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C.Nadia Seremetakis
University of the Peloponnese, GR
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C. NADIA SEREMETAKIS
This is a paper infiveacts — Saliva, the Journey, Traffic, fragments, deferred emotions and lost objects that were
Dust, and Reflexive Commensality — that explore the not part of the public culture of Greek modernization,
senses and material culture as exchange, memories, yet were integral to the tangible force of its historical
ethnographic description, and as a conceptual problematic passage. The mixture of fieldwork inquiry, biography
of fieldwork and modernity. The montage of these and narrative styles here also refracts the ready-made
impinging fragments concurs with my proposal that the montage that organizes that hybrid figure called the
numbing and erasure of sensory realities are crucial "native anthropologist;" a figure that is the very
moments in socio-cultural transformation. These embodiment of the syncretism of incomplete
moments can only be glimpsed at obliquely and at the modernization.
margins, for their visibility requires an immersion into
interrupted sensory memory and displaced emotions.
Thus the use of montage here is not simply an aesthetic SALIVA
or arbitrary choice. Sensory and experiential
fragmentation is the form in which this sensory history The grandma dressed in black, sitting at home or at the
has been stored and this dictates the form of its edge of thefields,feeds the baby.1 The baby in the cradle
reconstruction. For I believe that there can be no or on her lap is wrapped tightly in strips of cloth. She
reflexivity unless one passes through an historical takes a piece of crusdess bread, the inside of the bread
reenactment of perceptual difference. known as psiha crumbles it with her fingers and puts a
Montage also reflects the transactional dimensions few crumbs in her toothless mouth. The tongue rotating
of my research in rural and urban Greece on sensory moistens the bread with saliva till it becomes a paste,
experience, memory and material history which combines "day." She molds the bread till its texture signals that it
traditional fieldwork inquiry with the biographical is ready for the child. She takes the bread from her mouth
experience of my generation; a generation that straddles and places it in its toothless mouth.2 The baby swallows
the admixture of rural and urban economies and cultures it as she swallows her saliva flavored by the bread. Her
that has taken place since the post war period. In fusing fingers reach for more bread and the act is repeated. On
the ethnographic and the biographical I focus on everyday other occasions she dips the crumbs first in olive oil
language use, and the symbolic and affective dimensions before molding them with her saliva. She talks and
of material culture as passageways into those experiential chants to the baby, calling to it: "my eyes" "my heart,**
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this way for death. She can sense that she is modernized such "grandma' in every other Greek household.
as an element of a no longer pertinent reality which is In comparison with the sensory layers and residues
now named the past.' For the grandchild, however, the with which grandma is dressed in the village, she is now
dressing ofthe grandma transforms her into a redecorated covered with ''dead" objects. In this masquerade, she
artifact. The extraction of the grandma from her rural becomes the negated past, a fossilized display in the
context and her transformation becomes in the child s urban museum: the living room, the parlor. The
perception analogous to its own coercive extraction from deadening of the rural "past" and its framing in the
imaginary places and play and its insertion into an adult parlor-museum transforms the sensory alterity of the