“On Bread Alone”: A Deeper Cut

Neni Panourgiá (Justice-in-Education Initiative, Heyman Center for the Humanities
Columbia University)

David Sutton (Southern Illinois University)

Note: This is a follow up discussion to the post by Neni Panourgiá “On Bread Alone.”

Neni Panourgiá and I have been friends and colleagues since the late 1980s, when we were graduate students. We crossed paths while she was studying with Michael Herzfeld and I was spending a semester under his  tutelage. She generously offered me to use her spare bedroom during my Tuesday-to-Thursday weekly visits. During that time we shared cooking (she said she had never met an American who consumed more olive oil than her mother, as I did) and ideas.  We have shared interests, perspectives and insights on Greece and Greek Anthropology, discovered then and developed over the years. Thus, when Neni submitted her piece “On Bread Alone” to the Foodanthro weblog, it was a chance for me to continue the dialogue and dig further into a couple of points raised in the article. I sent Neni three  questions, which she graciously responded to, and which are appended below.

David: You describe your father slicing bread with his specially sharpened knife as eliciting anxiety from his audience. That raises two questions for me. First, given that most people in Greece cut bread resting it against their chest, what made your father’s technique different and eliciting of fear in his audience? Second, you suggest that your father was aware of the performative nature of slicing bread. Was this something distinctive to him? Do others, in your experience, approach slicing bread as a performative act?

Neni: You are absolutely correct to say that most people in Greece cut bread this way, men and women alike. It is more readily observed in the periphery, not in urban households, and I would venture to say that it might also be class-specific, so that’s where part of the surprise was located, in that we were an urban, non-working-class household. I think it might also be of a different time, might have been already by then (or becoming) marginalized by the rapid gentrification of Greece. But what elicited the particular sense of danger was the immense sharpness of the knife and the cutting process—not the usual “sawing motion” as you have accurately described, which is also used by bakers when they cut large loaves to sell, and which, actually, cuts down the speed at which the act of cutting can be performed; but one, singular draw of the knife, more like a butcher’s than a baker’s. Watching the knife slide so effortlessly on the bread one can get the sense that it cannot be interrupted on time if need be.

The question about the performativity of the act is very interesting. I have not observed it in the act of daily cutting of bread at home, but, of course, it is always there in the ritual cutting of the Christmas or the Easter bread; of St Basil’s Cake (Vassilopita) on New Year’s Eve; or the tearing by hand of Clean Monday’s lagána at the beginning of Lent. And, certainly, we have the ritual cutting of the prósforon or the Sunday ártos by the priest at church, ritual performances of bread cutting that include and require the use of special implements. But I would note, also, the negative dialectics of bread-cutting, where bread cutting is organized and determined by that which it is not allowed to be, namely the tearing of the daily bread by hand, where the immediacy of cutting through the elimination of the mediation of the knife provokes reprimand. No equivalence to baguette tearing here.

David: I’m thinking about the relationship between crumbs, “the crumb” of the bread (a more technical term), and the “soul,” a correspondence you suggest in the overlap between the words psicha and psyché. In one of your earlier works, I remember that you leave psyché untranslated because you are not quite satisfied with the correspondence to “soul.” Can you say a bit more about these two homonyms?

Neni: I am trying a play-on-words here. There is no linguistic or etymological connection between psícha (spelled with an -i-) and psyché (spelled with a -y-), so I claim that in my personal relationship to bread its crumb, its psícha is, indeed, its psyche. Psyché is the same word in ancient and in modern Greek so, ethnographically, we could say that I retain it in its indigenous form. But beyond that it’s not as much that I leave it untranslated, as it is, rather, that I use it within the historical genealogy of its meaning reading it through its secular philosophical and psychoanalytic deployments, eschewing the ways in which its meaning has been populated by Christian ideology as soul.

David: Both you and I were graduate students at the time that Anthropology was looking for new ways to reconnect to History (as disciplines and approaches). I think we both found an interest in understanding continuity was one way into these questions. Elsewhere you write about the memorial food kóllyva as a substance and a ritual practice that has connections going back over 2000 years. Bread is similar to kóllyva in that you trace it both as a substance and a ritual practice with a long history in Greece (and elsewhere of course). Can you say something about writing about continuity while avoiding the traps of nationalist historiography? 

Neni: Yes, we both come from the intellectual, political, and scholarly moment that marked any claims to continuity as suspiciously nationalistic, and we have both worked tirelessly to show that the connections that tie together nationalism, history, and belonging are far more complex than the declaratory reactions of either the mid-19^th or the late 20^th century scholarship. In 1995 I coined the term “geocultural texture of ritual’ to argue that ritual and non-ritual practices can exist across time as objects of history because they are being performed at the same place over time, not because they are being performed by the “same” people (whatever “sameness” might be forced to mean). Geocultural practices give form to syncretism, organize the territorialization (or deterritorialization or reterritorialization) of a place. Kóllyva, for instance, were used in antiquity in the area of Greece as ritual offerings to the gods, as meatless sacrifice, on days of remembrance of the shadows of the psyches, of the dead, we would say. Embellished with more ingredients but keeping with the same structure in their composition kóllyva are still offered ritually in remembrance and in absolution of the sins of the dead, as intercession. Many peoples have lived in the area of  Greece since antiquity, but the ritual has not been discontinued; it is still being performed because the area has been inhabited continuously since antiquity and peoples, through daily interaction, enter each other’s habitus, so intersectional cultural formulations are forged that interact with the spatial history of the place. Ethnonationalist and racist ideologies (fascism, Nazism, white supremacy, Panslavism) have developed theories of blood continuity in order to lay claims to mythical pasts that are exclusionary and excise from their histories entire populations; for instance, the Nazi claims to a singularly Teutonic past of Germany; or the 18^th and 19^th century claims circulating in Germany that Germans were the only extant ancient Greeks and that modern Greeks were not Greeks but Slavs— Jacob Phillip Fallmerayer was not alone in claiming this; or the claim that Palestinians did not exist in Palestine prior to 1948, or that Ephesus has always been Turkish. But if we think about place as a common referent then we might be able to liberate continuity from the transcendental strictures of nationalist blood mythologies.