Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island (California Studies in Food and Culture, 52, Band 52) - Softcover

Sutton, David E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520280555 ISBN 13: 9780520280557

Verlag: University of California Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen explores how cooking skills, practices, and knowledge on the island of Kalymnos are reinforced or transformed by contemporary events. Based on more than twenty years of research and the author's videos of everyday cooking techniques, this rich ethnography treats the kitchen as an environment in which people pursue tasks, display expertise, and confront culturally defined risks.

Kalymnian islanders, both women and men, use food as a way of evoking personal and collective memory, creating an elaborate discourse on ingredients, tastes, and recipes. Author David E. Sutton focuses on micropractices in the kitchen, such as the cutting of onions, the use of a can opener, and the rolling of phyllo dough, along with cultural changes, such as the rise of televised cooking shows, to reveal new perspectives on the anthropology of everyday living.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David E. Sutton is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University. He is the author of Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life and the coauthor of Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies.

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“This is a beautifully written book that transports you into the heart of ordinary, everyday Greek life. David Sutton’s method is innovative and his writing lucid. He draws readers into an intimate ethnographic adventure—an embodied and sensorial cultural immersion—in which they have the sense of inquiring and learning alongside him.”—Laurie Kain Hart, Stinnes Professor of Global Studies and Professor of Anthropology, Haverford College

“Secrets from the Greek Kitchen is yet another fine example of Sutton’s ability to draw our attention to details that matter through insightful ethnography and engaging writing. He brings his informants’ stories to life and unravels the magic behind a world that otherwise might be thought of as familiar, everyday, and insignificant. Once you have read this book you will never again consider cooking as trivial and mundane.”—Eleana Yalouri, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

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This is a beautifully written book that transports you into the heart of ordinary, everyday Greek life. David Sutton s method is innovative and his writing lucid. He draws readers into an intimate ethnographic adventure an embodied and sensorial cultural immersion in which they have the sense of inquiring and learning alongside him. Laurie Kain Hart, Stinnes Professor of Global Studies and Professor of Anthropology, Haverford College

Secrets from the Greek Kitchen is yet another fine example of Sutton s ability to draw our attention to details that matter through insightful ethnography and engaging writing. He brings his informants stories to life and unravels the magic behind a world that otherwise might be thought of as familiar, everyday, and insignificant. Once you have read this book you will never again consider cooking as trivial and mundane. Eleana Yalouri, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences

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Secrets from the Greek Kitchen

Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island

By David E. Sutton

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28055-7

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
List of Video Examples, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Why Does Greek Food Taste So Good?, 
1. Emplacing Cooking, 
2. Tools and Their Users, 
3. Nina and Irini: Passing the Torch?, 
4. Mothers, Daughters, and Others: Learning, Transmission, Negotiation, 
5. Horizontal Transmission: Cooking Shows, Friends, and Other Sources of Knowledge, 
6. Through the Kitchen Window, 
Conclusion: So, What Is Cooking?, 
Epilogue: Cooking (and Eating) in Times of Financial Crisis, 
Notes, 
References, 
Author Index, 
Keyword Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Emplacing Cooking

This chapter provides a short background sketch of life on Kalymnos in order to set the stage for my subsequent explorations of cooking. I develop ideas about food provisioning through some of my more recent ethnographic explorations of shopping and gifting on Kalymnos, and also briefly describe some aspects of Kalymnian marriage and family life relevant to thinking about cooking. Finally, I take a look at some of the key values that frame Kalymnian cooking discourses and practices.

Kalymnos has always been known for its barrenness, which, while not inimical to agriculture entirely, made agriculture secondary to sources of livelihood from the sea. While the days of the Kalymnian sponge trade, having been in decline since the 1970s, are now almost completely a memory (a "bitter" one at that [Warn 2000]), various sorts of fishing and especially the merchant marine continue to be options for those Kalymnians (men, almost exclusively) called by the sea. During my research in the 1990s, tourism was a much smaller part of the economy than it was on many of the neighboring Dodecanese islands, yet a number of factors have increased the visibility of tourism on Kalymnos during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The completion of an airport on the island means that it no longer requires a fourteen-hour boat ride from Athens to reach Kalymnos, though flights to Kalymnos so far are only from Athens. A spectacular discovery of fifth century B.C. artifacts in 2001 and the subsequent construction of a beautiful EU-funded museum have also raised the tourist profile of the island. But perhaps the biggest impact on tourism has been the discovery of Kalymnos in the late 2000s by rock climbers, which has led to the staging of a yearly rock-climbing festival that draws renowned climbers from all over the world to the island, converting Kalymnos's legendarily arid landscape into a money-making attraction. As one Kalymnian whose wife owned a restaurant and pension noted, Kalymnos is one of the few places in the world where you can climb imposing cliffs by day and relax in the Aegean Sea in the evening. Kalymnos, which had been unknown to all but the most dedicated tourists, was getting all kinds of press from rock climbing, even an article with spectacular pictures in the in-flight magazine for Lufthansa as I flew from the United States to Athens. Kalymnians were promoting their local attractions, not only the landscape and rock-climbing opportunities offered by no other island, but also Kalymnian restaurants. I remember attending a seminar in 2008 sponsored by the Kalymnian restaurant association that encouraged restaurateurs to feature the preparations they had offered all along as "local"—like the Kalymnian version of a Greek "village salad" known as mermizeli. By 2011 Kalymnian preparations were being featured in slow-food cookbooks, and several cooking shows (both Greek and American) had devoted segments or whole programs to Kalymnian specialties.

These new tourist opportunities notwithstanding, Kalymnos was feeling the pinch of the financial crisis in 2011. The main street of Kalymnos was littered with closed stores, mainly clothing stores. Kalymnians who had always had worked in the building industry or in the mayor's office were laid off. Increasing numbers of Kalymnians were following the long-hallowed tradition of migration from the island to Australia (the United States seemed to be drying up as a migrant destination), and some suggested to me that the population had dipped to nine thousand, draining the young from the island. The main Kalymnians moving in the other direction seemed to be women moving back to the island because they had inherited property (matrilineally, see below) that could be turned into tourist accommodations. One twenty-five-year-old told me that he had lucked into a job that spring, otherwise he would have joined many of his friends in seeking work in Australia. Some older Kalymnians had acquired Australian passports, even if not seeking work, because they looked to Australia as a backup if life in Greece became intolerable.

MATRIFOCALITY AND THE KALYMNIAN KITCHEN

Kalymnos shows a pattern shared through much of the Dodecanese island chain of matrilocal residence and matrilineal inheritance, practices that I traced in my earlier research in terms of their implications for female power (Sutton 1998). And while Kalymnos does have some "public" versus "domestic" distinctions, they are extremely blurry, with women taking an active role in the religious, economic, and political life of the island. And this is not a recent phenomenon (see Sutton 1999). One ongoing puzzle in my studies of Kalymnos was to understand the origins and role of female primogeniture in island life. This inheritance system was distinctive to Kalymnos and possibly a few other neighboring islands, and always intrigued me. In my scholarly reading and talk with colleagues and specialists, I've become convinced that this may be the only place in the world with such an inheritance system, or at least the only one that has been recorded. So I was curious about how this "custom," as people referred to it on Kalymnos—the "custom of the first daughter"—might have influenced gender relations in the past. Equally intriguing was how its memory (it officially ended in 1948 after the Dodecanese became part of Greece, though with a slower diminution of the practice during the course of the second half of the twentieth century), often expressed in the claim "We used to have matriarchy on the island," might still have influences on people's practices. While such puzzles remain for me, what I found clearly was that the practice of giving the entire family inheritance to the first-born daughter (who also takes the name of the maternal grandmother) established a pattern of and a model for powerful women on Kalymnos that shaped life on the island for several centuries at least.

I realized how much things had changed, however, in 2011 when talking with a woman in her twenties with two young boys. She told me that she was done with childbearing, and that there was no need to "make the daughter." When I asked about carrying on the grandmother's name, she dismissed this idea as the thinking of "the old mind-set," noting that she and her husband were happy with two boys, and that they would try to build houses for them when they grew up but it wasn't necessary: "If you have you give, but if you don't, there's nothing wrong with renting."

While first-daughter inheritance is now a memory, certain patterns remain that distinguish the island from mainland Greece, including a more equal inheritance of names between the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520280555
• ISBN 13: 9780520280557
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland