Secrets from the Greek Kitchen by Sutton David E

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen by Sutton David E

Author:Sutton, David E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520280540
Publisher: University of California Press


CONCLUSION

Let me return to the two claims often made on Kalymnos, that cooking passes seamlessly from mothers to daughters, and that the younger generation doesn’t cook anymore. Both of these are idealized claims meant to comment on proper or improper social relations, but not, I think, to refer to actual, specific circumstances. The same person who might claim that “the younger generation doesn’t cook anymore” will at the same time recognize many individual differences, making this blanket claim less descriptive and more a part of the general Kalymnian discourse on the felt benefits and downsides of so-called modernity (see Sutton 2008). As for cooking being passed from mother to daughter, my different examples have been meant to show that the relationships surrounding cooking and the knowledge encompassed by “cooking” are both highly variable.24 In the different examples in this chapter we have seen cooking “passed on” in different ways, from specific verbal instruction to demonstration of bodily techniques. And I have attempted to illustrate a multiplicity of different mother-daughter relations—from cooperative to semihostile—to suggest the many different social relations that may encourage or discourage the transmission or, perhaps better, the reproduction and remaking of cooking knowledge (cf. Marchand 2010). While certain aspects of cooking are explicit and open to discussion, negotiation, and debate (as we saw with Little Katerina), certain techniques may, in Bourdieu’s phrase, “go without saying because they come without saying” (1977, 167). In the former category would be all kinds of taste knowledge that circulates on Kalymnos about little “tricks” that make a particular dish tasty, as well as debates over whether to peel tomatoes or leave the skin on, to cut them or to grate them. Older women may have a greater amount of such knowledge, and there are opportunities for control of knowledge here and special tricks that make for one’s community reputation, such as how to prepare bitter onions (veryious, see chapter 3) properly. As anthropologists who have studied secrecy have long noted, the power of secrecy lies in the impression that there are always more secrets or “tricks” to be revealed or, as Lamont Lindstrom puts it, “Conversational power depends simultaneously on a person’s ability both to keep and to tell his [sic] secrets” (1990, 113; see also Barth 1987). But this kind of circulating knowledge can only be realized in practice, so there is a sense as well that discursive knowledge about cooking is cheap and readily moves throughout the community, among men and women, young and old, as part of daily food-related conversations. Even embodied techniques are subject to considerable verbal commentary, as the contributors to Marchand 2010 have shown at length. But at the same time, verbal commentary is very much an “education of attention” (Ingold 2000) and only makes sense in relation to the sensory training that is part of Kalymnian daily life. In the various instances of teaching Little Katerina, we see her mother and grandmother encouraging her to understand how one must negotiate the constant variations presented



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.