CHAPTER THREE

SENSORY MEMORY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF "WORLDS"

"Every man carriers within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is travelling through, and seems to be living in, some different world" (Chateaubriand, cited in Kahn 1994: xvii).

 

            This chapter looks at food memory from the perspective of the senses. That is, it addresses issues of how and why food is memorable as a sensory as well as a social experience. It does this through a consideration of cross-cultural, cognitive aspects of sensory memory, but without neglecting how such cognitive potentials can be culturally elaborated or downplayed in specific ways. I begin with a type of exchange not discussed in the last chapter -- transnational food exchange, which has, I argue, interesting aspects as part of a process of revitalization or "returning to the whole," through multisensory or synesthetic food experiences. I then describe certain synesthetic qualities that are elaborated in Kalymnian and Greek experiences of food. Finally I consider more general questions regarding synesthesia, memory, and categorization which lead back to the social quality of food memories.

TRAVELLING FOOD: MEMORY AND GLOBALIZED IDENTITIES

            "A flower-pot of basil can symbolize the soul of a people better than a drama of Aeschylus" (Dragoumis 1914).        

            At the end of the last chapter I suggested some possible implications for memory of the inflows of food from the global marketplace to Kalymnos. In this section I turn the telescope the other way to consider outflows of food from Kalymnos (and Greece in general) to other parts of the world. Once again my purpose is not to provide an extensive ethnographic picture, but rather to suggest some useful avenues to explore in the study of food's relation to memory practices.

            The reference to basil by Greek historian Ion Dragoumis provides a point of entry into my subject, the power of tangible everyday experiences to evoke the memories on which identities are formed. Dragoumis' aphorism was given substance by a comment passed on to me by a Eleana Yalouri, a PhD student in anthropology living in London, who was visited by a recent migrant from Greece. Smelling a pot of basil on her window sill, he told her with evident longing "It really ^[1] smells like Greece!" Although basil is not used in cooking in Greece to the same extent as in the United States, basil-dipped water is a component of the ubiquitous leavening used for bread-making, and the smell of basil a part of the general kitchen ambience in Greece. ^[2] That this basil-inspired memory is not an uncommon experience is further confirmed by Papanikolas, in her account of Greek immigrants in the American West in the early years of the twentieth century (1987: 156): "Basil plants grew in dusty cans on the window ledges of the restaurants and coffeehouses; men broke off sprigs to put in their lapels and from time to time brought them to their noses and breathed in the piquant scent. 'Ach, patridha, patridha,' [homeland, homeland] they said." This association is interesting at a number of levels. First it suggests the importance of the sensory in reconnecting and remembering experiences and places one has left behind for short or long-term migration. Secondly, the association with Greece, while particularly appropriate in this case given basil has been taken as a national symbol in Greece, suggests that objects can shift levels of identity when experienced in new contexts, becoming a symbol not just of home or local place, but of countries or perhaps regions. Closer examination of Greek migrant experiences reveals that basil is merely the tip of the iceberg of a vast array of transnational odorific and gustatory travelling companions.

            That food frequently accompanies people in their travels across national borders may be obvious to customs officers worldwide, but its significance has only begun to be explored by anthropologists. While there has been some interest in the way migrant food has transformed eating in the U.S. and other migrant destinations (Raspa 1984), less attention is given to the implications for identity of the food that migrants might bring with them, or have sent from home, (but see Knight 1998; Narayan 1995), ^[3] indeed its importance is explicitly dismissed by Hannerz in his theorizing concerning "cosmopolitans" and "locals" (1996:103). Yet Fog Olwig and Hastrup (1997) argue for the importance of "cultural sites," localized cultural wholes which become points of identification for people displaced by migrations caused by larger global processes. Here I suggest that food might be analyzed as just such a cultural site, and is especially useful in understanding Kalymnian and Greek experiences of displacement, fragmentation, and the reconstruction of wholeness.

            In using the concept of "wholeness" I am drawing on the ongoing work of Fernandez on the process of "returning to the whole," which he first discusses in the context of religious revitalization movements in West Africa. Bwiti, the revitalization movement among the Fang of Gabon where Fernandez worked, is seen as a response to the alienation and fragmentation brought on by "the agents of the colonial world and simply modern times" (1982: 562). In the face of these radical changes in their society, Fang use Bwiti to reintegrate the past and the present, to "recapture the totality of the old way of life" (1982: 9). Thus contra the celebration of fragmentation in post-modern analysis, Fernandez provides an analysis of some of the ways that those whose worlds are being rent asunder attempt to creatively reconstruct them. Fernandez's approach is potentially applicable to many sorts of alienation, from that of victims of war, refugees, migrants, downsized workers, those caught in major political shifts such as the fall of Soviet socialism, all those who in the midst of change "are looking for firm ground under their feet" (Thomassen 1996: 44).

            The originality in Fernandez's work comes in his focus on the symbolic processes by which the "return to the whole" is attempted. Fernandez describes the "whole" as a "state of relatedness--a kind of conviviality in experience" (1986:191). He suggests some of the difficulties of imagining or experiencing the whole given the atomization and fragmentation of present-day Fang society. It is the sense that there is a "lack of fit" or coherence between different domains of experience that leads to attempts to return to the whole. Returning to the whole requires a "mutual tuning-in" based on shared sensory experiences that are explicitly synesthetic (crossing sensory domains). "Hearing, seeing, touching, tasting--in primary groups, families, ethnic groups, fraternal or sororal associations, etc. If we don't have these things to begin with we have to somehow recreate them by an argument of images of some kind in which primary perceptions are evoked" (1986:193). This is where revitalization comes in, the process by which a domain of experience which is experienced as fragmented or deprived is revalued by simply marking it for ritual participation: "The performance of a sequence of images revitalizes, in effect, and by simple iteration, a universe of domains, an acceptable cosmology of participation, a compelling whole" (1986:203). While Fernandez focusses on elaborated ritual revitalizations, he also suggests more mundane venues for such processes, even that the teaching of introductory anthropology is an attempt at revitalization through "taking the students' too individuated awareness and...in some sense returning him or her to the whole" (1986:210). It is revitalization in a more everyday context, the effects of which may certainly be less durable than a full-scale revitalization movement, but nonetheless are a key component for the construction of identity in exile, which I examine here.

            Fernandez' final image is of "returning to the depths" (1986:211), an appropriate image for understanding the experience of Kalymnians. Until quite recently, Kalymnos relied on sponge diving for its livelihood. Sponge divers, prone to the crippling effects of the bends, can only temporarily regain use of their limbs and a sense of themselves as whole people by returning to the ocean depths where they contracted the disease. Fernandez's notion that wholeness requires a coherence of domains, a "structural repetition," also resonates with the words of a Kalymnian school teacher to whom I described my project of studying food and memory: noting that the study of food evokes a "whole way of life not divided into pieces," he pointed to sea urchins as an example. When a Kalymnian desired them, he had to take the time to go and find them...one couldn't buy them at the store. In diving for sea urchins "you became a sponge diver in miniature," and in the process, you were enculturated into Kalymnian life. Here "wholes" already exist, but for migrants, I suggest, food is essential to counter tendencies toward fragmentation of experience. And we can use Fernandez's terms to analyze this process of "conviviality" evoked through food in a way that brings out the aspect of memory which I believe is a key part of the experience of the return to the whole left implicit by Fernandez in his use of the term "iteration," i.e., repetition.

            The experience of absence from one's home is culturally elaborated in Greece under the concept xenitia. xenitia has a long history of commentary in Greek oral tradition, as examined by Sultan (1999). Sultan examines xenitia in the context of heroic poetry, and notes that for men xenitia means absence from the physical comforts of home: "The woman will not be with her man in xenitia to cook his meals or serve his needs...[thus] he will experience hardship and isolation with his horse as his only companion. The analogy is to misery and death" (Sultan 1999: 48). More generally in the modern Greek context xenitia is described as a condition of estrangement, absence, death, or of loss of social relatedness, loss of the ethic of care seen to characterize relations at home (Danforth 1982:93 ff.; Seremetakis 1991:85, 175-6). It provokes a longing for home that is seen as a physical and spiritual pain, as Frantzis describes for the Dodecanese migrants to Tarpon Springs, Florida: "The sun-drenched shores of Florida [are] verdant with pine-trees, orange trees, palms, beautiful tropical trees, and multi-colored fragrant flowers. All of them resemble and remind them of their islands. Nevertheless, and in spite of it all, their heart withers and the longing, for the wild beauty of these chunks of rocks where they were born is alive in them" (Frantzis 1962: 105). Here the sensual landscape of Florida serves as a painful reminder of the home they have left. ^[4] More usually, however, migrants are moving to an urban environment where there is a more striking sense of disjunction. Thus the need to have some physical object carried along or sent as a tangible site for memory, as expressed by poet Y. Drosinis (cited in Sederocanellis 1995:230) in the idea of carrying Greek earth with him in his travels:

Now that I leave for foreign lands,

                        and we will be parted for months, for years,

                        let me take something also from you,

                        ...

                        Earth scented by the summer seasons,

                        blessed earth, earth bearing fruit--

                        the muscat vine, the yellow grain,

                        the tender laurel, bitter olive...

            Here it is agricultural soil (though elsewhere in the poem he speaks of "blood imbued" national soil) which can be seen as a link to home. But food itself is more commonly sent to migrants, whether they have left a home village for Athens, for a sponge diving expedition, or for Europe, the U.S. or Australia. ^[5] Such packages of food sent abroad are given the local word "pestellomata" (B,FJ,88f:"J") ^[6] and described by Kapella as a part that recalls the whole: "pestellomata are a piece of homeland, carrying inside them its sun, its sea, its wonderful smells" (Kapella 1981: 35). Kapella stresses the symbolic nature of this transfer in recounting the bitterness of a Kalymnian mother whose son had married an Athenian and moved to Athens. She is told by her daughter-in-law not to send anything because "the refrigerator is full." ^[7] As Kapella notes, "in order to appreciate a pestelloma you need to have lived in a place, and to love it" (1981:39).

             Such packages sent within Greece often include fish pickled in rosemary and vinegar (often red mullet, available in Athens but at much inflated prices), locally produced cheese, locally-grown tangerines and a variety of homemade sweets. ^[8] Those sent further abroad can include Kalymnian oregano, thyme, mountain tea, locally produced honey, figs, almonds, hard cheese and dried dark bread rings, ^[9] all items which are particularly fragrant markers. The desire for such food is referred to by Kapella as a "burning of the lips" which comes from missing something deeply (36). Similarly a Kalymnian woman describes her brother's longing for a Kalymnian bivalve prepared in brine as his kaïmo--the noun form of the Greek "to burn," which translates as both "psychic pain" and "uncontrollable desire"-- which led him on his return to consume an entire bottle and become sick. Another story that a man told me concerned his son's time spent in the merchant marines, when during a long and unhappy stint in England in the late 1970s he bought a small vial of olive oil from a chemist's shop (at the time olive oil was not generally available for cooking in England), to sooth his desire for the taste and smell of it. That this tiny vial would be satisfying seems surprising, but it relates to a local practice that if you smell a food cooking at someone's house and strongly desire it, you must at least taste a small piece or lick the remains (e.g., of lobster shells). Otherwise the desire might cause men's testicles to swell or pregnant women to lose their babies (perhaps a transfer of desire from one domain to another).

            In some cases it is not specifically Kalymnian food that is sent abroad. A man in his thirties who had migrated back and forth to Italy for schooling mentioned that his mother sent him all kinds of things, feta cheese, grape leaves, even flour, "as if they wouldn't have flour in Italy!" Another woman speaks of sending her daughter a special sweet ^[10] ); when I asked if it was Kalymnian she replied: "no its Greek, but there are variations, whether you use oil or butter, almonds, and in any case it reminds me of Kalymnos." In speaking with Greek students studying in Oxford, I found that the food they received from home (either through the mail or brought by friends or family members on visits) fell into three categories: 1) olives, olive oil, meat (in one case, two whole goats for Easter), eggs and other products produced by family members on family land 2) baked goods associated with Easter and other festive times, either prepared by family members or store-bought, 3) mass-produced Greek products such as Feta cheese. The first type of item produced immediate local knowledge: one woman, who had lived in London for ten years working in various jobs while taking courses in art and design (with hopes to become an icon painter), told me about the olive oil that her father makes from family trees in Crete, and that the olives were especially good for oil because they weren't watered, but raised only on rainwater. She said it had zero percent acidity, that it sometimes becomes more acidic if you let the olives fall off the tree, but her father used a stick to knock them off the tree, and you must knock in a certain direction, otherwise the olives won't grow again.

            Aside from such local knowledge, sensory aspects of food sent from Greece are also stressed. Another woman, studying environmental planning who had been in England for five years spoke of the eggs sent from her father's farm which she contrasted with "plastic" eggs in England, which had a particularly unpleasant smell, while eggs from Greece had a deep orange color to the yolks and an "intense" flavor. ^[11] The second category had an obvious connection to "Greek traditions" as well as to family, usually mothers, who had baked some of these items. But it is certainly not only mothers who put together such packages. Fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers may send separate packages of foodstuffs, items that they have actually produced or that they have shared in the past with the receiving child.

            This direct connection with the family through food takes place in less tangible ways as well. Currently, with the availability of Greek products in the United Kingdom and the United States (even on the internet) one has the possibility of shopping for and cooking many Greek dishes. ^[12] If this makes packages of food from home somewhat less special, the contact through food remains. Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, a doctoral student in anthropology in Wales, notes that her mother invariably asks her what she is making for Sunday dinner: "She is satisfied when I tell her roast lamb, or other Sunday food. It symbolizes for her that I am doing OK."

             The third category of mass produced Greek products was less common in the late 1990s. One man noted that now (in 1998) it was possible to get these same products at British supermarkets, so the only connection they had to Greece for him was the thought of his mother sending them. But others spoke of the importance of Feta at earlier periods of migration, when greek Feta was not widely available. Dimitris Theodossopoulos, an anthropologist at the University of Lampeter in Wales, notes that new students who come from Greece wouldn't realize how much they were going to miss Feta. "When they would return to Greece for Christmas, they would really stock up, fill their suitcases and bags with feta in all different kinds of containers. One trip I came back from Greece with a 10-kilo tin of Feta cheese, which I preserved in brine....I would cut a little piece with my meal every night. It was like 'white gold' to me (laughing)."

            What is the actual experience of such food events? As seen above, they are often experienced in terms of a "burning desire" which is satiated through a sensory experience evoking local knowledge, at the same time that a domain of experience that has fallen into disuse, in Fernandez's terms, is revalued. They often explicitly evoke a wholeness, or fullness in experience, as in the following report by Kapella of a letter from a woman living in Germany, written in local Kalymnian dialect, receiving a pestelloma from Kalymnos at the post office: "My joy was indescribable, I laughed and cried at the same time. I took the package, left the post office, and in the street I felt like I was holding the whole world [in my arms]" (Kapella 1981:36). The woman notes that she used the honey to make doughnuts (a Kalymnian word) and she "soothed her insides". She contrasts this feeling to her experience of the sensory deprivation of work in Germany in a few descriptive images: "we've made money, but we've moldered in the factories. We don't see outside and we're dying of cold...Thank you for the pestelloma" (36).

            This gives a clear sense of one strategy for returning to the whole: through what Fernandez calls the shock of "recognition of a wider integrity of things" captured in the metaphor of the "whole world," but specifically triggered by memory of taste and smell. It is this memory that leads to the emotional affect described in the passage: simultaneous laughing and crying, and then a sense of soothing fullness, suggesting the evocation of other memories. The expression "laughing and crying" implies that such moments of wholeness are bittersweet and temporary, a reminder of homeland the return to which is deferred. Yet the soothing fullness also suggests that such moments give the migrants the strength to carry on with their xenitia. This sense of emotional/embodied plenitude evoked above is echoed in the following passage from Papanikolas (1987:217), describing several Greek immigrant men, cousins who were working in Idaho in an endless task of clearing sagebrush to homestead:

One night, working nervously, swearing obscenely, Louis made a pita. He could have waited for Sunday, gone the six miles to Pocatello...and had one of the Greek women who ran boarding houses make it for him, but he wanted it right then. Louis rolled out the pastry leaves, layered each sheet with butter and eggs mixed with crumbled feta. The helper gazed with tearful eyes, Yoryis avidly. That night they fell on their cots, satisfied.

Once again, the terrible emotional overload of xenitia -- living in a foreign land -- is temporarily relieved in the experience which demands and receives immediate satisfaction.

And once again it is through the iteration of a neglected domain, metonymically described ("Louis rolled out the pastry leaves..."), that revitalizes it for the participants. Implicitly the revitalization of one domain brings others with it, a point made by recent theorists of refugee displacement. For example, Nordstrom (1995) describes the everyday and ritual practices of resistance to the destruction wrought on people's lives by war in Mozambique. She concludes: "Worlds are destroyed in a war; they must be re-created. Not just worlds of home, family, community, and economy but worlds of definition, both personal and cultural" (1995:147). Bahloul's (1996:28) description of Jewish Algerian refugee memories also resonates in this context with Fernandez's concept of the return to the whole: "The remembered house is a small scale cosmology symbolically restoring the integrity of a shattered geography" (emphasis mine). ^[13]   (Nye, cited in Bardenstein 1999:152) As Fernandez describes, integrity is restored through a remembered coherence, or structural repetition between domains. This occurs because the food event evokes a whole world of family, agricultural associations, place names and other "local knowledge." Even memories of water have this characteristic, partly due to the fact that different qualities of water are said to produce different qualities of food (e.g., water used for olive trees or water used to soak beans before cooking them). Papanikolas recounts migrants' memories of water sources from home (1987:167) illustrating the almost sacred power of invocation:

The men talked constantly of the water in their part of Greece, which often had to be carried a long distance over rocky trails, how cold it was, a special taste, its curative qualities, how its fame was known throughout the province and people came from afar to drink it. They spoke the names of waters with reverence: Kefalovrissi__Head Springs, Palaios Platanos__Old Plane Tree, Mahi Topos__Slaughtering Place, Nifi Peplos__Bride's Veil, Nerolithi__Water Rock.

            It is this same sense of the part which holds the key to re-vivifying a whole structure of associations that I found when I followed the advice of my colleague cited in the introduction to "try Proust." Here is Proust describing the memory of the senses evoked by food, in his famous madeleine description:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection (Proust 1982:50-51; italics mine).

Of course Proust was not speaking of migration as I have been. But if the past "is a foreign country," then similar processes can be at work in temporal as in spatial or spatio-temporal displacement. And indeed Proust directs us once again to the power of sensory parts to return us to the whole, to the unsubstantial fragment to reveal the vast structure. Like the memories discussed above, Proust also points us to the emotional charge of the moment of consumption for keying, involuntarily, these associative memories. But why taste and smell? The question still looms before us.

             I would also suggest another reason for the sense of "fullness" stressed in these descriptions: that there is an imagined community implied in the act of eating food "from home" while in exile, in the embodied knowledge that others are eating the same food. This is not to deny that real communities are created as well: Dimitris Theodossopoulos notes how he would bring pieces of his 10-kilo Feta cheese to friends with whom he was sharing dinner, and the joy evoked in the shared consumption of this "most valuable object." But even in this case of shared consumption, a wider community of homeland is being referenced in the act of eating "food from home."

            Here I am drawing on Anderson's notion of imagined communities, made famous in his primal scene of the "secular ritual" of the newspaper reader who, in the everyday act of reading "is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion...What more vivid figure of the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?" (1991:35). What indeed? Anderson's image, despite its appeal, is perhaps far too literary as a conceptualization of processes of identity formation and reproduction (see Wogan n.d., for a critique of Anderson's literacy-oriented biases). It lacks Fernandez's sense of the importance of immediate, synesthetic experience as a primary strategy of dealing with the inchoate. As Palmer, drawing on Billig's concept of 'banal nationalism,' argues: food is one of the mundane reminders that keep national identity "near the surface of daily life" so that people do not forget their nationality (Palmer 1998: 192).

            Here things become interesting, because the processes I have been describing work at multiple, sometimes contradictory levels of identity -- the family, personal or village history which needs only to be remembered, or reimagined, as well as at higher levels of imagining such as the nation. Just as people's identities shift levels in changing contexts such as migration, local products can take on shifting identifications as well. I have suggested that Feta cheese evokes a national "Greek" identity in migrant contexts. Within Greece Feta can shift between representing a "national" cheese (part of the diet of most Greeks and the single most-consumed cheese within Greece) and also having strong local associations (i.e., strong differentiating between Feta produced in different parts of Greece). The same man who shared Feta with other "Greeks" also had very localized memories of buying Feta as a child from the small shop in his neighborhood: how it was kept in large cans of brine, and the shop-owner had a "magical way of dipping his knife in the brine and simultaneously spearing and cutting the Feta." In the mid-1990s, In the wake of challenges by Denmark to the EU to have the right to produce a cheese called "Feta," Feta gained new "national" significance. The "purity" of Greek Feta, represented by the "whiteness" of Ewe's milk (as opposed to the "yellowish" cow's milk which predominates in Danish Feta) became a rallying point in Greece, thus associating Feta with the whiteness of ancient Greek statues. ^[14] What was a taken-for-granted national product with local associations became a national symbol in which to debate issues of Greece's relation to the European Union. ^[15] Like Feta experienced abroad, the basil sniffed in a pot in London reminds the new migrant of "Greece" in this instance rather than any more localized association. Though it is interesting to note that the phrase cited by Papanikolas "Ach, patridha, patridha" (homeland, homeland), is inherently ambiguous in Greek, and can be used to refer to both local and national "homes."

            The power of smell and taste is not fixed to specific references then, but can take on many levels of identity, which normally don't contradict one another. However, local and national experience are not always congruent. A Greek couple living in England recount, half-jokingly, their fights over bean soup, which the woman believes is "properly" made with tomatoes, and the man equally vociferously insists cannot be made with them. As the woman put it, "call it something else: call it some French recipe for making beans, and I'll eat it. Just don't call it authentic bean soup, and don't call it Greek!" The man noted that they no longer made fassoladha, it was only when his partner was away, and perhaps his sister (also living in England) was over for dinner, that he enjoyed this dish. Here it is the fact that he comes from the Peloponnese region and she from Thessaloniki that makes for the clash in attempting to make their local experience a metonym for national identity. And although local divergences in cooking, dress and custom are part of discourse within Greece as well, ^[16] I would suggest that they become more intensified in the migrant context, where cooking is not simply an everyday practice, but an attempt to synesthetically reconstruct and remember, to return to that whole world of home, which is subjectively experienced both locally and nationally, if not at other levels as well.

            This brings us to a deeper consideration of the sensory aspects, or synesthesia that forms a key component of these memories. Or as I asked a moment ago, why taste and smell? I address this question from two directions, first a general consideration of the socio-cognitive aspects of the senses and synesthesia in cuing, storing or creating memory, and second an examination of the specifics of Kalymnian sense worlds which argue for the particular potency of food memories in this cultural context.

TASTE, SMELL AND EVOCATION

            Although I focussed in the previous section on the power of migratory food among Kalymnians and Greeks abroad, the themes of fragmentation and the search for the whole permeate U.S. migrant experience. ^[17] I could just have easily found similar materials in the experiences of other diasporic groups and individuals, as shown in the beginning of the film Il Postino, in which an old woman tells the postmaster that she is sending her own pickled capers to her son in the United States, to which the postmaster replies: "He will be pleased." Sarah Franklin, an American-born Anthropologist living and working in Britain provided me with the following list of items brought back from a recent trip to the States:

*Maple syrup produced by Aunt & Uncle in New Hampshire

*Velveeta processed "cheesefood" (a vastly underrated food, she says)

*Karo Syrup (a sweetener)

*Bisquick pancake mix (Here she talks about how she shows her English friends how to cook with Bisquick: "mix it in a bowl with water, 'watch carefully,' and it's done!").

*Indian Corn and corn flour for Tortillas (made from the inside of the kernel that has been soaked in wood ash, lye or lime. She never cooked much corn in the US, but has a corn fetish now out of "pure chauvinism." British call corn maize and use it as animal feed. She has even planted corn in her backyard, from seeds brought back from Guatemala).

*Reeses Peanut Butter Cups (Despised by British because of mix of chocolate and peanut butter, but in fact she has got her whole office onto these).

*Arm and Hammer Baking soda (buys this for the packaging, a distinct orange, old-fashioned color, because she likes the way they look in her kitchen).

*Limes from California and other fresh fruit from Latin America (brought in illegally).

            This list shares many aspects with those of Greek migrants in its mix of items involving personal connection or local knowledge of place with those associated with a particular home activity (Bisquick and breakfast), and items of significance in maintaining a broader national identity experienced as different from "the British." ^[18] Along similar lines many friends, knowing of my interest, have shared "Proustian memories" focussed more on temporal than spatial displacement. If this is clearly a general, if not universal phenomenon (remember our Oxford Don) some wider consideration of the issues involved in sense memory seem in order.

EVOCATIVE SENSES

            Note that in his madeleine description, Proust does not single out taste, but rather taste and smell, as the senses which hold the promise of the return of the memorable whole. Taste and smell, it is generally noted, are interrelated senses. The chewing of food forces air up through the mouth to the nose, and a blocked nose can cause considerable reduction in the ability to taste (Vroon 1994:24). In his 1975 work Rethinking Symbolism, Dan Sperber directly addresses the Proustian phenomenon in a consideration of the evocative power of smells. I believe his discussion could equally well be applied to taste, as will become clear from what follows. Sperber begins by contrasting smells with colors. While colors have a fairly elaborate classificatory terminology, hierarchically arranged so that we recognize shades of the same color, smells are organized much more simply along an axis of good-bad, and in terms of their causes and sometimes their effects: "the smell of coffee brewing," "a nauseating smell" (see also Engen 1991: 86). Attempts at scientific classification of smells in something equivalent to classes have led to little consensus concerning what might constitute clusters of smells and "primary smells," and attempted taxonomies seem forced and vague, such as Linnaeus' division of smells (on a gradient of best to worst) into 1) Aromatic, 2) Scented or perfumed, 3) Ambrosia or musk-like, 4) Sharp or garlic-like, 5) Stinking or goat-like, sweaty, 6) Repulsive and 7) Disgusting. ^[19] Sperber continues his contrast by noting that it is fairly easy to recall colors to mind, even when not in the presence of the actual stimulus. In other words, if asked to imagine the color of a granny smith apple, most people experience little difficulty seeing the color in their mind, or the apple itself. The same is not true for smells, or, I might add, for tastes. ^[20] As Sperber notes, if one does want to recall a scent, one often employs an image: the church where one smelled a certain type of incense: "and I will almost have the impression that I sense that scent - a misleading impression, however, which will fade as soon as, relinquishing the recollection of the object it emanated from, I try mentally to reconstitute the scent itself" (1975:117).

            The failure to recall scents is related for Sperber to the way they are categorized, or rather, not categorized; in other words, there is no "semantic field of smells." By contrast, in the presence of a stimulus, smells can be recognized over a distance of many years. ^[21] Recognized, but not analyzed and described in the fashion one might do for a color. Or for the face of someone one has seen before who one runs into at the supermarket: once recognized, one can access or invoke prior information one has about the person to whom the face belongs, and add the fact that you shop at the same supermarket. With smells, however, because of the difficulty of analysis and invocation, one attempts evocation: "in the case of smells, the evocational field comprises all recollections likely to corroborate the feeling of recognition, and it is these recollections that evocation passes in review” (1975:121). In other words, smells evoke what surrounds them in memory, what has been metonymically associated with the smell in question. Smells are prototypical symbols, in Sperber's terms: "by virtue of the accepted definitions according to which the symbol is the part for the whole, or the object that gives rise to something other than itself, or the motivated sign, etc." (1975:118).

            Recent research has borne out Sperber's view of the relation between smell and memory. First, the idea that memory often works by synchronous convergence, i.e., the association of diverse things occurring at the same time, is "well documented" (Fuster: 1997:451). "If, for example, you are reading Dante's Divine Comedy about Beatrice while watching scenes on the television of refugees, then images of Beatrice and the suffering of refugees are likely to be associated in your memory" (Reyna n.d.:284; see also Engen 1991: 3 ff.). But this property is more true of smells, as Vroon notes, because smells more easily connect with "episodic" than "semantic" memories (i.e., life history memories as opposed to "recognition of a phenomenon" memories), and also because of the tendency for smell memories to be emotionally charged (Vroon 1994:95; 104). This emotional charge is touched on by Sperber in noting that in trying to place a smell that one is reexperiencing "one may revive memories that are more captivating than the smell itself, more insistent than the original desire one had to identify it" (1975:122). Or to quote a food author discussing the phenomenon of taste memory: "the hunger is in the memory, not in the biscuit, berries and cream [your mother's strawberry shortcake]" (Lust 1998:175).

            Once again, if we extend this view to taste, which shares limbic system location, and low semantic/high episodic recall, then we have a confirmation that on both counts, Proust was right! And this gives us a context to understand the bag of apricots with which Yiannis began his story of forty years ago that so puzzled me, since it was not at all about apricots. The apricots provided the taste and smell that could continually cue for him all the local knowledge of time of year, of places on Kalymnos where apricots could be found and which unlocked a vaster structure of recollection of different times on Kalymnos.

            Sperber speculates on the absence of other analyses of smell in anthropological discussions of symbolism given that they are for him "symbols par excellence," and places the blame on their seemingly individual and idiosyncratic nature which "bypass all forms of coded communication" (118). In other words, apricots evoke World War II for Yiannis, but they just give me hives. But say the words "Chinese Pressed Duck" and I am sent into reveries of early college years and love in bloom. However, Sperber goes on to argue that culture does in fact play a role in these types of phenomena. Through repetition in ritual and other forms, cultural symbolism "focusses the attention of the members of a single society in the same directions, determines parallel evocational fields that are structured in the same way, but leaves the individual free to effect an evocation in them as he likes" (137). ^[22]

            These ideas form a bridge to our consideration of the sensory worlds within which Kalymnian evocative fields are shaped, if not determined. And it is a bridge that, while hopefully leading us forward, also returns us to Fernandez's conception of the whole, since, as I will argue, it is the notion of synesthesia that best sums up the sensory experiences with which I will be concerned.

"LISTEN TO THAT SMELL!": THE CULTIVATION OF SYNESTHESIA

            In studying phenomena in comparative, cross-cultural perspective -- from concepts of personhood, gifts and commodities, to embodiment -- recent anthropological work has stressed that we are dealing not, for the most part, with radical cultural difference, but with shifting emphases, with cultural elaborations on a continuum of experience. Thus ideas of the "individual" vs. the socially embedded "dividual" do not characterize entire cultures, but rather may represent dominant understandings without precluding the co-existence of subordinate understandings opposed to these within the same culture. Such a view is applicable to the attempt to describe different, "non-Western" sensory worlds: we are not dealing with phenomena of radically different perceptions, but rather with the cultural elaboration of certain sensory registers and the relative dormancy of others. ^[23] The study of smell and taste in one society might lead one to look at the realm of myth and the afterlife (Bubant 1998), in another to issues of healing (Rasmussen 1999), and to the domain of advertising in a third (Classen, Howes & Synnott 1994: ch. 6). In trying to give a sense of Kalymnian smell and taste-scapes, I will focus on the domains of religious experience and cooking, stressing the cultural elaboration of the synesthetic nature of these domains which lead to their prominence in memory processes. Cultural elaboration is reflected, but not completely comprised in linguistic elaboration. Thus while I will focus on Kalymnian discussions of taste and smell, which of course provide the easiest access for the ethnographer, I will also describe ways in which these senses may be elaborated non-linguistically.

            "Orthodox ritual stimulates the senses--sight, sound, touch, taste and smell" (Hirschon 1998: 21). Indeed it is difficult to enter a church on Kalymnos and not feel overpowered by sensory stimulation, from the smell of myrrh and frankincense which are spread by the priests swinging censers rhythmically back and forth, to the flicker of the candles that each person lights and places in front of the icon when entering the church. One experiences the kinesthetics of making the cross and kissing the icon, the press of bodies in the often confined space of many of the small chapels on Kalymnos, and the reverberating nasal pitch of the liturgy being sung by the cantors. And, of course there is the multicolored sight of the icons illustrating key stories from the bible and the taste of the communion bread and wine mixed to the consistency of gruel and presented by the priest on a spoon. Kenna (n.d.: 5) sees this in terms of reinforcement of the message of sacredness: "An Orthodox Church service is a synesthetic experience: every sense is conveying the same message." ^[24] The sensory experiences are not confined to the church, but extend outward into the community. The liturgy itself, projected over loudspeaker, is heard throughout each neighborhood every Sunday morning and other special days. At other times it is the bells of the church being rung that peel through the streets of each neighborhood usually to announce a funeral. Incense, basil, icons and blessed bread are a few of the many items that either pass between church and home, usually through the mediation of women, or are reduplicated in each setting (Hart 1992:148; Hirschon 1998:139-140; Kenna n.d. ^[25] ). When liturgies are held at the many local chapels that dot the island, usually on the name day of the Saint of the chapel, these sensory aspects are extended through the serving of a variety of sweets and Greek coffee at the end of the liturgy. And on Kalymnos in particular sensory aspects of the church are heightened by the throwing of dynamite from church courtyards on Saturday at midnight when Christ is officially risen. ^[26] People expressed the importance of dynamite by using a language of feeling: "If I didn't hear the dynamite I wouldn't feel it was truly Easter," was a common sentiment. And many migrants are known to phone home on Easter specifically to hear the sounds of the exploding dynamite.

            The stress on the material and sensory aspects of religious experience is a part of the official doctrine of Orthodoxy, as seen in the notion of the deification of matter, or the idea that "it is the human vocation to manifest the spiritual in and through the material" (Ware 1986: 64; emphasis in original). Panourgia, for example, stresses the corporeality of Greek religion, crystallized in ritual and epitomized in the epitaphios, the funeral processions of Christ on Good Friday (1995:151 ff.). And these sensory aspects of religious experience were often remarked upon by Kalymnians as well, and seen as what distinguished their religion from the perceived "coldness" of Western Christianity. Two men in a coffee shop discussed with me and each other at length the power of different cantors on the island to evoke religious sensibility through the sound impressions they created on the tympanum of the ear. This is a common topic of discussion, as frequent church attenders compare the services at different churches in terms of the beauty of their cantors' singing voices.

            Another key sensory aspect associated with Orthodoxy is the question of the smell of decay associated with sin and death. Although the body and other matter is not inherently sinful, matter is corruptible as well as redeemable, a distinction made by Ware between "body" and "flesh" (1979: 79; see discussion 59 ff.). On Kalymnos this distinction tends to play out in the realm of smell, with sinful flesh smelling putrid, while redeemed flesh smells 'wonderful,' perhaps an association with the incense that envelops priests and the church (cf. Classen, Howes & Synnott 1994:52). The corpse of a bad person is said to putrefy quickly, and to stink very soon after death. One man told me a story about someone on his deathbed who feared he might have such a fate. He instructed his wife to place a small vial of perfume in his funeral jacket when he was buried so that later people would smell it and say "mmm (making a gesture of smelling) this must be a saint, he smells of frankincense;" and thus gravediggers checked the pockets of the people they were burying against such frauds. ^[27] Similarly, the proof adduced by many people that a Kalymnian man who had died in the 1960s was indeed a saint was the fact that his remains, on display at one of the island monasteries, had not putrefied after all these years. ^[28] A considerable part of this was seen as related to a rejection of food and animal flesh in particular, the food most directly associated with religiously required abstinence from certain foods (see Sutton 1997 for a full discussion). One man told me of the decayed smell of meat that remains overnight caught between his teeth, as compared to vegetables which he claimed did not have such a smell.

            Good and bad smells also make claims for social distinction, as a number of writers have noted (Classen, Howes & Synnott 1994: 165-69; Corbin 1986). Thus a man in the heat of an argument with his wife about family financial dealings shouts "I'm a sweet smelling flower, and you are stinking meat!" (eimai mirismeno loulouthi, kai esi eisai vromo kreas). This indicates his claim to have had "clean" financial dealings with the world in contrast to his perceptions of his wife's corrupt schemings. ^[29] On Kalymnos smell can be used as a put down for poorer families, such as a neighborhood grocer who was nicknamed "dirty," and whose store was reputed to smell. But smell can also acts as a levelling mechanism "from below" on Kalymnos. Thus a man describing to me a neighbor who was planning to open a hotel mocked him, saying "he puts on a tie every morning (here the man acts out tying a tie), he acts like he's important, but his house still stinks." In making the argument that this man could not claim to be higher class than other people we see how vision is associated with surface acting, while smell reveals inner essence, a common theme noted by Classen, Howes and Synnott (1994:4).

            A more positive discourse on smell, as well as a synesthetic orientation can be found not only in ritual contexts such as the church, but in everyday discourse and practices related to food. As noted in chapter one, basic recipes and ingredients seem, from an outsider's perspective, to be somewhat limited on Kalymnos. But this did not preclude a lively discourse on the quality and preparation methods of different ingredients. When I asked a woman about why locally produced honey was so expensive on Kalymnos, she noted that it was produced from many different flowers, which gave it its extraordinary taste and medicinal properties. Her husband then went and got his "special stash" of honey which had been given to him by a beekeeper friend, and we all shared a spoonful while they asked me to identify all the different flavors it contained. On another occasion I inquired about different prices for store-bought olive oil which was of similar quality (i.e., "extra virgin"). She suggested we "do an experiment" and brought out some store-bought oil along with locally fresh-pressed oil. She noted that the oil must "sit for three or four months in order to take its scent ." She poured each into small glasses and advised me to note the differences in color and viscosity, noting the thickness and deep-green color of her local oil, before giving me each to taste on a piece of bread. Such attention to quality does not only focus on local products, and I noted that Kalymnians debated the differences between different brands of rice and pasta with equal interest. Even salt was carefully distinguished, with iodized salt being acceptable for some cooking uses, but coarse sea salt (rock salt) being insisted upon for use on homemade french fries and in salads, especially when it is collected fresh from small sea caves around Kalymnos. ^[30] Similarly special preparation methods were said to make a great difference, and I was lectured upon the importance of soaking beans in rainwater rather than spring water to make them puff up better. This entailed a visit by one woman to her mother-in-law's house and an opportunity to socialize since her mother-in-law was the nearest person she knew who had a cistern. She also used the opportunity to ask her mother-in-law for fresh parsley, a much coveted seasoning for preparing bean soups, particularly during the deprivations of Lent.

            Discourse surrounding food focusses on sensory qualities as well, smell in particular. A woman in her twenties living at home with her family describes her culinary preferences as follows: "I prefer salty foods, cheese, cheese pies, to sweets. When I eat something I wanted it to have a smell and a flavor." But she also told me that she did not eat meat because she couldn't stand the smell of it. One way to refer to a tasteless food is "water-boiled" , in one case used by a woman to describe the noodle casserole made by her cousin on the neighboring island of Kos without nutmeg to give it its proper aroma. Metaphor is also prominent in Kalymnian discourse on food. A particularly delicious batch of bean stew is called "Turkish Delight!" (, a word which doesn't have the modifier 'Turkish' in Greek. It also directs attention to the tender texture as well as sweet flavor of the beans). A man tells his friend that he ate prickly pears the other day and they were tasteless, but today "they were honey!" A woman refers to fresh-caught tuna as "souvlaki!" and a man describes a batch of oranges he bought as "banana!" In these cases it seems that a superordinate category of "sweet foods" is used to relate prickly pears and honey or oranges and bananas, as in an "attributive categorization" view of metaphor (see McGlone 1996). What is interesting is the vividness of the metaphors so that in the latter two examples, any conjugation of the verb "to be" is dropped entirely: "I ate one of those oranges...banana!" Kalymnian practice of using multisensory terms and metaphor is not in itself unusual. In his study of restaurant workers, Fine (1996: 207 ff.) discusses the imprecision of discourse surrounding food taste, even among chefs. The tendency is to either use superlatives ("it tastes wonderful;" "it tastes like shit") or to rely on similes and metaphors, although interestingly all the examples he provides are of similes rather than metaphors, while in my Kalymnian examples the seemingly more direct and vivid metaphor is employed: "the prickly pear today, it was honey". ^[31]

            These materials have a number of suggestive implications. First, memory theorists note the importance of "encoding specificity" for later recall: "'What is stored is determined by what is perceived and how it is encoded, and what is stored determines what retrieval cues are effective in providing access to what is stored'" (Tulving & Thompson, cited in McGlone 1996: 557). Second, as Tilley notes: "A vivid metaphorical image, such as saying 'they cooked the land', is likely to be remembered far longer than a statement such as 'they burnt down the forest'. In so far as metaphors can evoke vivid mental images, they facilitate memory" (Tilley 1999: 8). This suggests some basis for the Proustian phenomenon of remembering through evocation of a powerful sensory image: the sweetness of a banana hardly seems similar to that of an orange, and yet as an image of a food with a strikingly sweet flavor, "banana" does have a certain evocative power. It should be pointed out here that, as noted in my discussion of Sperber, the significant quality of smell and taste is that it is possible to recognize them, but much more difficult to recall them. As Engen (1991: 80) notes, in cases in which people do claim to be able to recall odors, such as perfumers working on creating a new scent, it is more likely that a visual image is what is evoked. Through metaphor, Kalymnians seem to be providing the powerful images which might facilitate recall.

            One other aspect of odor memory stressed by Engen (1991: 81 ff.) is that time seems to have no effect on dissipating recognition ability. Indeed, a powerful (positive or negative) first experience of the smell of a certain food may color all subsequent sensory experiences of that food (or other odor). In the cases discussed above, the food referred to had been consumed recently. However, in one case I recorded a man discussed the meats and cheeses that the Italians brought to Kalymnos during the Occupation (60 or more years previously) first by a metonymical listing: "mortadella, proscuitto, provolone," and ending with the declaration: "Aroma!" here citing the sensory experience directly through invocation rather than metaphor. He did follow this, however, with a striking metaphor, phrased in the infinitive: "to eat and to have your insides open up from joy." (<" JDfTH 6"4 <r"<@\(@L< J" FB8VP<" F@L!) Through use of metaphor, as well as through invocation, the sensory intensity of the experience is either stressed for the interlocutor or recalled to mind by the person him or herself. Several other distant memories of food similarly rely on striking images, for example the plump purple figs a woman served to her fiancé who had returned from years working in the U.S. As she notes, she knew that he would be longing for Kalymnian figs, having been away so long. This memory combines a visual image with the memory of migrant longing discussed above, as well as, in the context of a marriage negotiation, the noted sexual suggestiveness of figs. Another memory focusses on the sensory qualities of the first loaf of bread consumed after World War II by a woman who was a child at the time:

"I remember when the Red Cross finally came at the end of the war, with flour that was from America, or Australia, it wasn't Greek flour, and when my mother shaped it into a bread ring and it was baking in the oven, my sisters and I kept opening the oven 'look how big it's getting!' 'shut the door, you'll ruin it!' 'But look, it's getting all red on top like a rose!'"

Once again a striking, synesthetic visual image captures the food memory and preserves it as narrative that the woman can return to.

            In his discussion of chefs, Fine draws out another aspect of discussions of taste: the tendency of chefs to see themselves as artists, and to use a synesthetic vocabulary in describing their activities, focussing sometimes on visual imagery of brightness and hues, and in other cases on musical analogies: taste seen in terms of musical octaves (Fine 1996: 212). The synesthesia evidenced in Kalymnian/Greek church experience is also strongly present in food experience and food discourse, as I have been suggesting throughout. Seremetakis has written an extended essay discussing the evocation of such synesthetic qualities in Greece. She notes the bringing of children into this synesthetic world through cooking and through verbal play (often by grandmothers) in the following passages (1994: 27):

The cook 'has to be fully alert', because cooking is a sudden awakening of substance and the senses...most of the time she does not eat the food she prepares for others, for she is 'filled with the smells'...The entire act of feeding the child and naming the points of the body [e.g. 'my eyes'] is an awakening of the senses. The act of talking to the child engages hearing. Naming the eyes awakens vision, the transference of substance from mouth to mouth [referring to the softening of bread with saliva to feed to infants] animates taste and tactility.

Seremetakis significantly locates synesthesia at the very heart of the enculturation process in rural Greece through the feeding and the teaching of language to children. She also describes the journey from urban to rural spaces (to visit the grandmother who remains in the largely abandoned village) as a journey from the implicitly anesthetized city to a world of sensations, "tactile and auditory smells": a bunch of oregano hanging over a sheep skin of homemade cheese, the smell of bread baking mixed with the ashen smell of the outdoor oven. As she notes, nothing that gives off smells is sealed, "to do so would mean to silence the smells preventing them from being heard" (1994:29-30).

            This last comment brings us to the discursive elaboration of synesthesia in Greece. While it is fairly easy to find synesthetic discussions in the cookbooks that line the walls of Barnes and Noble and on the pages of the food sections of major newspapers, there are a few distinctive aspects of Kalymnian/Greek synesthesia, and in particular the focus on the auditory qualities of food. This is reflected in the expression found on Kalymnos, and in other regions of Greece (but not, apparently, in Athens), "listen to that smell" which is used, usually in an approving context, to refer to the odor of food cooking, and often accompanied by a noisy intake of breath through the nose. The opposite, to indicate the failure to taste an element of a dish, is "it is not hearable" (*,< "6@b(,J"4). ^[32] Seremetakis sees this as directly tied to the encoding of memory discussed above: "The memory of one sense is stored in another: that of tactility in sound, of hearing in taste, of sight in sound" (1994:28). Seremetakis sees this as a violation of the Cartesian segmentation of the senses characteristic of modernity, and the point of her many examples is to show that the lack of such segmentation is what gives ordinary experience its depth and historical connectivity: the cup of coffee with the rich foam on the top -- "the top implies sedimentation, texture in taste"-- supplies a pause in the day, a chance to reflect on the past, and provide meta-narratives on the felt losses of "modernity," or of the exile of migration (1994:17; 26). The ways that such experiences of synesthesia do or do not pervade life in the United States and Western Europe must be left somewhat of an open question at present. Intuitively, one could contrast the swirl of sights, smells and sounds at open marketplaces in many parts of the world to the packaged, deodorized, muzak experience of the modern supermarket. Writers who do discuss the senses in the modern West stick to analyses of the commodification of taste and odors. For example, Classen, Howes and Synnott (1994) describe the marketing of scents and flavors in a chapter entitled the aroma of the commodity, arguing that "marketers have discovered what academics and other arbiters of culture have ignored: smell matters to people" (1994:197). Indeed advertisers, with their concern for consumer memory have focussed on the transmission of mood and image rather than information to sell their products (1994:187-189). They seem at least intuitively aware of the importance of synesthesia: one only need think of the well remembered jingle for Rice Krispies: "snap, crackle, pop!" ^[33] But surely the sensory experiences of those living in the United States or Western Europe aren't limited to the experience of commodity transactions. We certainly don't need to fall into global dualisms of a rational "West" and a sensory "Rest," even if we revalidate the sensory side of the equation. ^[34] Rather in the study of "experience" or "the everyday" we need to recognize that all experience is synesthetic to some degree, and cultural differences, to the extent that they exist, will fall along a continuum of the elaboration or validation of different senses. Forrest's (1988) ethnography of "everyday aesthetics" in a small, relatively isolated fishing village in North Carolina, is suggestive in this regard. It provides an analysis of how the aesthetic realm is unequally gendered, with men by-and-large suspicious of appeals to the aesthetic, ^[35] as well as being divided between inside and outside (of the home, of church). Forrest also suggests the importance of Baptist doctrine in dividing the "spiritual" and the "material" senses in ways that could be both compared and contrasted to Kalymnos: "Food, being material, feeds the material body, but sounds, being nonmaterial, feed the nonmaterial spirit. Sounds can feed the soul because they can be used to express spiritual concepts through a variety of linguistic modes" (Forrest 1988:230-31). Unfortunately, apart from literature and film, we have almost no other descriptions of everyday sensory experience in the West on which to ground our comparisons and contrasts.

            While the relationship of synesthesia and memory seems to be an open question from the point of view of experimental psychologists (see e.g. Jones 1976; but cf. Cytowic 1993: 129 fn.2), intuitively it seems to be the case that synesthesia is an aid to memory. This relationship has been particularly described by Luria, in his classic study The Mind of a Mnemonist. According to Luria, S. used synesthetic associations to code words and other objects for future remembrance. This additional information acted both as a prompt to recollection, and as a screen for false memories, i.e., if a word was altered by the experimenters, it would not produce the same taste, sense of weight, or emotions (Luria 1968: 28). S. was, of course, synesthetic in a clinical sense, rather than having been culturally encouraged toward synesthesia, so his case must be used with caution. But his subjective perception that synesthesia aided his memory is what is of interest to me here. For my purposes it is these subjective associations that are crucial, rather than experimental assessments of synesthesia and memory, since I am looking at claims to remember food, the accuracy of which I have little way of testing. ^[36]

CONCLUSION

Perfume is symbolic, not linguistic, because it does what language could not do--express an ideal, an archetypal wholeness, which surpasses language

                                                                                    (Gell 1977:30).

            The experience of synesthetic memory brings us back to where we began this chapter: the return to the whole. In this chapter I have argued that we can understand the evocative power of food by examining some of the properties of tastes and smell, which are universal but which can be culturally elaborated to different degrees and in different ways. The fact that taste and smell have a much greater association with episodic than semantic memory, with the symbolic rather than the linguistic, and with recognition rather than recall, help to explain why they are so useful for encoding the random, yet no less powerful, memories of contexts past than, say vision or words. But at another level there is no need to counterpoise the senses in this way, since I have argued that the experience of food in Greece is cultivated synesthetically and emotionally so that eating food from home becomes a particularly marked cultural site for the re-imagining of "worlds" displaced in space and/or time. The union of the senses in synesthesia has a powerful effect, much like Turner's descriptions of the power of ritual (e.g., 1968). The Desana of the Amazon, for example, place the synesthetic experience of Ayahuasca-induced hallucinations "at the core of their culture, saying that it reveals ultimate truths about cosmic reality" (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994: 156). But the union of the senses is not only a metaphor for social wholeness, as this last quotation suggests (cf. Fernandez 1988), it is an embodied aspect of creating the experience of the whole. Food is not a random part that recalls the whole to memory. Its synesthetic qualities, when culturally elaborated as they are in Greece, are an essential ingredient in ritual and everyday experiences of totality. ^[37] Food does not simply symbolize social bonds and divisions, it participates in their creation and re-creation.

NOTES