A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory

Abstract

David Sutton A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory AT A TIME W H E N DRINK S AVAILABLE IN GAS STATION COOLERS PROMISE exotic ingredients to boost your m em ory powers, my own in ter­ est in food and m em ory m eets w ith bem usem ent from friends and colleagues.' Both the study o f food and o f m em oiy are relatively recent subjects in anthropology and social science m ore generally, and thus their convergence still provokes surprise and curiosity. In the words of one colleague, "Food and memory? W hy would anyone w ant to rem em ­ ber anything they had eaten?" (see Sutton, 2001: 1) In this essay I wish to reflect on this question, and in keeping w ith the them e of this issue, pose the question in term s of "social" or "collective" memory. In w hat ways does food, ingested into individual bodies, feed social memory? Recently, a num ber of scholars have suggested that the topic of social m em oiy suffers from a lack of precision in definition, a lack of common methodology and a lack of theoretical development (Climo and Cattell, 2002; Golden, 2005; Holtzman, 2006). In this essay I hope to m ake a small contribution to clarity in exploring w hat we m ean by memory, how food is im plicated in very different types o f memory, and how these different types of m em ory relate to each other. This will not be a review of the burgeoning liter­ ature on this topic, since this has been done recently and thoroughly by H oltzm an (2006). Rather, I will draw on ethnographic exam ples from my fieldw ork on th e island o f Kalymnos, Greece to suggest social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2008 157 some of the ways th at food and m em ory can be productively thought together. SOCIAL MEMORY Social or collective memory, of course, em erges from the w ork of Halbwachs, who argues that memory is only able to endure in sustain­ ing social contexts (see Narvaez, 2006: 61). Connerton begins his book How Societies Remember (1989) w ith the claim "We generally think of m em ory as an individual faculty." Connerton, however, sees social m em ory as having a crucial norm ative role in creating social orders and identities. As he puts it: "It is an im plicit rule that participants in any social order m ust presuppose a shared memory." This is because, according to Connerton, divergent pasts would lead to the creation of divergent presents: "our images of the past commonly serve to legiti­ m ate a present social order" (1989: 3). One m ight be tem pted to criti­ cize Connerton here for a lingering functionalism, even if cloaked in the language of identity and power. In fact, Connerton, drawing from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, gives examples of the diver­ gence of mem ories betw een generations of "the sam e" social group, w hich may, as he suggests, lead to m iscom munication, but hardly to im m inent social breakdown. It would seem to be an empirical question how shared any particular social m emory is or needs to be. Most societies seem to tolerate a huge divergence of memories of all kinds: from episodic memories (Watergate, Vietnam), to bodily/habit memories (ability to play the piano; memories associated with first taste of sushi) to even the memories that m ake up the social categories that some argue are the very basis of "culture" (some Hawaiians categorized Captain Cook as a god, others a chief, others a plundering rogue). I raise this point not to criticize Connerton, but to suggest that memories can be deeply social in the sense o f being shaped by our interactions w ith the hum ans, objects, and institutions that m ake up society, w ithout neces­ sarily needing to be widely shared. This is, indeed, w hat Proust showed us, in describing deeply personal, embodied memories such as eating the Madeleine cookie dipped in tea, or tripping over a paving stone— 158...