, that pro-
voke important cross-cultural methodological consequences (1994:5).
Seremetakis short essay is a cross-sensory exploration of the materiality
of Greek culture, captured in gestures such as picking greens in her
fieldwork village (which also happened to be her home village), and
suddenly recognizing the body memory involved in this gesture: I
had tasted them [growing up in New York City] . . . and I had heard all
kinds of talks around them. When I went out to collect them, the
sensory memory of taste, order, orality stored in the body was trans-
ferred to vision and tactility. My body involuntarily knew what I
consciously did not (1994:16). Thus her approach brings together
themes of embodiment, habit memory, socialization, tradition and
modernity, historical consciousness, the senses and memory around
the collection, cooking and eating of food. As such she provides a
guidepost for several of the kind of issues I wish to raise here, and I
will have occasion to discuss her work again in subsequent chapters.
For the moment I take what I imagine her response might have been
to that Oxford don (or my own, if I had been quicker): Why food and
memory? Because whole worlds of experience and interpretation are
contained therein!
In summary, because the topic of food and memory is indeed
unexplored in anthropology, I plan to be fairly eclectic in suggesting
possible paths and theoretical approaches, illustrated primarily through
my Kalymnian material, that might productively begin this exploration.
My approach will be to use food to address some of the formal issues of
memory processes that have been usefully raised by recent work on
embodiment and the senses, while at the same time suggesting some
other neglected avenues. At the same time I will be using memory to
energize studies of food past, by explicitly adding the question of
historical consciousness to work that looks at food in terms of ritual
and everyday uses, that looks at histories (of production and consump-
tion) and identities (ethnic, gender and other). Food and memory, I
16 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
argue, provide a space both for extending current theoretical approaches
into new ethnographic contexts and for productively creating new
theoretical tools and combinations.
Plan of the Book
In Chapter 1 I investigate the venerable anthropological topic of ritual,
and the way that ritual and everyday contexts of eating echo and
mutually reinforce each other. Thus I begin with a consideration of
some of the everyday contexts in which food is bought, prepared and
consumed on Kalymnos, giving a sense of how food structures both
daily routines, and more long-term rhythms represented by seasonal
harvests, feasts and fasts, and life-cycle markers, particularly death. Food
structures temporal rhythms not just objectively, by placing constraints
on peoples lives, but also subjectively, as people actively look forward
to meals while at the same time looking backward to past meals and
prospectively remembering the special meals, the Easter feast in the
midst of the Lenten fast. It is this dense web of food rhythms that
provides the sense of food structuring days, weeks, months and years
on Kalymnos. Foods role in life-cycle rhythms is also explored in the
context of funeral and mortuary memorials, and this is set in
comparison and contrast to work in Melanesia and Amazonia on the
role of mortuary feasting in processes of remembering and forgetting.
Finally, certain foods become particularly significant because of their
symbolic charge across everyday and ritual contexts. In the Orthodox
Christian tradition one key food in this regard is bread. Thus the role
of bread as memory food, passing between the sacred and the mundane,
is examined.
In Chapter 2 I develop the theme of memory in the context of
exchange: exchange itself as an attempt to create potential future
memories through the destruction of material objects.
20
Acts of food
exchange do not work to create memories on their own on Kalymnos.
They must be reinforced by narratives of generosity past, of failed
generosity or of the false generosity of others. Food generosity, then,
can be seen as a lieu de mmoire, a topos on which Kalymnian ideas
about name, reputation or honorable personhood are constructed. But
food generosity is also a key site for elaborating notions of group
20. Cf. Kuchler (1987) on the production of memory through the destruction of carved
gifted sculptures.
Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology? 17
identity, in particular a modern identity that poses itself in contrast
to a lost past in which generosity made up the shared substance of
everyday life on Kalymnos. I explore these memories of community,
or gemeinschaft, for what they can tell us about Kalymnian historical
consciousness. I also examine some of the changing modes of food
production and their implications for the generation of food-based
memories.
In these first two chapters I essentially take traditional anthro-
pological topics, ritual and exchange, and suggest the productivity
provided by a re-examination of well-trod material through the lens
of food and memory. I suggest that memory was implicit in these issues
all the time, but has not been drawn out until recently, in particular in
the work of a few Melanesian anthropologists. In Chapter 3 I turn to
some of the more recent theoretical concerns discussed above. I take
steps toward an ethnography of the sense of taste and the related sense
of smell on Kalymnos, to see eating as embodied practice. I argue
that foods memory power derives in part from synesthesia, which I
take to mean the synthesis or crossing of experiences from different
sensory registers (i.e., taste, smell, hearing). Synesthesia, I argue, is a
key aspect of eating practices on Kalymnos. I further suggest that
synesthesia provides that experience of returning to the whole which
Fernandez has analyzed in the context of religious revitalization, and
which, I suggest, helps us to understand the significance of food in
the maintenance of the identity of Kalymnians and other migrants
who have left their homeland behind. I also look at taste and smell
from the perspective of cognitive anthropology. Unlike vision, which
is divided up into a developed categorical system such as named colors,
taste and smell have relatively few verbalized categories associated with
them. Because of this, I will argue, taking off from Dan Sperbers work,
that they instead become evocative of social situations with which they
are associated.
Chapter 4 marks a return to the meal taken as a whole. In it I shift
from experience and embodiment to questions of structure and
repetition to look at the play of sameness and difference, metaphor
and metonymy. I argue that these types of relationships provide the
key for one meal recalling another, or better put, for Kalymnians
recalling past meals while collectively consuming present ones. Some
have argued for the role of analogy and memory as the very basis of
cultural processes (Shore 1996). Developing such a view I look at the
way the meal is constructed as an event that fits within (without
exactly replicating) a significant structure in ways parallel to how
18 Introduction: A Proustian Anthropology?
history itself is seen as a series of structure-full events on Kalymnos
(a point developed in Sutton 1998:135ff.). Or alternatively one could
say that culture and history are cooked, prepared in ways similar to
those of a proper Kalymnian meal.
A final chapter considers recipes, on the one hand in terms of the
recent wave of nostalgia cookbooks that fight for space with offerings
on how to eat like a pig and lose 50 pounds and other tomes on the
shelves of Barnes and Nobles bookstores. But it also looks at the role
of recipe transmission in a more active view of processes of encultura-
tion, which is at the same time a key site for the transmission of certain
types of memories and histories, both textual and embodied, that may
challenge more official sources of knowledge concerning the past. And
of course, I provide you the reader with a signature Kalymnian recipe,
copiously annotated so that you can better ingest and remember my
theoretical and ethnographic reflections through a more embodied
experience, so that you too can eat in order to remember!