A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory

September 28, 2008

By Sutton, David



Social or collective memory, of course, emerges from the work of Halbwachs, who argues that memory is only able to endure in sustaining social contexts (see Narvaez, 2006: 61). Connerton begins his book How Societies Remember (1989) with the claim “We generally think of memory as an individual faculty.” Connerton, however, sees social memory as having a crucial normative role in creating social orders and identities. As he puts it: “It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” This is because, according to Connerton, divergent pasts would lead to the creation of divergent presents: “our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order” (1989: 3). One might be tempted to criticize Connerton here for a lingering functionalism, even if cloaked in the language of identity and power. In fact, Connerton, drawing from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance ofHiings Post, gives examples of the divergence of memories between generations of “the same” social group, which may, as he suggests, lead to miscommunication, but hardly to imminent social breakdown. It would seem to be an empirical question how shared any particular social memory is or needs to be.

Most societies seem to tolerate a huge divergence of memories of all kinds: from episodic memories (Watergate, Vietnam), to bodily/ habit memories (ability to play the piano; memories associated with first taste of sushi) to even the memories that make up the social categories that some argue are the very basis of “culture” (some Hawaiians categorized Captain Cook as a god, others a chief, others a plundering rogue). I raise this point not to criticize Connerton, but to suggest that memories can be deeply social in the sense of being shaped by our interactions with the humans, objects, and institutions that make up society, without necessarily needing to be widely shared. IMs is, indeed, what Proust showed us, in describing deeply personal, embodied memories such as eating the Madeleine cookie dipped in tea, or tripping over a paving stone-memories that were significant to Proust because they allowed him to reconstruct the rich tapestry of social life he describes in the course of his novel. What I am suggesting is that Halbwachs is in a sense right in claiming that all memory is social (no memory is, then, asocial). But we could also say that all memory is personal: organized through individuals with their own particular trajectories through the social landscape. The same could be said for “culture,” as anthropologists have been arguing for some time now (for example, Garro, 2006; Rosaldo, 1989; Toren, 1999). This also suggests a revisiting of Pierre Nora’s well-known discussion of milieux de memoire (environments of memory) and lieux de memoire (spaces of memory In some ways the notion that food is a key “site” of memory- to a greater or lesser extent in one society or another-is apposite. Whether, however, Nora’s larger view that traditional societies have milieux de memoire, richly layered environments of memory, while “modern” societies must settle for lieux, particular spaces or sites of memory, is more of a problematic issue. As I will suggest, the lack of milieux de memoire does not necessarily preclude memories of food being deeply social.

Within food studies much recent scholarship-well represented in journals such as Food, Culture and Society and Food and Foodwoys- has shown how food is a key mediator of social relationships, a symbol of identity and a marker of difference, whether defined by gender, class, race, or ethnicity. So how to bring these two strands of work together? Different writers have suggested different schemes for dividing up memory, which often include variations on the following: episodic memory, semantic memory, and bodily/habit memory. I will be considering all these different categories in what follows. In a recent review of works on food and memory, Holtzman has usefully suggested a number of such different types of memory that this literature explores, including nostalgia and the relationship of food to identities, “real” or “invented”; food as the marker of epochal transformations-for example, from “tradition” or “the good old days” to “modernity”; food and sensuous/sensory memory; and food’s use in ritual contexts to stimulate memory (and forgetting, hi the case of some mortuary rituals). In what follows I will be looking at all of these, and adding another category, what I call “prospective memory” or the active planning in the present for future memories.

But how do these categories help us analytically, besides alerting us to possible phenomena to pay attention to in our research? As noted above, I will not be arguing that there is an overall distinction to be made between social and individual memory. Rather, and once again picking up on a suggestion by Holtzman, we might think of the power of food for memory in the fact that our relationship with food “intrinsically traverses the public and the intimate” (2006: 373). As he puts it, the ingestion of food “always has a deeply private component” at the same time that it is publicly transacted through sharing, ritual, or even shopping, musing that “One might consider … the significance of this rather unique movement between the most intimate and the most public in fostering food’s symbolic power, in general, and in relation to memory, in particular” (373). I will argue that what makes food such a powerful site for exploring memory is the very fact that, unlike, say, public monuments, in producing, exchanging and consuming food we are continuously criss-crossing between the “public” and the “intimate,” individual bodies and collective institutions.


Taste itself, like the body that does the tasting, is both individuated and deeply socially shaped. Bourdieu (1984) has trenchantly illustrated this in his analysis of class eating practices, and as is underlined in recent television commercials for Burger King offering their hamburgers as a rallying point for beleaguered male identities. Yet such class or gender identities are still actuated in individuals whose taste may diverge even while their “identities” converge, especially in contexts where children are enculturated to develop “individual” tastes and preferences (see Ochs, Pontecorvo, and Fasulo, 1996). My point with these all too brief examples is simply to stress that “social memory” is not an identifiable object, separate from some other type of memory, but rather that there are social and individual aspects to all memories, a point that will have implications for my analysis below.


The Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, a few miles off the coast of Turkey, is known as the island of sponge fishermen. In the heyday of the sponge industry, around the turn of the twentieth century, Kalymnos counted around 30,000 permanent residents. Now, with sponge fishing in deep decline, Kalymnos hovers around 12,000 people. However, unlike other islands whose economies rely solely on tourism, Kalymnos does not lose the majority of its population during the winter months. Kalymnians continue to thrive on a combination of fishing, the remnants of the sponge industry, migrant remittances, state and European Union projects, and tourism. One of the many “customs” that Kalymnians see as setting them apart from other Greeks is that of cooking Easter lambs in closed containers that are placed hi ovens instead of roasting them on spits. There are two elements here, starting with the containers themselves. In the past they were all made of clay, but increasingly people have substituted large olive oil cans or special scalable stainless steel pans for the clay containers. second, the ovens that are used: when I did fieldwork in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the majority of people took their pots to bakery shops to be cooked in the baker’s oven (a common practice for a number of dishes, particularly during the Lenten period). A small minority had their own brick ovens in their backyards which they used for preparing the lamb. I was told that in “the old days” it was only the rich or shepherds who lived on the mountainside who had their own outdoor ovens. When I returned to do fieldwork in 2006, I found that an increasing number of Kalymnians were building their own outdoor ovens-they were considered a “must” for new house constructions, and were even being added in the backyards of many older houses. As I explored this shift with many Kalymnians, I found that it involved complex negotiations of taste, nostalgia for “the old years,” ritual performances, and the exchange relations they entailed with neighbors and relatives, as well as “prospective” imaginings about what might be memorable in the future. These ovens partake, then, of all the categories of food memory mentioned above, and thus represent the ideal locus for the exploration of how these different memories are tied together and feed off each other.

In my earlier work I suggested the importance of what I called “prospective memory”-that is, people actively planning to remember meals and how tasty they would be. I suggested that in the case of Easter this was tied to the cycle of fasting and feasting, in which a lot of talk during fasting days centered on people’s longing for the Easter lamb, how good it was going to taste, even the diarrhea that would be caused by its over-consumption. This discourse is stimulated by the presence of the baby lambs themselves, which typically live in a family’s yard for a week or more, are constantly bleating, and are an object of play, and sometimes pity for younger family members before their slaughter on Easter Saturday (see Sutton, 1997). Nor are the lambs themselves bought from a butcher, but from known friends, people with whom one has established a relationship of trust to provide well-cared-for animals.



Yiorgos (responding to my question about what dishes on Kalymnos were considered “traditional”): Actually, we are losing our food traditions. No one uses the clay pots to cook lamb in for Easter anymore and this makes all the difference.




Yiorgos: Really? In aluminum? But the water will evaporate so rapidly, it won’t make a difference.




Irini: I have the clay pot, but I’m trying to preserve it because it’s very old, valuable, so I don’t use it. I have a new aluminum casserole dish that I use instead. I don’t want to break it because it’s old, ancient!

David: From your mom?

Irini: Keep going…

David: Your Grandma?

Irini: Keep going… three generations, four, or even more.







Here Eleni describes what they used to do in the “old years” (cf. Sutton, 1998), a practice repeated over many Easters, a memory in the imperfect tense. Because the parents had built the brother a house on the outskirts of town, they had enough land to include an outdoor oven in the backyard (prior to the recent rage for such ovens). Note that Eleni’s memory doesn’t actually extend back to the period of 20 years earlier, when they had to use one of the public bakeries for their Easter lamb, but to a relatively recent past since the building of the brother’s house. Like all memories, memories of food are prone to this kind of telescoping in which the idealized aspects of the past are what are best recalled. Indeed, the brother in the story had married a tourist woman from Scandinavia, and the relations this couple has with the rest of the family have often been rocky.

It is interesting that Eleni claims that everything was initially harmonious. In doing so, she draws on a discourse about the past as a time of easy sociality and generosity, of closer-knit social relations that have been lost in the present, what I have referred to elsewhere as “memories of gemeinschaft” (Sutton, 2001: 53 ff.). Eleni then shifts to a different memory register, the sensory memories of taste, to talk about why she couldn’t imagine going back to using the bakers’ ovens, exaggerating the cost, but stressing the fact that in order to celebrate Easter, you must taste the tastes that have become Easter’s familiar, recognizable signature. These kinds of embodied taste memories are, as I suggest with the discussion between Yiorgos and Mihalis above, instantly recognizable on Kalymnos, drawing as they do on community discourses that stress the intimate details of the tastes of different foods, different methods of preparing dishes, and different qualities of ingredients.



This complicated passage shows the fluidity of individual and collective memory. Eleni begins with a memory of the decision to build the oven, which she claims was made based on her insistence, motivated by her own taste memories. This leads her to recount a “prospective memory” in which she projects her family into the future, imagining it with and without the oven and the proper taste of Easter lamb. She follows with a generalizing statement about the importance of ritual observance: “the custom is only once a year . . . you have to taste it,” once again neatly tying together the social and the sensory. Finally, in switching between the second person and the third person plural, she also makes a statement that distributes the memory of different ovens among herself, her family, and the wider Kalymnian community. Note also that the building of the oven itself was not based on any do-it-yourself booklet or suggestions from a local home store. Rather, Eleni’s husband Nicholas drew on his own embodied skill, as well as the direction of his mother-in- law, Eleni’s mother, who told me that she explained to him how it should be built, its dimensions, etc., based on her recollection of her own mother-in-law’s (now defunct) oven.

These memories are embedded in a number of ways that traverse the individual and the collective. They are embedded in the stories of individuals and families, at the same time that they are about both individual and shared discourses about taste and smell; they tell the stories of families from the point of view of particular family members-Eleni feels that the taste of Easter lamb is more important, while her husband worries about the social consequences of building the oven-at the same time that they draw on collectively shared discourses about what things were like in “the old years” in order to anchor and make sense of one’s particular experience. Let us follow Eleni’s story a little further in order to examine how these memories of ovens are intimately related to social action in the present, serving as a commentary and planning out of one’s relationship to a larger community of extended family, friends, and neighbors.


In this recounting we can see Eleni’s relation to the wider community of Kalymnos spread out against a landscape of past and future Easter preparations. Once again, these individual experiences are sorted and recalled based on a more familiar island-wide discourse (or schema, to use Bartlett’s (1932) terminology) of generosity and betrayal, at the same time that the current Easter is remembered and contrasted in relation to past Easters which were seen as more innocent-even if there was fighting there was no alcohol and no expectations of providing a big party for those coming to share the oven. This once again suggests the easy sociability that is believed to characterize former times on the island, in which all kinds of social relations, including stealing from neighbors, are imagined to have been simpler and more pure than the stress and atomization of social relations in “modern times” (cf. Sutton, 1998; 2001:53-57).




But while this distinction may be useful to in contrasting a relatively face-to-face community like Kalymnos with a more anonymous society, it does not preclude the fact that food still serves as an excellent source of all of these different sorts of memory, even if we see food as a “site” rather than an environment of memory. For example, perhaps we can say that unlike Kalymnos, the United States does not have a shared “cuisine,” as Mintz argues, which would imply a shared community eating similar food “with sufficient frequency to consider themselves experts on it. They all believe, and care that they believe, that they know what it consists of, how it is made, and how it should taste” (1996: 96).1 Nevertheless, I would argue that food, even at its most commodified and disembedded from the layerings of knowledge that we see with Kalymnian Easter ovens, would still have the propensity to provoke a kind of social memory (very much in keeping with Halbwachs’ observations).2

Take, for example, an essay by novelist Jill McCorkle, with the inauspicious title “Her Chee-to Heart.” She recalls incidents from her childhood such as the following:

I was enamored of a boy named Michael in the first grade who licked Kool-Aid powder from his palm whenever the teacher wasn’t looking. He moved away before the end of the year, and yet thirty- one years later, I still remember him with a fond mixture of repulsion at the sticky red saliva that graced his notebook paper and admiration for the open ease with which he indulged his habit. I loved Pixy Stix straws, which, let’s face it, were nothing more than dry Kool-Aid mix poured right into your mouth. Sweetarts. Jawbreakers. Firecrackers. Mary Janes. An item that I was told was very bad for my teeth (McCorkle, 1998:149).





My point is not to argue there are no differences between my two examples of memories tied to food. Indeed, it might not be inaccurate to say that the Easter ovens are embedded in milieux de memoire, while American junk food (and fast food eateries perhaps as well) are lieux de memoire, some of the few common topoi of relatively general, shared food memories, but lacking the multiple, overlapping referents of my Kalymnian example. Either way, I want to suggest that both these can be analyzed to recognize individual and collective aspects. The power of these memories is that they unite very different levels of experience, whether we think of them as mind and body or sensory and social, or something else; they move seamlessly between taste and social relationships, and this wholeness allows them to stand for and powerfully evoke entire periods of time-”the good old days,”"childhood years”-and thus capture individual biographies and collective identities. To return to Holtzman’s point, it is the fact that food “intrinsically traverses the public and the ultimate” even in relatively disembedded context, that makes it such a powerful vehicle for studying memory. In other words, I am suggesting that it is at some level intrinsic to our experience with food that this should be so.



1. By this definition, we would have to consider that there are enclaves of “cuisine” within the wider U.S. society, such as New Orleans. See Beriss (2007). 2. In my earlier ethnography I tracked food memories tied to such commodities as feta cheese, which is “embedded” in Kalymnian life only as a commodity bought at the store. But given its iconic status as a “Greek” cheese, as well as recent controversies over “foreign” feta, it is equally provocative of collective memories for most Kalymnians as is locally produced cheese. See Sutton (2001:80-85) for a full discussion.




Beriss, David. “Authentic Creole: Tourism, Style and Calamity in New Orleans Restaurants.” The Restaurants Book Ethnographies ofWhere We Eat. Eds. D. Beriss and D. Sutton. Oxford: Berg, 2007.151-166.




Demossier, Marion. “Culinary Heritage and Produits de Terroir in France: Food for Thought.” Recollections of France: Memories, Identities and Heritage in Contemporary France. Eds. Sarah Blowen, Marion Demossier, and Jeanine Picard. Oxford: Berghan, 2000.

Holtzman, Jon. “Food and Memory.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 361-378.

Garro, Linda. “‘Effort after Meaning’ in Everyday Life.” A Companion to Psychological Anthropology. Ed. R. Edgerton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Golden, Charles. “Where Does Memory Reside, and Why Isn’t it History?” American Anthropologist 107:2 (June, 2005): 270-274.

Kockel, Ulrich. “Heritage versus Tradition: Cultural Resources for a New Europe?” The European Puzzle: The Political Structuring of Cultural identities at a Time of Transition. Ed. Marion Demossier. Oxford: Berghan, 2007.

McCorkle, Jill. “Her Chee-to Heart.” We Are What We Ate. Ed. Mark Winegardner. San Diego, Calif.: Harvest Original, 1998.


Narvaez, Rafael. “Embodiment, Collective Memory and Time.” Body and Society 12:3 (2006): 51-73.

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7-25.

Ochs, E., C. Pontecorvo, and A. Fasulo. “Socializing Taste.” Ethnos 6 (1996): 7-46.

Sutton, David. “The Vegetarian Anthropologist.” Anthropology Today 13 (1997): 5-8.



Sutton, David, and Michael Hernandez. “Voices in the Kitchen: Cooking Tools as Inalienable Possessions.” Oral History 35:2 (August 2007): 67-76.






Copyright New School for Social Research, Graduate Faculty Spring 2008


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