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Article Excerpt
AT A TIME WHEN DRINKS AVAILABLE IN GAS STATION COOLERS PROMISE exotic ingredients to boost your memory powers, my own interest in food and memory meets with bemusement from friends and colleagues." Both the study of food and of memory are relatively recent subjects in anthropology and social science more generally, and thus their convergence still provokes surprise and curiosity. In the words of one colleague, "Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remember anything they had eaten?" (see Sutton, 2001: 1) In this essay I wish to reflect on this question, and in keeping with the theme of this issue, pose the question in terms of "social" or "collective" memory. In what ways does food, ingested into individual bodies, feed social memory? Recently, a number of scholars have suggested that the topic of social memory 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 make a small contribution to clarity in exploring what we mean by memory, how food is implicated in very different types of memory, and how these different types of memory relate to each other. This will not be a review of the burgeoning literature on this topic, since this has been done recently and thoroughly by Holtzman (2006). Rather, I will draw on ethnographic examples from my fieldwork on the island of Kalymnos, Greece to suggest some of the ways that food and memory can be productively thought together.
SOCIAL MEMORY
Social or collective memory, of course, emerges from the work of Halbwachs, who argues that memory is only able to endure in sustaining social contexts (see Narvaez, 2006: 61). Connerton begins his book How Societies Remember (1989) with the claim "We generally think of memory as an individual faculty." Connerton, however, sees social memory as having a crucial normative role in creating social orders and identities. As he puts it: "It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must 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 legitimate a present social order" (1989: 3). One might be tempted to criticize 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 divergence of memories between generations of "the same" social group, which may, as he suggests, lead to miscommunication, but hardly to imminent social breakdown. It would seem to be an empirical question how shared any particular social memory 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 make 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 of being shaped by our interactions with the humans, objects, and institutions that make up society, without necessarily needing to be widely shared. This is, indeed, what Proust showed us, in describing deeply personal, embodied memories such as eating the Madeleine cookie dipped in tea, or tripping over a paving stone--memories that were significant to Proust because they allowed him to reconstruct the rich tapestry of social life he describes in the course of his novel. What I am suggesting is that Halbwachs is in a sense right in claiming that all memory is social (no memory is, then, asocial). But we could also say that all memory is personal: organized through individuals with their own particular trajectories through the social landscape. The same could be said for "culture," as anthropologists have been arguing for some time now (for example, Garro, 2006; Rosaldo, 1989; Toren, 1999). This also suggests a revisiting of Pierre Nora's well-known discussion of milieux de memoire (environments of memory) and lieux de memoire (spaces of memory In some ways the notion that food is a key "site" of memory--to a greater or lesser extent in one society or another--is apposite. Whether, however, Nora's larger view that traditional societies have milieux de memoire, richly layered environments of memory, while "modern" societies must settle for lieux, particular spaces or sites of memory, is more of a problematic issue. As I will suggest, the lack of milieux de memoire does not necessarily preclude memories of food being deeply social.
Within food studies much recent scholarship--well represented in journals such as Food, Culture and Society and Food and Foodways--has shown how food is a key mediator of social relationships, a symbol of identity and a marker of difference, whether defined by gender, class, race, or ethnicity. So how to bring these two strands of work together? Different writers have suggested different schemes for dividing up memory, which often include variations on the following: episodic memory, semantic memory, and bodily/habit memory. I will be considering all these different categories in what follows. In a recent review of works on food and memory, Holtzman has usefully suggested a number of such different types of memory that this literature explores, including nostalgia and the relationship of food to identities, "real" or "invented"; food as the marker of epochal transformations--for example, from "tradition" or "the good old days" to "modernity"; food and sensuous/sensory memory; and food's use in ritual contexts to stimulate memory (and forgetting, in the case of some mortuary rituals). In what follows I will be looking at all of these, and adding another category, what I call "prospective memory" or the active planning in the present for future memories.
But how do these categories help us analytically, besides alerting us to possible phenomena to pay attention to in our research? As noted above, I will not be arguing that there is an overall distinction to be made between social and individual memory. Rather, and once again picking up on a suggestion by Holtzman, we might think of the power of food for memory in the fact that our relationship with food "intrinsically traverses the public and the intimate" (2006: 373). As he puts it, the ingestion of food "always has a deeply private component" at the same time that it is...
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