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  • Remembrance of Repasts. An Anthropology of Food and Memory
  • Richard C. Hoffmann
David E. Sutton , Remembrance of Repasts. An Anthropology of Food and Memory. New York: Berg, 2001. Pp. xiii + 211. Cloth $84.95, PB $26.95.

How do people think about the foods they have eaten? How do their recollections of meals fit into their understanding of who they are? For David Sutton the intersection of food and memory coincides with a problem zone for anthropological theory, notably as respecting material culture in the contemporary world. Almost incidentally, the principal body of information for Sutton's discussion comes from his years of field work on the Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, taken in comparison with data from Britain, the United States, Melanesia, Amazonia, and elsewhere.

To his anthropological colleagues Sutton insists on the importance of the conjunction of two cultural realms, eating and remembering, and grapples with how best to conceive and analyze it/them. Food has both obvious and arcane cultural roles, which blend the pragmatic and the highly symbolic. A dense written introduction probably touches nearly all current theoretical bases in social anthropology. Memory, too, blends productive processes of remembering and [End Page 472] forgetting with subsequent use of its content to construct personal and group identities in an understood social universe.

Having laid out several frames of reference, Sutton continues with five overlapping or interlocking thematic chapters. He first examines how ritual (defined broadly) and routine together structure the way people eat and recall what they have eaten. Daily and seasonal patterns of food shopping, preparation, and consumption on Kalymnos shape ordinary lives and the occasions – the next meal, a funeral feast, the Lenten fast—through which people anticipate and look back upon events. Bread in particular is at once mundane staple and a highly charged symbol in the Orthodox Christian tradition. The second chapter uses exchange, notably of food, to probe at the construction of memory. Sutton argues that on Kalymnos it is not gifts and counter-gifts of food that create memory, but the stories Kalymnians tell of such exchanges in past, present, and future. A reputation for generosity or parsimony with food becomes a central element of personal and group identity. The author contrasts Kalymnians' remembered past of community generosity with their present disconnection of memory from the foreign foods globalization now brings to the island, even though their culture does incorporate these exotic items in other ways. The first two chapters thus try to use food and memory to comment afresh on some hoary staples of anthropological thought.

Chapter 3 grapples with ways to conceptualize the experience of eating as "embodied practice" when the analytical tools for describing sensations of taste and smell remain so undeveloped compared to those for sight and hearing. Sutton here posits synesthesia, the crossing of different kinds of sensory experiences, as the basis for food being memorable and thus capable of evoking a larger whole, notably the homeland that serves as a touchstone of identity for migrants and expatriates. This he illustrates with heartfelt tales of Kalymnians in Athens, London, or North America yearning for the remembered taste of local figs, oil, or fish.

Yet, says Sutton in his fourth chapter, it is as whole events that Kalymnians recall meals. Their thinking fits each meal into an implicit schema which balances elements of repetition and novelty. The mode of thought about eating is, in Sutton's view, part of a more general understanding of time and the remembered which he had diagnosed in earlier publications about Kalymnos. Thus a present meal brings recollection of those earlier ones deemed analogous and noteworthy. The meaningful event contrasts with uninterrupted and essentially meaningless routines. On the other hand, the meal as event comprises individual dishes and the process passing knowledge of their preparation from generation to generation further roots food into memory and time. Hence the final substantive chapter deals with recipes, first as presented in the present-day western fad of "nostalgia cookbooks" and then with the traditional oral transmission this fashion ultimately fails to replicate. Literate nostalgia replaces hands-on teaching only because and when the cultural setting for memory is itself being...

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