Demotic Memorials: Preservation as Social Memory.

Demotic Memorials: Preservation as Social Memory. Susan E. Jowsey and Dr Rachel Carley, Unitec, Auckland,New Zealand

AbstractThis paper is intended as dialectic on the theme of preservation from the position of memorial. The dialectic will be formed around several decisive ideas with the common thread being social memory.It is intended that this paper have two voices each bringing to bear on the topic differing points of view and that the discursive ideas weave together, in congruence. We will examine how ritualised practices aroundpreserving can be understood in relation to demotic memorials. To preserve is to make a tangible, enduring record of a temporal event. This temporal event may signal a ‘compulsion to repeat’ a culinary tradition and also operate as a prudent strategy to extend the shelf life of seasonal produce. Trench stores and survival packs are examples of how provisions can sustain life during times of mortal danger.The concept of memorial is also evidenced in domestic provisioning wherestores can be read as gifts to others: their preciousness afforded by the time and devotion given to their production and display. We will be considering the context of food in relation to memorialisation - that what we provide for others to eat connects us through social memory. Food is poignantly connected to both landscape and memory through material culture, as food is representative of certain rituals, in this case those rituals are associated with preservation of self. Given this preciousness preserves are often forever preserved. Unopened, they become memorials to the everyday, secreted away in kitchen cupboards, away from the degenerative effects of heat and light. They can be seen as memento mori’s that give weight and meaning to the temporality of the seasons, extending their life. They also act as signifiers of personal largesse.

Key words: Social memory, Memento mori’s, the Gift, Demotic memorials and Survival.

IntroductionOnce every few years I send a collection of homemade jams and chutneys to my sister inLondon. Each one is cushioned in bubble wrap and snugly packed for the journey overseas. The customs declaration is usually confectionery to try to allay interception and disposal. There is relief when they arrive at their destination unscathed. The recipient receives these distillations of our New Zealand Summer with great delight, rationing them out to prolong enjoyment, or in exceptional circumstances choosing not to open them at all, their preciousness rendering them inaccessible.

Through this distillation process we create a myriad of associations, an attachment to the moment [or the accumulated associated moments of each day - fragments of intangible memoriescompiled from; tones and colours, light, sound, smell, taste and feeling] whichas if threads, bind us to objects both tangibly and intangibly.Food; as ingredients raw and processed, prepared and unprepared, cooked and uncooked, consumed and never to be consumed are part of our everyday object array. Our days are coloured by the food we eat or fail to eat or desire or anticipate – the food we

consume, literally, spiritually and conceptually also consumes us.

Domestic MemorialsIn the 1950s Fay Divich of Awanui was consumed by the desire to be crowned the Catholic Queen Carnival. She baked her way there, raising funds to help build a new church for the district. The foundations of this community building (as with many others) were built on slabs of marshmallow slice, afghans, and melting moments produced by young women working frenetically in domestic kitchens.

Like aprons, we wear the food we consume on our bodies - smells and odours cling to us. Devoured food leaves faint traces on ourskin and clothes, a small spot of splashed sauce on a lapel, likelipstick traces left by a mistress. When these traces are gone and we cannot partake in our embrace with food, our hunger is replaced by desire, we recall those foods that have sustained us,

rough tastes that succor. Through significant moments such as our ‘first taste’ or the repeated tasting or by reading and handling ingredients, we play out a series of events that define our connection to the past and to the future – we enact food.This enacting correspondingly becomes a memorializing moment - amoment when the taste, smell or sight of particular foods consumes our identity and we are transformed.

Leaden sponges incinerated scones and desiccated cakes were unedifying foods that revealed poor household management. Fay buried her baking mishaps (tins and all) in the garden behind her father George Divich’s Awanui Bargain Store. The store had ample ingredients (and tins) at the ready. I have imagined excavating these hidden relics from her childhood to try to glean the extent of her trial and error in her quest forbaking supremacy. The act of burial sought to remove evidence of such transgressions from the social circuit. These personal reminiscences impact upon how food is produced and understood. I would like to suggest that Social memory is preserved through a form of action-based memorialisation. Each time I bake I both preserve and invigorate my mother's memory. When my mother was baking, the kitchen bench was punctuated by small bowls of measured ingredients carefully laid out in serried ranks, ready for depositing into a large Crown Lynn Beehive mixing bowl. These spatial ritualscontinue to be played out by her 3 daughters, demonstrating a compulsion to repeat those ordered arrangements. Therefore the physical act of baking can be understood as a form of demotic or everyday memorialisation. The action of baking and the tangible outcomes of this process literally and metaphorically preserve, establishing

indexical links to personal histories. This memorialisation allows me to connect to the past and also establish new bonds into the future through the capacity for largesse andhospitality the redistribution of baking (and preserving) invites. This memorialisation works with well-rehearsed recipes and also recipes that allow latitude for reinvention, advancing a culinary conversation through the use of new techniques and processes that serve to vivify, keeping memory alive.

Basic SustenanceSome foods though, allow little latitude for reinvention their purposeis simply to maintain existence. Neither visually appealing nor tasty Hard Tack sole purpose was to ensure survival - it is a food that reflects its purpose - to maintain existence - its impenetrable surface symbolises unadorned, basic sustenance. Food for survival - it is constituted from flour [usually whole wheat for expedience] and water with the addition of a small quantity of salt.Pricked on both sides and baked twice to ensure it is fully and resolutely dried out – it can last for years – the oldest hardtack biscuit still in existence that I was able to locate hada message written on it dated 1784.

Despite it’s unappetizing character, the Hardtack biscuits standsvictorious as a culinary memorial. Firstly, because of its placein the history of exploration and warfare –It embodies the ‘will to survive’ and the ‘will to conquer’. It is not the food of emperors or kings, it is the food of empires –the food that kept the sailors and the fighters alive... euphemistically known as ‘dog biscuits’ by soldiers in WW1. It is an inglorious food – able to withstand the elements and offer itself up for consumption when more delicate foods were dreamed of but were impotent in the face of deprivation. Hardtack was not a food of choice but a food of necessity. It’s particular relationship to the history of survival whether at sea or on the battlefield underscores its dependence on conditions of distress.However, its status changes subtly when it is considered in the context of Hardtack as ‘offering’.

In 1867 the New Zealand Government decided to construct and provision castaway depots on the islands, , after the publicity created by the rescue of survivors from the General Grant, which sunk after an unusual ordeal when the ship became trapped inside a cave on the Auckland Islands in 1866, inside the depots , Hardtack was stored in large red square tins.The Government maintained these huts from 1877 to 1927 when the last were decommissioned and their contents left to rot. In suchconditions - Hardtack can be assigned more than the contingent status of dried [preserved] food - transformed by circumstance itbecomes a symbolic object for [physical] consumption, it both denotes and connotes survival. It’s placement in these depots ensured, at least for a while, the continued existence of the castaways, unfortunately not always until rescue.

The Gift and Social MemoryAnthropologist Mary Douglas observes in her introduction to Food in the Social Order, “After a year or a decade, the sequence of meals can be counted, as real as colonnades through which people can walk. Food may be symbolic, but it is also efficacious for

feeding as roofs are for shelter, as powerful for including as gates and doors. Added over time, gifts of food are flows of life-giving substance, but long before life saving is an issue the flows have created the conditions for social life. More effective than flags or red carpets which merely say welcome, food actually delivers good fellowship.” 1

This quote places hospitality at the centre of spatial performativity. This fellowship is emblematised by the symbolic event of the Queen Carnival. These fundraising events brought communities together and buoyed spirits in the wake of war. The woman who raised the most money was crowned Queen during a pageant event, which was also a fundraiser. Floats festooned with floral tributes made their way down the main street. Sitting atop were the queen and her entourage of ladies in waiting and Princes at the ready. The Queen Carnival marked an occasion: celebrating the economic power of domestic endeavour within the civic realm. Baking became a form of domestic production that bore socio-cultural weight. Community life was sustained by such enterprise.

The spectacle of the Queen Carnival can be understood as a form of gift to the local community: a reciprocal gesture acknowledging the value of volunteer labour used to build public amenities.

1 Douglas, Mary (ed.) Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food in Three American Communities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 1984, p. 12.

The gift also has a motivational context, which is social. The food and other objects placed within the provisioning depots weregifts from the New Zealand Government. For something to be defined as ‘a gift’ the thing given normally requires a context, so that there is a mutual understanding about the relational meaning, inherent in the act here the context is that of the saviour and that of the castaway [or the lost soul]. The aspect of this gift giving that is of most interest to us is the relationship between the setting up of food stores and the concepts of social responsibility/memory and memorial/survival. In relation to the Auckland Island depots there is little doubt that, built into the socially motivated act of provisioning, was an economic imperative it is a well-known fact that here was a pre-existing need for the NZ Government to regularly patrol the waters around these Islands. [The killing of Seals had been banned by this time and boats patrolled the area to ensure the ban was upheld] The relationship between the object [the hardtack] and the subject [the castaway] is complex because whilst the food source was itself not inviting materially it was nevertheless sustaining. Offering just enough and no more, munificence not being a necessary condition of gift giving. Hardtack, whilst a life preserver, appears on the surface to offer little else, in its simplicity one can only just fathom theability to survive.

Traditionally food was preserved to get people through the lean winter months. It allowed for survival. Preserves render domestic environs (often assumed to be spaces ofretreat and repose) ambiguous. Preserves do this by insinuating the ‘just in case scenario’: as provisions that allow for infelicitous events such as natural disasters that can despoil the creature comforts of home. These stores are sequestered within marginal spaces within the domestic realm such as cupboards and pantries-spaces secreted away from the light. Produce is hermetically sealed, suffocated and confined within black pockets of the interior.

We now need to consider what the socio-cultural significance of ‘preserving’ might be.In preserving nature’s bounty a transmutation takes place. Something surplus becomes something highly prized: a lifeline. Yet this begs the question-how much should we preserve? How much is the minimum we require and how much would we be prepared to gift to others? As an avid Jam maker who toils over hot ovens during the sweltering heat of summer there is urgency about the preserving process, ensuring produce is captured at an optimal level of ripeness. In this frantic production there is a tacit knowledge that I will produce more jam than we need. I then try to determine how much I can ‘afford’ to give away as gifts and how much I want to remain as provision, as life line.

And it is this, the intention of the object - the lifeline, that we must consider in order to fully understand how Hardtack can be read as anything, other than just basic sustenance.This food is everyday fare for those in need of survival rations;flour, water and a pinch of salt it is not decorated or iced, or spiced, or sweetened. [It is not an ANZAC biscuit] It is an unremarkable thing yet this food holds within it the memory of home [society & place] of life and of hope. Each emotion is reinforced by the context in which the food is offered. The object appropriates the context, it has a symbolic value way beyond that of gold to those starving and lost - cast adrift from home and loved ones - the biscuits beauty becomes intrinsic to the setting. Provisioning huts are repositories, they offer more than food to the survivor - they are demotic memorials - These huts and the provisions contained within stand as sentinelson the bleak landscape, they exist because of death their purpose, to repel it.

Biographical ObjectsThe kitchen pantry can also be understood as a place for demotic memorials: fruit and vegetables are bottled and preserved to stave off entropy and decay. A surfeit of seasonal produce is gathered together in anticipation of cooler weather and to indemnify us against ‘hard times’. There are also the never to be opened jars of preserves that are considered too precious to be eaten. These items memorialise and distill a particular moment in time. They become permanent fixtures within the pantry interior and when necessary, move with us to new lodgings.

Aided in no small part by the rations of preserved food gifted tothem by the NZ Govt, many a man, one woman and a young boy survived shipwreck on the Auckland Islands. By extension these foods are also gifts or offerings from society at large, which called for sustenance to be provided on the Islands in the wake of the whispered tales of horror. The provisions becoming the gift of life bequeathed by society and are therefore not mute objects but objects that speak about belief, values and memories. They

are biographical objects because they tell us a stories of that past – in their frozen state the never to be opened red tin stored inthe dim light of Te Papa speaks to us about our history and aboutour desire to supplicate and save one another in times of extremeneed. Once investigated further Hardtack offers us a ‘mnemonic clue’ as to the relationship of food to social memory. The food offered is not just for nourishing physical life it is also a form of social tether reinforcing the tie, we see ourselves as being socially responsible, we offer food. Food allows us to constructa vision of ourselves as socially caring and thoughtful; to maintain that belief through the act of provisioning and to construct our belief in social responsibility from the afterglow of the tales of souls saved. In this way the offering of Hard Tack to the endangered, creates a social connectivity, the expectation being, that even when lostone can be rescued by meagerest of food.

Social connectivity also exists in offerings that promise a ‘second life’ - such as bottling. Bottling holds the residues of the season, augmenting their lifespan through curing, pickling and sugaring. The culinary processes employed in preservation, that of the reduction and distillation of raw materials is, we believe a simulacrum of 'preserving life' - melding the rationing of summer with the viscosity of life, of one's desire to cling to the promise of it, like the tracery of a finger in stickiness and the condensation from gently boiling fruits, life can be bottled into moments to savour and devour. In Being and Nothingness Jean Paul Sartre describes this viscous state as being“like a cross section in a process of change. It is unstable, but it does not flow. It is soft, yielding and compressible. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it. Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness. Plunging into the water gives a different impression. I remain solid, but to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity.”2

2 Jean-Paul Sartre in Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. London. 2002. p. 47-8.

Through memories we bond the survivor to society; the offering offood and clothing reinforces the importance of these aspects of life that we hold fast to for survival of self, as well as reinforcing a sense of loss and dislocation that these items are limited and will run out. [Despair is a significant issue faced by the castaway - the fear they will never return home]Food in this context creates associations in the human mind. Thecastaway is drawn to recall personal, spatial, and sensory experiences. The preserved food is truly sucked and savoured, not for it’s flavour or its subtle taste but for it’s capacity tonourish both the body and the soul.

This paper has drawn attention to three different forms of culinary memorial: hardtack as life preserver for those at war or shipwrecked, baking and preserving as action-based memorials that tether us to personal histories, and finally preserves as ‘ambiguous’ memorials that wed us to the seasons, distilling natures bounty to act as a stay against entropy. Preserves have an ability to stave off time and so are stockpiled incase of emergencies. This means we need to consider how much we can afford to give away to ensure survival. The gift of hardtack assists in the survival of the shipwrecked and is rationed as judiciously as home made preserves freighted to the other side of theworld, that tether the gifted to their social memories.

Endnotes 1. Douglas, Mary (ed.) Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food in Three American Communities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 1984, p. 12.2. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge. London. 2002. p. 47-8.

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