Tonight, only two mezedes [appetizers] are served: a bowl of freshly picked yigantes—gigantic white beans—oven-roasted with tomatoes, carrots, and parsley, and a slab of the undramatically named dopio tyri (“local cheese”), which turns out to be the richest cheese I’ve ever tasted on Thasos, its equal portions of goat’s and sheep’s milk held together by a tender membrane of rind. When I begin swooning over the cheese, pestering the men with inquiries, they point to a scarecrow sipping tsipouro in the corner. “That’s the shepherd there,” they tell me. . . . When we ask him about the cheese, he tastes a slice from his impossibly weathered fingertips. “It’s not mine,” he says. “This is some other man’s cheese. There’s too much goat in this one.” With that, he nods and returns to his corner and his drink. (Bakken 2013, 14)
Nomiki is describing to me the making of a meat sauce for the dish pastitsio. She begins by listing the main ingredients, and then she comes to the spices, noting, “I added cinnamon, garlic, onion, pepper, bay leaf. . . .” Here she reaches into the pan to pull out a bay leaf and says, “I’m using my hand. It doesn’t matter. Cooking requires hands.” After listing a few more ingredients, she adds, “The ingredients don’t go in all at once. One at a time. There’s an order in cooking. You’ll put in the cinnamon, then after a little bit the pepper, the salt, the bay leaf, one by one, so that you can hear the smell of each ingredient.” (Author’s fieldnotes, May 2006)
Both of these extracts capture something of the unique taste of Greek food, the first from a culinary memoir by poet Christopher Bakken and the second from my fieldnotes during my own research. Bakken’s text captures the sense of “the taste of place,” that the flavor of food is shaped by its environment and the profoundly local knowledge of process and small differences that are the stuff of endless conversation in Greece. As many Greeks will tell you, and as I have experienced myself, no matter how hard you try to reproduce the same dish outside its local context, you won’t be able to because the sun, soil, and air will be different, leading to different flavors. If you have ever traveled and then tried to reproduce the flavors of your trip in your home environment, you will know that the results tend to be ghostly reflections of your memory of the original dish.
The extract from my fieldwork is a reminder that “taste” is not only embedded in the context of place, but in a cultural context in which the senses are enculturated in specific ways—in this case, through a stress not only on careful technique, but on the ways that all the senses need to work together in creating proper flavors. Synesthesia, the union of the senses, has always been a major feature of food practices on the island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, where I have conducted research for the past two decades. The easy expression of this synesthesia encapsulated in the intriguing phrase “hear the smell” was only emphasized by Nomiki’s comfortable tactile engagement with the ingredients as she dipped her hand confidently into the bubbling meat sauce to scoop out a bay leaf—captured and preserved on my video camera—while all at the same time emphasizing that cooking is far from a haphazard affair; cooking involves forethought and order.1 If anything had impressed itself on me during my research in Kalymnian kitchens, it was that the flavor of food, and how that flavor was achieved, was a matter of deep concern to Kalymnians, women and men, young and old.
Indeed, even though men are not the primary cooks on Kalymnos, it became clear to me during my research that cooking matters to Kalymnian men in a fundamental way. It is fascinating to me to observe men talking to other men on Kalymnos about the details of cooking, details that they may never need to put into practice in their daily lives. Men on Kalymnos are typically accidental cooks; yet they will still express fascination with cooking processes and their variations—the way to cook an octopus, for example, by either removing or conserving its sea water, or the importance of adding feta cheese directly to a dish of green beans in tomato sauce so that the cheese absorbs the sauce. These are some of the topics that men spontaneously raise with other men, and that they pass on to young boys as part of a valued cultural knowledge of flavors on Kalymnos. Kalymnians care about cooking because flavor matters to them, because it represents one of their deeply held values—or at least so it had always seemed.
This book is an ethnography of cooking knowledge and practices on Kalymnos, an island in the Dodecanese chain, just a few miles off the coast of Turkey. It explores the ways that cooking is transmitted, reproduced, and transformed among several generations of Kalymnian cooks. It poses this question: are cooking traditions passed down from one generation to the next, and if so, how?
Why should this matter, one may ask, to anyone except the Kalymnians with whom I worked? The question of the fate of cooking knowledge in our so-called “modern” world is a topic of ongoing concern, as many bemoan the supposed “death of cooking.” Michael Pollan (2009), for example, suggests that we have moved from the kitchen to the couch, as cooking has become a spectator sport to watch on TV, but not to attempt to reproduce at home (as it was, presumably, in the days when food TV meant Julia Child). Similarly, a New York Times article notes that what used to be a “60-minute gourmet” column now has been trimmed to “30 minutes.” “30 is the new 60,” the author notes ruefully (Grimes 2004). Apparently, the only time that Americans spend more than half an hour in the kitchen these days is when they’re cooking for their canine or feline companions. Considering my project, was I condemned to old-fashioned salvage ethnography, lamenting another “lost tradition” captured in writing just before its last flames flicker out in practice? Or are rumors of the demise of cooking greatly exaggerated?
The study of cooking knowledge and its transmission raises questions about the fate of tradition generally, and the potential loss of cultural and linguistic diversity that is feared to accompany the decline of all sorts of practices labeled “traditional.” Some scholars and activists who wish to fight the loss of tradition through the preservation of “traditional” linguistic, ecological, or other knowledge seem to end up abstracting and objectifying it, as if knowledge were a freestanding object that can be treated with the tools of resource management. As Julie Cruikshank argues about the sensory practices and stories that are interwoven with the reproduction of knowledges among Tlingit and Athapaskans, creating the idea “that truthful knowledge can somehow be ‘captured’ and recovered in databases; such studies seem to do damage to northern visions when statements by knowledgeable people are stripped from evocative contexts and taped, transcribed, codified, and labeled.”2 In the realm of food, this approach is reflected in the seed banks that attempt to preserve the diversity of agricultural plant life separate from the knowledges and contexts in which these plants have been grown.
When we turn to cooking, we can see similar attitudes and approaches reflected in the vast dissemination of recipes on the Internet and in mass media, the kind of food programming that Pollan sees as leaving us deskilled couch potatoes, able to name and describe a crudo or the uses of a shiso leaf, but with no actual ability to produce such exotic, not to mention mundane, concoctions. Pollan holds that transmission of cooking knowledge has lost its traditional, female context with the rise of women in the workforce and the lure of the fast-food industry, while food programs on TV have not replaced such traditional female sources of transmission, but simply made us better able to know how to order in fancy restaurants: “As a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, ‘How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?’” (Pollan 2009).
Recent times have also seen the rise of a movement known as molecular gastronomy, which claims to transform cooking by using laboratory science to “rationalize stylistic and aesthetic conceits” and “eradicate tacit knowledge from culinary practice” (Roosth 2013, 8, 7). In this view, the transmission of cooking knowledge is not something that is being lost by modernity and must be preserved by external, technical means. On the contrary, as practiced in France by Hervé This, one of its leading exponents, “vernacular skills transmitted intergenerationally—from parent to child or from chef to trainee—get left out of French cuisine as it is reinvented as rational and positivist.”3 He and his colleagues believe that cooking’s “old wives’ tales” will stand or fall based on their confirmation or disproof in his laboratory—or as another molecular gastronomist put it, “‘Because for a lot of centuries our ancestors did this one [recipe] like that, [so] we do it like that and maybe it’s wrong. It’s wrong. And molecular gastronomy can explain why it’s wrong.’”4
These ideas run parallel to those found in other domains of the contemporary food scene, such as the magazine Cooks Illustrated, which purports through extensive empirical testing to create recipes that are replicable and perfectible (a subject discussed further in the conclusion to this book). Note that whether traditional cooking knowledge is something to be preserved or discarded, it is seen as an object, like a recipe or a technique, which can be detached from its context and made to speak for itself, without distraction, in the objective setting of the scientific laboratory.
As an anthropologist who has been conducting fieldwork in Greece for more than two decades, I have a different view of tradition and its relation to tacit knowledge and its transmission. “Traditional knowledge” is not frozen in time; rather, it is deeply responsive to social and material environments, as those who study processes of learning and apprenticeship have long argued. The ethnography that follows is an argument for what is revealed about cooking when one starts from a more complex and contextual understanding of what ordinary people have been doing in kitchens. It is only when we move away from static notions of tradition that we can begin to understand and assess the actual impacts of something like the rise of food television on everyday cooking practices. If, as a generation of scholars has shown, learning always occurs in concrete contexts, deeply shaped by social, historical, and material environments, then we must seek to study cooking in its contexts rather than separate it from them.
Such an approach allows me to ask questions about tradition that include the following: Has cooking ever passed smoothly and directly from mothers to daughters? How does the choice of cooking tools and technologies shape everyday notions of identity and morality? Why might Kalymnians choose to cut vegetables in a way that cooking specialists would label “inefficient” and “dangerous”? I am not suggesting that Kalymnos represents an exotic repository of tradition to be contrasted to our “modern” ways of cooking—as we will see, Kalymnians struggle with some of the same contrasts. But I am suggesting that by taking seriously everyday practices and values in ordinary kitchens and presenting them for scrutiny, we can develop new perspectives on why people make the choices they do in their kitchens, and why those choices matter to them.
When I returned to Kalymnos in the summer of 2005 for the first time with a video camera, intending to record some of the processes and practices of Kalymnian kitchens, I found much that had changed since previous trips. Young women were dressed in the latest fashion, a rarity during my research in the early 1990s. The first big supermarkets, carrying diverse frozen foods and preprepared meals, had opened the previous year, while specialty stores offered wasabi mustard, Thai curries, and a variety of Mexican seasonings that had not existed previously. Cooking shows were now a regular feature on Greek TV stations, and they seemed popular with many Kalymnians. And the discourse of health, while not absent in the past, seemed to have been quantified; people discussed cholesterol numbers with confidence and precision.
One thing that struck me as both new and seemingly an echo of American concerns over loss of cooking skills was the succinct claim I heard repeated by many older Kalymnians: “The younger generation doesn’t cook anymore.” Nowadays claims that cooking is dead roll off the tongue of many Kalymnians, its passage seen as one of the ambivalent fruits of “modernity” that has been threatening to overtake the island during the decades that I have been doing fieldwork there, and no doubt for much longer. On a Greek sitcom about four single women seeking love and fulfillment titled Alone through Carelessness, I watched one of the heroines shopping diffidently in the pasta aisle of a supermarket. She is confronted by a more matronly-looking woman who says, “Pasta, pasta, all pasta. Don’t you younger women know how to cook anything else? That’s why men don’t want to leave their mothers.”
This statement suggests that such discussions are not merely descriptive but moral discourses, laced with gendered assumptions. As I argued in my earlier ethnography of Kalymnos, the balancing of “tradition” and “modernity” is seen as the most significant moral issue faced, individually and collectively (Sutton 1998). Here I am attempting to get at some of the real changes as well as continuities in people’s lives. What has been striking to me since I began to examine the local meanings of “modernity” on Kalymnos was the pervasiveness of the discourse, how it invaded every aspect of daily life, from the hair color of children to the choice of what kind of pot to use for boiling one’s stuffed grape leaves. This was true even before the commodification of food traditions that emerged in the first decade of the new millennium, as producers of foods such as cheese and honey as well as restaurateurs were increasingly encouraged and given institutional support to sell their products as Kalymnian tradition. Meanwhile, in the autumn of 2010, Greece’s application to have the Mediterranean diet recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage (an application made in conjunction with Spain, Italy, and Morocco) had been accepted. When I have presented my research to nonacademic audiences, one of the things they have wanted to know is, “What is happening to the Mediterranean diet?” and whether it is still prevalent or, perhaps, being swept aside by McDonald’s and other global forces.
By 2011 food choices and cooking were being recontextualized by questions about the Greek debt crisis. On Kalymnos the priests were telling people to return to the practice of backyard gardening to supplement their food budget. Some people were talking about how to survive the crisis by reverting to a traditional bean-based diet (after the past twenty-five years have seen meat gain more prominence in the diet), while others suggested that careful shopping for cheaper cuts and better deals at the island’s supermarkets would allow them to ride out the storm. In Athens, by contrast, the protesters, known as the “outraged,” were not thinking about such small adjustments, but rather employed food metaphors to express their desperation and anger at the government and political parties. As reported in The Guardian:
There is another mic here, and it’s grabbed by a man wearing a mask of deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos: “My friends, we all ate together.” He is quoting the socialist politician, who claimed on TV last year that everyone bore the responsibility for the squandering of public money. Pangalos may have intended his remark as the Greek equivalent of George Osborne’s remark that “We’re all in it together,” but here they’re not having it. “You lying bastard!” they roar back. “You’re so fat you ate the entire supermarket.” (Chakrabortty 2011)
Despite the direness of the economic situation as it related to cooking and eating, in the second half of the 2000s I noticed a flourishing of food TV in Greece. Beginning with indigenous cooking shows like Vefa’s Kitchen and Forgiveness with Every Bite (analyzed in detail in chapter 5), by 2011 Greek channel lineups were crammed with both Greek programs (some following the model of successful shows in the United States and England like Top Chef and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares) and foreign shows featuring chefs like Jamie Oliver. And these shows were popular. It seemed that economic news had not yet dampened the pleasure Kalymnians took in discussing and analyzing their daily fare. More than that, kitchen choices of major proportions, like building an outdoor oven in one’s backyard, or simple things like styles of can opener were seen not simply as superfluous frills but as existential choices, very much about how one saw one’s relationship with the past and present, or with the ill-defined concept of “modernity.”
I never imagined when I started out as a graduate student with an interest in Greece that twenty-five years later I would be writing a book about Kalymnian cooking. When I first did fieldwork on Kalymnos in the early 1990s, my graduate training had posed the question of historical change—the relation between “structure” and “event,” or “rules” and “practices”—as the central question for anthropology to solve. My own research project was framed in terms of these concerns, but I also felt that the question of historical consciousness, or the felt relevance of the past in people’s daily lives, might be important for understanding how the past shapes the present, and how the present inflects our memories of the past. I explored some of the ways that the past and the present are tangled up with one another in Kalymnian practices, such as the ritual throwing of thousands of pounds of dynamite at Easter, an “explosive” expression of complex Kalymnian attitudes about their relationship with the long history of outside occupation of the island. I looked at how debates over the proper place of tradition in contemporary life shape people’s understanding of gender relations in the present in the memories and ongoing influence of the Kalymnian “first-daughter” inheritance system of female primogeniture, a system that is unique in Greece to Kalymnos and some of the neighboring islands. And I examined how debates over contemporary events such as the breakup of Yugoslavia became debates over “history.” But I was also concerned with how these debates were shaped, sometimes unconsciously, by customary practices such as the naming of children after grandparents as a key aspect of the creation of cultural continuity (see Sutton 1998). As I pursued this project, I increasingly became aware of the significance of food in people’s memories of the past. Food was in the margins of my notes as part of expressive anecdotes, but for Kalymnians it was clearly central to their memories, marked by the expression often directed to me, to “eat, so that you remember Kalymnos.”
In reviewing these marginal notes I became increasingly intrigued by the Kalymnian perception of a strong interrelationship of food and memory, and noted the absence of anthropological reflection or analysis on the topic. This lack of anthropological interest at the time provided an impetus for me to pursue a “Proustian anthropology,” which would take food memories as a jumping-off point for broader anthropological considerations. In Remembrance of Repasts (2001) I traced some of the ways that food memories tied together ritual and everyday life and were central to exchange relations, in which the memory of past acts of generosity were narrated for the ways that they could establish and solidify individual and collective identities. I was struck by the sensory dimensions of Kalymnian memories and posed questions about how anthropologists might get at sensory experience, a subject that has become an ongoing concern for me. I noted at the time the ways that a kind of casual synesthesia seemed to pervade Kalymnian cooking practices (as well as other aspects of life on Kalymnos), and explored the metaphors and other tropes by which Kalymnians themselves attempt to convey the tastes, textures, smells, and sounds of the kitchen.
When I was close to finishing writing Remembrance of Repasts I had another “revelatory moment” (Fernandez 1986)—or an “aha moment.” My colleague Janet Dixon Keller suggested to me that cooking was very much a “memory process,” and that I should consider cooking in a more systematic way. Of course, I thought, you can’t think about food without thinking about cooking, but somehow cooking as a topic of ethnographic exploration and analysis had escaped my notice until that moment. This led me to write a largely speculative chapter on what an ethnography of cooking focused on “memory processes” might look like, raising questions of kitchen tools and technologies and their relation to embodied memory, of the role of recipes and other forms of objectification in the transmission of cooking, and of how different kinds of learning processes might shape the acquisition and retention of cooking knowledge. I was most excited by the fact that this inquiry led me to different approaches that I had not been familiar with before, in particular to studies of learning and apprenticeship, to phenomenology, to actor-network theory, and to various archaeological perspectives on tools and technology, and material culture studies more generally. As I read more, I got increasingly excited both because these diverse approaches seemed to illuminate the topic of cooking and because they had not been applied to cooking before. So as with food and memory, I have felt throughout this project that there was something to be gained by bringing together topics and approaches that hadn’t been tried before—like trying out a new recipe—and seeing what resulted.
I began my ethnography of cooking with several small projects in southern Illinois, and with, for me, a major methodological innovation: prompted by my graduate student Michael Hernandez, I began filming people as they prepared everyday meals.5 In using video I was inspired, in part, by the work of Patricia Greenfield on Maya weavers.6 While visual anthropology has a history almost as long as the discipline itself, Greenfield was a relatively early proponent of using video to explore daily practices, particularly in the context of learning skills (her subjects were young Maya girls). Her work pointed me to the ways that video can get at how bodily habits themselves are culturally shaped, as she described the training that goes into mastering the difficult postures involved in balancing oneself to manipulate a backstrap loom. And her work pointed to the value of collecting video data over time, as she explored some of the changes in her subjects’ practices as they matured and as their community adapted to changing socioeconomic circumstances.
The value of video was instantly apparent to me, as even for interviews it created a richness of presence lacking in audio recordings. But it also created for me a whole new type of data that provided information about the relationship between language and all kinds of practices, the use of tools in the kitchen, kitchen organization, and bodily movements and postures as cooks interact with noncooks or fellow cooks—an entire kitchen choreography. Returning to these videos allowed me to start thinking in much greater detail about questions of how people do things, the technical and aesthetic aspects of life that I had paid only scant attention to while focused on more purely social or symbolic questions.
In 2005 I began filming cooking on Kalymnos, and I have returned yearly or semiyearly since then to follow up and document some of the micro-changes that may be occurring in Kalymnian kitchens. These videos served not only to expand my appreciation for people’s everyday practices (and, indeed, provided a better record of their linguistic devices as well), but when I presented my research to colleagues, video also seemed to bring my arguments to life and provide for engagement and lively discussion. Thus in this book I supplement my written descriptions with video footage from my research. I urge readers to become viewers as well, and to deepen and perhaps also to challenge my analysis through viewings of these videos.
No introduction would be complete without a ritual invocation of the scholarly and theoretical tradition in which one is working, while typically also showing that no one has studied this particular issue in this particular way before. My own version of this exercise humbly follows, divided into two sections, the first briefly reviewing general theoretical issues, with some thoughts on how they apply to food, and the second focused more specifically on previous approaches to studying food and particularly cooking.
Contemporary studies of objects or “material culture” have stressed an approach that acknowledges that “the representational aspects of material culture far from exhaust its uses or role within society” (Boivin 2010, 30). Thus, instead of seeing material culture as interesting to anthropologists purely because of its signifying or languagelike properties, recent work has focused on how all phenomena in the world are mixtures of both “social” and “material” effects, and the two cannot easily be distinguished or segregated from each other; nor should they be. Thus, chiles are not interesting because they “stand for” heat, or even masculinity, but because they take on certain meanings in the process of producing certain effects on the tongue and the body. Much of the debate in such theorizing is in working out the implications of these insights for anthropological practice, whether to speak of “materials” or “materiality,” and what all this implies about “the agency of objects.”7 Here I simply want to make a few points.
Without reviewing the complex corpus of anthropologist-philosopher Bruno Latour, I take from him the important point that “objects” need to be part of our ethnographies in new ways—that is, neither as pure symbolic repositories of human thought, nor as technological determinants of human society. In between these two views, Latour suggests, we can analyze the way that “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor. . . . Thus the questions to ask about any agent are: Does it make a difference in the course of some other agent’s action or not? Is there some trial that allows someone to detect this difference?” (2005, 71; emphasis in original). Latour asks us to imagine hitting a nail with or without a hammer to understand that hammers make a difference in human actions and projects. This is not, as Latour notes, to say that hammers determine any particular action, nor that they symbolize strength or power. Between these two possibilities, he suggests, “things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on” (2005, 72).8
In the following pages we will see cooking tools such as knives, rolling pins, brick ovens, and can openers that all make a difference in the daily lives, projects, and actions of Kalymnian cooks, and that need to be as much a part of our consideration in an ethnography of cooking as issues of gender identities, matrilocality, “globalization,” and cultural values. Bringing such “objects” as cooking tools into our analytic consideration no more discounts these typical subjects of anthropological inquiry than an anthropology of “power,” developed in the 1980s and 1990s, should displace concerns with kinship, ritual, or exchange, still clearly important facets of human social life. One goal of this book, however, is to suggest that “technology” need not be a stand-alone subspecialization within anthropology; rather, its consideration is very much part of what we want to understand about contemporary life, whether we are talking about potato peelers or smart phones. That these “objects” are still tied to “identities” is clear, but not only in the sense, once again, of being symbols of identity or status markers (though they can be that as well), but in the sense described by Marx in his image of Homo faber, that is, the way humans shape themselves in the course of producing objects: “By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.”9 This is similar to Daniel Miller’s notion of objectification: “In objectification all we have is a process in time by which the very act of creating form creates consciousness . . . and thereby transforms both form and the self-consciousness of that which has consciousness” (Miller 2005, 9). When this concept is applied to cooking, one could say that in transforming materials or ingredients into forms—the cooked dish—one is also engaged in a process of self-transformation, into that of the competent or incompetent cook.
A related approach to objects draws from Marcel Mauss (1954), who stressed the way that objects and subjects blur into each other, as the objects themselves become personified, taking on the histories and identities of their owners and recipients, while the identity of subjects becomes tied to the objects they possess, hence the notion of “biographical objects,” or even “inalienable possessions.”10 As we will see, all of these approaches are useful in understanding objects in the Kalymnian kitchen, where old flour sifters or coffee grinders may be displayed on top of cabinets as a reminder of the previous owners or users of these objects as Kalymnians struggle to come to terms with notions of “tradition” and “modernity” in what I refer to as “existential memory work.”
What of food itself as an object? Or as Jon Holtzman asks, how might we approach food “as food” (2009, 50)? Some have suggested that food’s distinctiveness lies in its power to cross the boundaries between outside and inside, to begin as external and then become part of “us”—one of the reasons that food is so tied to notions of kinship or “shared substance.”11 Philosopher Jane Bennett—drawing on nutritional studies as well as on philosophers such as Nietzsche and Thoreau—argues for the importance of the “material agency” of food to alter our moods, affecting our dispositions as well as our “psychological, aesthetic, cognitive and moral complexions,” suggesting that “edible matter is a powerful agent . . . that modifies the human matter with which it comes into contact” (Bennett 2010, 43–44). Holtzman takes a slightly different approach, suggesting that to study food as food is to study the intersection of multiple processes, nutritional, social, political, religious, emotional, and so on—that “what makes food food . . . is how it simultaneously ties together disparate threads of causality and meaning” (2009, 53). Holtzman also suggests that ordinary people, at least where he did fieldwork in northern Kenya, don’t tend to parse out the different aspects of food that anthropologists tend to treat separately. While I like the holism suggested by such a view, I think the same might be said of many other topics of anthropological study as well, death or money, for example. Of course, food doesn’t have to be unique among objects to be interesting, and Holtzman’s point is well taken that food can be studied as food rather than mainly as a window onto some other thing (class, globalization) seen as more important.
Another approach to food as an object is suggested by Joy Adapon in her application of Alfred Gell’s theory of art as agency in her ethnography Culinary Art and Anthropology (2008). If the essence of Gell’s approach is that humans tend to impute agency when they encounter an “effect,” Adapon applies this insight to food in showing how “we recognize culinary artistry by the power of the food to perform a perceptual change in the eaters, physically enhancing their experience of life” (34). As Adapon argues for Mexican cuisine, “Confronting a meal can also be thought of as confronting a person . . . and the food itself is the outcome of the cook’s intentions” (38). This leads people to talk about transfers of emotion between persons and food—if someone is angry, tamales will not set because they are angry as well (39), and food resents being “rudely handled” (20). These personifications are examples of Gell’s notion that an object is an “artwork” to the extent that “‘it embodies intentionalities that are complex, demanding of attention and perhaps difficult to reconstruct fully’” (Gell, cited in Adapon 2008, 39). This is related to the notion that artworks, such as a complex meal, can be “traps” for the viewer-eater, as they suggest a complexity of intention and execution that the eater cannot fully reconstruct: How were they produced? With what feelings and intentions? There is a notion here that food “collaborates” with humans in producing certain effects (Janeja 2010, 20). But by the same token, as food circulates—that is, as it is eaten by different people—it has the possibility to “betray” the intentions of its creator (Janeja 2010, 20); its taste can be unpalatable to some or it can spoil, thus once again suggesting a notion of “agency” if not of actual intentionality.
Much as with objects, the senses themselves are no longer understood as passive recording devices, but as part of our active engagement with our socio-material environment. As David Howes puts it, attention to the senses allows us to explore “how meanings are transmitted and experienced through sensual modes of communication and . . . how perceptual relations are also social relations, making culture a lived, multisensory experience” (2003, 40). Moving beyond some of Paul Stoller’s earlier claims that anthropologists “should spice [their ethnographic descriptions] with the sauce of sensuous observations,” Howes argues that “sensuous experience is not opposed to reason, rather it is replete with logic and meaning, both personal and communal. Consequently, sensuous evocation is not just a way of enlivening ethnographic description, or of infusing scholarship with sensuality. It is an essential basis for exploring how peoples make sense of the world through perception” (2003, 43).
Perception, it should be noted, is not simply present-tense, but always involves a combination of what Howes refers to here as “perception” with memory and imagination, a mixture of tenses and temporalities that leads to the rich complexity of all embodied sensory experiences.12 What is powerful in a synesthetic approach is that it sees the senses as a bridge between what we traditionally divide into “internal” or “subjective” and “external” or “objective” experiences. Sensory experience occurs at the borders between these Western dualisms, as numerous authors have attempted to capture. Thus, C. Nadia Seremetakis writes, describing what she sees as a Greek rural approach to the experience of the senses, “The sensory is not only encapsulated within the body as an internal capacity or power, but is also dispersed out there on the surface of things, as the latter’s autonomous characteristics, which can then invade the body as perceptual experience” (1994, 6). Others have commented on how taste and smell seem to dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, problematizing the distinctions drawn from a more vision-based worldview (see Borthwick 2000 for a review).
Howes is one of a number of scholars who have transformed our understanding of sensory experience so that one can now speak of an “anthropology of the senses.”13 This scholarship has shown quite clearly that the typical Western view of the senses—including the notion that there are only five and that they can be ranked from “higher” to “lower”—is as limiting and limited as any other supposed commonsense dressed as “universal.” Recent ethnographies have provided wonderful descriptions and analysis of the senses—movement in Japanese dance and Brazilian capoeira, the sense of balance in Ghana, the synesthetic experience of baskets and “acoustemologies” in the Amazon, and the smell and taste of environmental hazards in Canada, to name just a few.14
When it comes to studying the senses in relation to our human, cultural experience of food and eating, a number of recent approaches have been suggestive. There is a developing sense among anthropologists and other scholars of food that the study of taste, far from being peripheral to our understanding of culture, can in fact provide a new way of organizing our research into social life. I suggest the term gustemology, a gustemic way of knowing, living, and interacting, to capture this idea, drawing on Stephen Feld’s coinage of the term acoustemology to make a similar point about sonic approaches to the world (2003). What I mean by gustemology goes beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s more metaphoric use of “taste” (1984) to talk about social distinction, drawing inspiration rather from Sidney Mintz’s use of sweetness to understand social life and the transformations that led to the notion of the “modern” individual consumer (1985), and Judith Farquhar’s focus on bitterness as a key to understanding changing experiences in pre- and post-Maoist China (2002).15 In both of these cases, it is because sweetness and bitterness are placed in a context in which taste matters deeply to people’s daily lives and identities, and because these sensory experiences become part of the person through consumption, that taste can take on much broader and potentially more metaphoric applications. In a gustemological approach, taste takes on the quality of a total social fact, tied to multiple domains of social life.
But a gustemological approach should certainly not be limited to taste, and should recognize that “taste” is only one of the sensory aspects of flavor, which needs to include most obviously smell, texture, and temperature, but also sight and sound (“hear the smell,” as Nomiki put it). Such parsing does not capture the fluidity and interconnectivity of these experiences, which even Proust tried to limit to “taste and smell” in his famous Madeleine reverie. A gustemological approach would both recognize the potential for far more tastes than the standard four (or now five, with the latecomer umami), and recognize that our experience of food (like all of life) is always inherently synesthetic.
If, as noted above, the senses are seen to bridge the internal and the external, they are deployed in relation to a social and material environment. As Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips put it, “The forms that things are felt to take, the general sense of what it is possible to do with things, and the ways of being-in-the-world, derive from sensory interaction with the world” (2006, 5). In thinking about what it is possible to do with things in the sensorily rich Kalymnian kitchen, I have found it helpful to draw from notions of situated action and skill developed by anthropologists Jean Lave and Tim Ingold, among others. Both take us closer to understanding the mechanics of everyday practice through exploring the emergent qualities of action.
For Ingold, for example, skilled practice involves not the mind telling the body what to do according to a preconceived plan, but rather a mobilization of the mind/body within an environment of things that “afford” different possibilities for human use. This is a departure from traditional learning research in which, as Lave notes, “learning researchers have studied learning is if it were a process contained in the mind of the learner . . . ignor[ing] the lived-in world” (1996, 7). Skill, for Ingold, involves much more than the application of a sort of mechanical force to objects (what he sees as the model of technology); rather, it is an extension of the mind/body, often through the use of tools, requiring constant and shifting use of judgment and dexterity within a changing environment. The environment is not objectified as a “problem” that humans must “adapt” to; instead, it itself is part of the total field of activity, as in his example of a woodsman who, in chopping wood, consults the world with his senses for guidance, not a picture in his head. “The world is its own best model” (Ingold 2000, 12; see also Lave 1988). It is through such skilled practices, then, that forms are generated, rather than through the execution of a mental plan, though mental plans may provide guideposts for practices; in other words, they can allow you to assess your work at various moments.16 This approach has implications for the transmission of skill as well, which once again is not a set of rules to be memorized. Skill must be learned through the sensuous and sensory engagement of a novice with the environment or with a skilled practitioner. This learning, as Lave argues, is part of all ongoing activity: “Situated activity always involves changes in knowledge and action . . . and ‘changes in knowledge and action’ are central to what we mean by ‘learning’” (1996, 5).
Learning has tended to be referred to in classical anthropology as “enculturation,” based on the “blank slate” notion of precultural children with minds waiting to be filled with cultural stuff—categories, ideas, and so on. Ingold suggests that we reframe this learning as an “education of attention,” or, as he puts it, speaking of his father, “His manner of teaching was to show me things, literally to point them out. If I would but notice the things to which he directed my attention, and recognize the sights, smells and tastes that he wanted me to experience . . . then I would discover for myself much of what he already knew” (2000, 20). Learning from others involves copying, but rather than a transcription of knowledge from one head to another, it is a “guided rediscovery” (2000, 11) in a sensorily rich environment. It also involves people in sociality, as learning a skill often involves, as Rebecca Bryant puts it, “Learning to be the type of person who can do X” (Bryant 2005, 224). Harry West shows the co-presence involved in developing into the kind of person who becomes a cheese maker, in describing the children of cheese makers: “Each of them came of age in a world where dairying and cheese making were taken-for-granted facts of life. Each spent time in the stable and in the cheese room long before they sought to learn, and long before others sought to teach them. By the time they might have started learning, they seemingly already knew. They rarely ever asked how to do something and rarely were they explicitly told” (West 2013, 330; see also Grasseni 2009).
One can see here why a view of skilled practice might be compatible with an anthropology of materiality attuned to the senses. Like other recent scholars of material culture, Ingold does not view objects or the environment as passive ciphers to which humans simply add symbolic meaning (see also Myers 2001; Miller 2005). Rather, objects—because of their sensual properties—afford certain possibilities for human use; the semiotic and the material constantly cross-cut and convert into each other. Hiking boots, for example, by their material nature “afford” certain possibilities in relation to nature by “expanding the range of possible actions available to the body” (Michael 2000, 112). This in no way limits the meaning or uses of hiking boots, but it forces us, as analysts, to engage with the everyday problems that boots, or other material objects, are meant to engage with.
For a long time cooking seemed to be interesting only to anthropologists of the universally human. Thus, Claude Lévi-Strauss famously saw cooking as the key practice indicating the human transition from “nature” to “culture.” Lévi-Strauss also suggested the importance of human-technology relations in this view of cooking: the more technology involved (boiling in a pot versus roasting directly on a fire, for example), the more “cultural.” More recently, biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham updated and broadened Lévi-Strauss’s claim for the centrality of cooking in his much-discussed Catching Fire (2010). Wrangham’s argument boils down to cooking being the central motor of human evolution since its discovery, which he dates to approximately 1.8 million years ago.17 It was the discovery of cooking, not warfare or some other social process, not even meat eating, that drove the changes from Habilines (Homo habilis) to Homo erectus; and it was improvements in cooking that led to more recent evolutionary changes. This is because the energy unlocked in cooked food and the time saved in digestion freed up human creative capacity for brain growth and, eventually, complex social relations. His arguments seem impressive, but when it comes to speculating on the implications of cooking for human social structure, Wrangham is on shakier grounds in claiming that the supposed universal division of labor in which men hunt and women cook was a necessary adaptation, which he describes as a “primitive protection racket” in which “having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered foods will not be taken by others; having a wife ensures the man will have an evening meal” (2010, 154). While I will be considering the implications of cooking for gender relations on Kalymnos in what follows, I part company with Wrangham’s deterministic views of the implications of evolution on social structure to which his speculations (and indeed, they are speculations, as no evidence of social structure of Homo erectus is available) lead him.
Jack Goody, by contrast, focuses on social processes that have structured cooking over the past several millennia in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In his Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Goody makes an argument for the importance of key structural factors in shaping cooking, factors to which he has given attention in his many other works on the development of various societies. These factors include environmental and technological ones, such as the role of writing and cookbooks, hoe versus plow agriculture, and the preservation processes that allowed for the development of the food industry in the late nineteenth century. They also include the importance of class difference in allowing for the development of elite cuisines that were significantly different in quality rather than just in quantity, and indeed reflected other divisions of society conceptually and socially into “the high and the low” (Goody 1982, 97).
One would be wrong to claim that cooking has been ignored by anthropologists, and indeed if we broaden our terms from cooking to food in general, no one doubts that the study of food goes back to the very beginnings of the discipline.18 However, despite the central place that scholars give to cooking in the story of what it means to be human, it’s clear that for a long time the process of cooking simply did not pose any interesting ethnographic questions to the majority of anthropologists, and one can find no ethnographies with cooking as their central subject in the anthropological literature up to the turn of the twenty-first century. In part this could no doubt be laid at the feet of the tendency of male ethnographers simply to ignore activities associated with women. Western feminism’s ambivalence about cooking—seen as simply another domestic chore like cleaning the bathroom, a source of oppression—meant that the rise of feminist anthropology in the mid-1970s didn’t lead to any noticeable growth in studies of cooking. Indeed, pioneer feminist anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, in claiming that “the wives of herders, agriculturalists and businessmen lead lives that are conceptualized in remarkably similar terms” (Rosaldo 1974, 29 n. 8), seemed to imply that “domestic” activities were relatively uninteresting anthropologically speaking, and it was only when women stepped into the so-called “public sphere” that they became involved in socially valued activities of “articulat[ing] and express[ing] social differences” (29).19
As feminists in anthropology and other fields began challenging the distinction between public and private, showing repeatedly how it does not capture the fluidity of people’s lives, kitchen activities became a subject worthy of scrutiny. The key question that emerged was, Is cooking a source of women’s oppression or empowerment? The answers were diverse depending on context, circumstance, and approach. In some cases cooking was an activity that brought women together and allowed them to extend their social networks and gain influence far beyond the immediate family; while in others cooking, even when it traveled beyond the home, was part of women’s isolation from generally valued social goods, a chore and a task that men and other cultural agents could demand of women, and judge their failure to comply.20 More recently, various scholars have shown the ways that cooking can be simultaneously oppressive and a “recipe for agency” (Counihan 2010, 128; see also Meah 2013). A number of scholars have avoided an either-or approach and begun to explore the potential of the kitchen as women’s space for social commentary and for the transmission of personal and family histories.21 Feminist social historians have drawn our attention to the ways cooking has become part of public discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to the gender, class, and race assumptions deeply embedded in many of the ways that cooking has been publicly framed in the United States in cookbooks and other popular media. These social historians have also pointed to the ways that cooking has been used, contradictorily, by women such as Fannie Farmer and Julia Child who were making claims to public authority and value.22
What I take from this previous scholarship is the need to pay attention to the contexts in which cooking occurs, both in the sense of the social relationships (gendered, generational) that surround cooking, and in the sense of the larger context of cultural values and public and media discourses that frame cooking choices and ideas about what makes for “proper food” and “good food.” In any particular setting there may be competing values such as “healthy food,” “fresh food,” “tasty food,” “convenient food,” “traditional food,” and “modern food,” and how these different, often contradictory values play out in people’s practices is a complex process for ethnographic exploration.23 Finally, cooking may be about power, but it is not only about power between men and women; it also plays out among women (and among men) in intergenerational, neighborly, friendship, and other relations. And cooking is clearly not only about power, but expresses many different, culturally defined values including love, solidarity, control, creativity, joy, disdain, and friendly competition.24 While my earlier work on Kalymnos tended to see women’s intrafamily relationships as largely ones of solidarity, as mothers and daughters often cooperated against “outsider” husbands, exploring cooking has led me to a more complex view of female relationships and their multiple, shifting aspects.
Recently, studies have begun to explore the kitchen itself as a space of cultural contestation, and of processes of identity and memory formation—“kitchenspace” as Christie (2006, 2008) dubs it—while recognizing that this space may extend beyond the boundaries of the kitchen proper to “the indoor and outdoor spaces of food preparation” (Christie 2006, 654). Some cognitive scientists have looked at the workings of different sorts of semantic, biographical, and habit memory in the kitchen,25 while cultural studies scholars have explored some of the ways that the design of technology and the material form of kitchen objects can shape their meanings and usages, as well as the memories associated with these objects. For example, Louise Purbrick’s study of preservation practices associated with the objects used in cooking and serving food shows how considerations of materiality can open up onto wider social histories. She suggests this in exploring the introduction of Pyrex into British postwar homes. Through its ability to move between the kitchen and the dining room, to be used for cooking and for serving, Pyrex was integral in people’s experience of a “servantless” home, in which women were supposed to experience labor as a kind of leisure, part of “a new propriety; it was a material expression of twentieth century ideologies of the good home that modernized, rationalized and to a certain extent a [sic] democratized without entirely abandoning, the past ideals of domesticity” (2007, 74).26
In my own cooking research in southern Illinois I worked with my student Michael Hernandez to explore how kitchen tools can become biographical objects that people use to tell their stories of their lives. We looked at the ways that objects like steel knives and cast-iron pans, because they both endure and change with time, seem to be apt vehicles for people to chart their own changing relationship with cooking and the larger social worlds that cooking indexed. We treated these objects as fetishes, in the positive sense of fetishism as a recognition of the “spirit in things” or the mixing of human and nonhuman intentionalities. We also began to think about cooking tools as ways of extending the human body into the world, and how the body itself becomes a tool in cooking, themes that I develop further in the present work.27
Recently, a number of scholars have made cooking the focus of book-length ethnographies. Jean-Claude Kaufmann (2010), for example, shows how questions of choice versus tradition are mediated through people’s cooking practices in France, while Frances Short (2006) makes the case for a much wider definition of cooking to reflect the ways that people balance and negotiate multiple household demands in the process of providing family sustenance in Britain. Meredith Abarca describes how Mexican women employ “twists” in “making their distinctive meals original to them at the time of their invention” (2004, 10; see also Fertaly 2012). Abarca (2006) and Joy Adapon (2008) both use the concept of sazόn to look at the cultural value given to the sense of taste in Mexico, and how in producing taste women can project their agency onto the wider world, even when marginalized economically, socially, or otherwise.
I have drawn on all these approaches in thinking about my own project. I believe that my innovation on these previous approaches is in focusing methodologically not only on the rich materials available from interview methods, but in adding to this the insights gleaned through long hours spent observing in Kalymnian kitchens, which allow me to analyze more directly the practices that others have relied on informant description to examine.28 The point of observation, of course, is not that it is more objective than what people say, nor certainly is it to judge people’s cooking against some explicit or implicit external standard (or even a self-imposed external standard), but to be able to gain a sense of how Kalymnians’ diverse goals and values are reflected in and modified by their practices, their skilled use of tools and technology, their relation to previous iterations of any particular dish (written, passed down orally, seen on TV), and their relation to their kitchen as a space or an environment for cooking. This brings me to questions of methodology.
Recent food scholarship has drawn on notions such as “food-centered life history,” or more generally “food voice,” which express experiences and viewpoints of women and others who tend to not leave traces in official discourses and records.29 I have drawn on these notions, but my approach is both more general and more specific. More generally, cooking is integrated into daily life in diffuse and often surprising ways as Kalymnian women balance the myriad daily demands of family life and the many, often unexpected, exigencies and opportunities that arise. A discussion of cooking suddenly morphs into memories of World War II, a critique of politicians, a comparison or contrast with “the Turks,” or an exegesis of religious themes. In light of my longstanding research on Kalymnos, I have tried to follow these conversations where they lead at times, in order to give a sense of the wider embedding of cooking in various aspects of Kalymnian social life rather than focus only on individual “life histories” through food. However, I have been interested in particular in intrafamily dynamics, and how cooking shapes not only relations among grandmothers, mothers, daughters, husbands, sons, and so on, but also how different life transitions are experienced through cooking: a daughter getting married and leaving the island, a mother dying, a young girl maturing while staying home or going off to college, men giving up migration patterns to “settle” on Kalymnos. Cooking practices can illuminate our understanding of these intrafamily dynamics and life stages.
Researchers interested in the anthropology of skill and the senses have pointed to the importance of digital video for capturing “the significance of repetitive but skilled action, and of . . . embodied technical knowledge.”30 No doubt video has its own particular implications that one has to be aware of. Katerina Miha, a teenager, always talked about my cooking videos in terms of the TV cooking shows she was familiar with, and the first time we made a video of her cooking, she tried to mimic the style of the leading Greek cooking show host, Vefa Alexiadou. The first time I turned on the camera, Nina—a middle-aged Kalymnian American woman—told me explicitly, “I don’t want to talk into this thing.” But my request to pretend it wasn’t there seemed to mollify her, so that she never hesitated afterward. She did like to reflect in amazement on the idea that her kitchen had been seen “at Harvard” when I presented my research to a seminar there. Polykseni, a schoolteacher, used the video to give a formal statement about her respect for the research I have done on Kalymnos before getting down to the business of cooking. Rinyo, a middle-aged office worker, simply said she didn’t want to be filmed, but would discuss her cooking practices while I used a voice recorder. By and large, however, I found that my subjects seemed to settle quickly into their routines as if the camera were not there, perhaps a reflection of how ubiquitous video cameras have become on Kalymnos.
I was grateful that some Kalymnians allowed me to film intimate scenes, such as some women cooking in their nightgowns. This reflected the fact, as well, that almost all of my subjects were Kalymnians whom I have known over a period of twenty years or more. I was not a stranger invading their homes with my camera, but a known presence among the families with whom I worked. Nevertheless, I remain conscious of the trust that my subjects have placed in me in allowing me such intimate access to their private domestic spaces, a trust I didn’t want to betray by displaying scenes of family conflict for any casual YouTube viewer. At the same time, Kalymnians take considerable pleasure in the thought that their opinions will be transmitted to a wider world beyond the island, a reflection of notions of locality and globality and ideas about the role of hospitality in “bringing the world to our table” that I have analyzed in my previous work.31
Jean Lave, reflecting on her long ethnographic engagement with questions of learning among Liberian tailors, writes that contrary to the notion that there is an identifiable relation between masters and apprentices, those who know and those who don’t know, in fact “we are all apprentices, engaged in learning to do what we are already doing. . . . Further, learning to act on the basis of any craft, and for that matter, any problematic, requires practice to come to inhabit the practice and its conception of the world” (2011, 156). In approaching cooking as a deeply valued skill for Kalymnians, and as an ethnographic subject for myself, I am trying in this book to reflect a sense of daily practice that is always fluid, fraught with challenges that are culturally embedded in particular social, technical, aesthetic, and sensory worlds. Developing skill in the kitchen is a project without an end point, just as developing ethnographic understanding is a project that can yield only temporary satisfactions, ongoing questions, and new challenges. Through the various approaches I take in this book I am trying to capture this sense of cooking as a skilled practice, and examine what that might mean for its role and significance in Kalymnian lives. However, capture itself is the wrong word, for how to write about cooking skill without objectifying it into the very types of static and solid knowledge associated with formal education and capital C Culture? How does one trace relations of memory, identity, and the present without falling into sterile dichotomies—“Cooking is dead,” “No, it’s just changing”—of “tradition” and “modernity,” the “global” and the “local”?
In the chapters that follow I alternate between general considerations of topics—the kitchen as an environment for practice, recipes and cooking shows, the politics of cooking knowledge or skill and its transmission—and sections focused on the specific stories of Kalymnian families, as seen through their daily cooking and its transformation over time as family members change roles, gain or lose knowledge, and view their cooking practice in different lights. These sections are not meant to alternate between general analysis and particular stories, or to reproduce invidious distinctions between the “analytical” and the “evocative.” Rather, sections based on more general considerations are meant to provide contexts and comparisons, while individual stories will give a sense of the ways that Kalymnians live this shared background, and of some of ways that cooking practices transform through time. These may take the form of minor alterations—a new ingredient or technique added to an old recipe—or major breaks: a new outdoor oven or a death in the family. I think that both these minor and major transformations (as well as the repetitions that accompany them) are important in trying to get at a sense of the flow of people’s everyday lives.
In the end, cooking is important because it is clearly tied up with cultural reproduction. Cooking is a process that involves knowledges: explicit verbal knowledges of recipes and ingredients as well as embodied knowledges of techniques and “tricks.” Does cooking knowledge simply “pass from mother to daughter,” a phrase that rolls off the tongue of many of my informants? Or is it filled with breaks, gaps, inventions, rediscoveries, and renewals, just like the secret male ritual knowledge much studied by anthropologists? How Kalymnians manage to produce what is recognizable to them as Kalymnian food while still incorporating all kinds of new tools, techniques, and ingredients is at the very heart of understanding the role of identity, memory, and embodied knowledge in the process of cultural transmission and transformation.