Listen to that Scent!
Travelling Tastes and Smells Among Greek Immigrants
David Sutton
Photo Courtesy of Laura L. Letinsky
I begin with an anecdote--what my mentor Jim Fernandez would call a revelatory moment, though its insights were purely retrospective. It is the memory trace--with all the unreliability there implied--of a fragment of a conversation; the time was about 1989 when I was a graduate student under Jim's tutelage, the place the quadrangle behind the Reynolds Club at the University of Chicago. I remember Jim saying that what we need in anthropology are more ethnographies of taste and of smell. I did not really take in the significance of what Jim was saying, coming as it was several years before such concepts as "the anthropology of the senses," so popular today. But more than the phrase, I remember the kinesthetics of Jim touching his index finger to his nose and his lips as he said this. It reminded me of what my father had once said in instructing me in the arts of cooking under the guise of my "helping him get dinner going," a repeated scenario during my teenage years. He recounted to me in Talmudic fashion how he had once heard a noted chef asking his student what was his most important cooking implement. After due consideration, the student replied, "the whisk." The chef shook his head, and eyes twinkling, said it was first, the nose, and then the tongue.
What follows is an effort to make good those two apprenticeships, to bring together food, the senses, and memory in ethnographically productive ways. I argue in particular that Jim's concepts of "revitalization" and the "return to the whole," are useful in analyzing experiences of displacement in our transnational world, and, more specifically, the synesthetic experiences of food in the lives of migrant Greeks.
Travelling Smells
The reference to basil by Greek folklorist 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 windowsill, he told her with evident longing "It really smells like Greece!" She noted that the ubiquitous leavening used for making bread contains and smells strongly of basil. That this is not an uncommon experience is further confirmed by Helen Zeese Papanikolas, in her account of Greek immigrants in the American West in the early years of the twentieth century. Papanikolas writes, "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" (Papanikolas 156).
That food--the tastes and smells of homeland--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, less attention is given to the implications for identity of the food that migrants might bring with them, or have sent from home. Yet the recent increase in transnational migration has suggested 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 Greek experiences of displacement, fragmentation, and the reconstruction of wholeness.
In using the concept of wholeness I am drawing on James Fernandez's ongoing work 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" ("Bwiti" 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" ("Bwiti" 9). 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, all those who in the midst of change are looking for firm ground under their feet.
How is this "return to the whole" achieved? Fernandez describes the whole as a "state of relatedness--a kind of conviviality in experience" ("Persuasions" 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 of 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" (Fernandez, "Persuasions" 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 [repetition], a universe of domains, an acceptable cosmology of participation, a compelling whole" (Fernandez, "Persuasions" 203). While Fernandez focuses on elaborated ritual revitalizations, he also suggests more mundane venues for such processes. For instance, even teaching introductory anthropology is an attempt at revitalization through taking the students' too individuated awareness and, in some sense, returning them to the whole of human experience.
Fernandez' final image is one of "returning to the depths" ("Persuasions" 211), an auspicious one for understanding the experience of Greeks from the island of Kalymnos, where I conducted my fieldwork. Kalymnos is an island in the Eastern Aegean which, until quite recently, 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 schoolteacher 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.
The experience of absence from one's home is culturally elaborated in Greece under the concept xenitia. Xenitia, or exile, has a long history of commentary in Greek oral tradition. In the context of heroic poetry, for example, xenitia means absence from the physical comforts of home. "The woman," writes Nancy Sultan, "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" (48). More generally in the modern Greek context xenitia is described as a condition of estrangement, absence, death, of loss of social relatedness, or loss of an ethic of care seen to characterize relations at home. It provokes a longing for home that is seen as a physical and spiritual pain, as George 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 105). Here the sensual landscape of Florida serves as a painful reminder of the home they have left. 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 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... (Sederocanellis 230)
Here it is agricultural soil (though elsewhere in the poem he speaks of "blood imbued" nationalist soil) which acts as a link to home. But food itself is more commonly sent to migrants, whether they have left a home village for a sponge diving expedition, for Athens, or for Europe, the U.S., or Australia. Such packages of food sent abroad are given the local word "pestellomata." According to Kalymnian folklorist Themelina Kapella, "pestellomata are a piece of homeland, carrying (kleinoun mesa tous) inside them its sun, its sea, its wonderful smells" (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." As she notes, "in order to appreciate a pestelloma [pestelloma is singular and pestellomata is plural] you need to have lived in a place (topos) and to love it" (Kapella 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 (mizithra), locally grown tangerines, and a variety of homemade sweets. Those sent farther abroad can include Kalymnian oregano, thyme, mountain tea, locally produced honey, figs, almonds, hard cheese, and dried dark bread rings (kouloures), 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 salted bivalve called spinalio, as his kaimo, (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 of the bivalve and become sick. Another story that a man told me concerned his son's time spent in the merchant marine, 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 [pharmacist's] shop to sooth his desire for the taste and smell of it. At the time olive oil was not generally available for cooking in England. That this tiny vial would be satisfying seems surprising, but it relates to a local belief 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); failure to satisfy the desire might cause men's testicles to swell (na bouzefthouv) or pregnant women to lose their babies.
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 sweet called foinikia, which when I asked if it was Kalymnian, she replied: "No it's Greek, but there are variations, whether you use oil or butter, almonds, and in any case it reminds her of Kalymnos." In speaking with Greek students studying at Oxford, 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 such as tsoureki and ftazimo, 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 explained 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, so her father used a stick to knock them off the tree. Furthermore, you must knock the olives off in a certain direction; otherwise they 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 contrasted the eggs sent from her father's farm with, what she characterized as, "plastic" eggs in England. Where the latter had a particularly unpleasant smell (mirizoun avgoulila), the eggs from Greece had a deep orange color to the yolks and an intense flavor. The second category had an obvious connection to Greek traditions, as well as to family, usually mothers, who had baked some of these items.
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 and cooking many Greek dishes. If this makes packages of food from home somewhat less special, the contact through food remains. Elisabeth Papazoglou, 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." A Greek student of mine from Thessaloniki, Leonidas Vournelis, provides an even more striking example: his mother Georgia, in the course of their weekly conversation, told him that she had eaten a beet salad. Surprised, he said, "But, mama, you hate beet salad!" "Yes," she replied, "but you love it, and so I ate it and thought of you."
The third category of sending mass produced Greek products was less common in the late 1990s. One man noted that 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 Theodosopoulos, an anthropologist at St. Peter's College at Oxford, 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," he said, laughing.
Eating the Past
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 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 36).
The woman notes that she used the honey to make doughnuts (loukoumadhes) and her "insides were soothed" (ivarsamothika ta mesa, lit. they were embalmed). She contrasts this feeling to her experience of work in Germany with a few descriptive images: "we've made money, but we've moldered (iraxliasame) in the factories. We don't see outside and we're dying of cold...Thank you for the pestelloma" (Kapella 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. This sense of emotional and bodily plenitude is echoed in the following passage from Papanikolas, 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 (217).
Once again, the terrible emotional overload of xenitia--exile in a foreign land--is temporarily relieved in the experience which demands and receives immediate satisfaction.
And once again it is through the reconnection with a neglected aspect of life that it becomes revitalized. Implicitly the revitalization of one domain brings others with it, a point made by recent theorists of refugee displacement. For example, Carolyn Nordstrom describes the everyday and ritual practices of resistance to the destruction wrought on people's lives by war in Mozambique. Nordstrom 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" (147). As Fernandez describes, integrity is restored through a remembered coherence. 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, as described by Papanikolas, for migrant Greeks, and once again 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 (167).
Of course the role of food in everyday acts of revitalization was famously elaborated by novelist Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, in his description of eating the tea biscuit known as a madelaine. What is interesting to note is that Proust also very clearly invokes synecdoche, this same sense of the part which holds the key to re-vivifying a whole structure of associations:
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 (58, italics added).
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, 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.
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 knowledge that others are eating the same food. This is not to deny that real communities are created as well: Dimitris Theodosopoulos 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. Food, then, is one of the mundane reminders that keep national identity near the surface of daily life so that people do not forget their nationality, a particular threat to migrants facing pressures toward assimilation into a host country.
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 only needs 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." Another interesting example was provoked in March of 1999 on the Modern Greek Studies Association Electronic Bulletin Board by an article in a college newspaper by an American student complaining about the anti-American politics of her Greek roommate, whom she refers to by the pseudonym "Feta." Here a smelly cheese comes to stand for an entire national identity as well, but in the negative context of ethnic slurs, rather than the positive one of ethnic identifications.
So does food represent Greece or simply one's own village or family? The word "homeland" (patridha) is, in fact, ambiguous in Greek, and can be used to refer to both local and national homes, one's village or one's country. The power of scent 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 experiences are not always congruent. A Greek couple living in England recount, half-jokingly, their fights over bean soup (fassoladha), which the woman believes is properly made with tomatoes (kokkini), 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 fassoladha, and don't call it Greek!" The man noted that they no longer made fassoladha, and that 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 stand for national identity. And although local divergences in cooking, dress, and custom are part of life within Greece as well, 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. So, given this, perhaps those Americans traveling in foreign lands who find themselves reaching for the occasional hamburger shouldn't feel so guilty. They are simply following the injunction that I heard repeated often on Kalymnos: faei, yia na thimasai, "eat, in order to remember!"
Works Cited
--Dragoumis, Ion. Greek Civilization. Athens, 1914.
--Fernandez, James. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982.
--Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes In Culture. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.
--Frantzis, George. Strangers in Ithaca: The Story of the Spongers of Tarpon Springs. St. Petersburg, FL: Great Outdoors Publishing, 1962.
--Kahn, Miriam. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the Expression of Gender in a Melanasian Society. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994.
--Kapella, Themelina. Kalymnian Echoes. Athens, 1981.
--Nordstrom, Carolyn. "War on the Fronts Lines."
--Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival. Eds. Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius Robben. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
--Papanikolas, Helen Zeese. Amalia-Yeiorgos. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1987.
--Proust, Marcel. Remeberance of Things Past. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Penguin, 1957.
--Sederocanellis, Anne. Spanning a Century: A Greek-American Odyssey. New York: Vantage Press, 1995.
--Sultan, Nancy. Exile and the Poetics of Loss in the Greek Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
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