Harvard University Press Blog

Food and Memory

John S. Allen’s The Omnivorous Mind is an examination of the cultural and biological truths revealed by our evolving relationship with food. From the diets of our earliest ancestors, to cooking’s role in the evolution of the human brain, to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies, Allen’s take on how and what we eat is consistently revelatory. Below, Allen looks at the powerful role food plays in human memory. Also below, listen to a conversation with Allen on a recent episode of our podcast. 

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Not that long ago, at the counter of a gas station out in the country, something yellow and red caught my eye—it was a Bit-O-Honey candy bar wrapper. I had not had a Bit-O-Honey bar for nearly 40 years, having moved as a child from Bit-O-Honey’s midwest base to California. So I bought one. As I unwrapped and ate it, certain memories quickly came back to me: the difficulty of getting the inside wrapping paper off the sticky taffy, the little rectangles meant to be broken off one by one, the initial hard chewiness that always made me wonder if it was stale, and finally, the honeyed flavor of the taffy itself, offset by little bits of nut. The memories did not stop there, however: in an instant, I was transported back in time to the back seat of my parents’ car, looking out the window at the apparently endless rows of corn stalks that passed by for hour after hour as we drove down highways and interstates. I thought about AM radio and the backs of my parents’ heads. I finished my chunk of Bit-O-Honey, got in my car, and drove back to the present.

We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting. Food is an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and emotions, internal states of the mind and body. So my Bit-O-Honey experience is not all that unusual. Search for websites with the word candy combined with vintage, retro, or nostalgia, and it becomes readily apparent that many people use candy as a pathway to the past. But why should this be the case?

 

There are several reasons. First, evolution has seen to it that food in general may be a privileged target of memory in the brain. There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus (one in each hemisphere) that is critical for memory. The hippocampus is particularly important for forming long-term, declarative memories—those that can be consciously recalled and which contribute to the autobiographies that we all carry around in our heads. The hippocampus is also important for spatial memories, which may be its primary role for animals that do not possess language. The hippocampus has strong connections with parts of the brain that are important for emotion and for smell. This may explain why emotional memories can be so vivid or why certain smells trigger a sense of recall in us even before we consciously remember an event.

The New Supernatural

Vampires, zombies, Dan Brown. The books sell like crazy, movies fill seats, cash registers ring, young folks swoon. What’s happening? Fad? Trend? Passing fancy? Or the forefront of a reinvention of American Christianity?

That last one, says Victoria Nelson, author of Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. In what’s certainly the first HUP book to include both a photo of a shirtless, shimmering Robert Pattinson and a Guillermo del Toro Hellboy II character sketch, Nelson argues that popular culture is now saturated with a supernaturalism reminiscent of Pre-Modern Christian European culture. But it comes with some new twists: these figures aren’t just evil monsters as in the classic Protestant Gothic, but are semi-divine. And they’re no longer just males—the new heroes are joined by heroines.

Gothicka picks up where Nelson’s widely praised and deeply loved The Secret Life of Puppets leaves off, tracing the movement of this “unconscious religiosity” from what she calls the “sub-Zeitgeist” (“the grab-bag mass market popular culture lying beneath or around or on top of the secular-materialist mainstream”) to the everywhere.

In the years since The Secret Life of Puppets was published, this trend has emerged as a much more explicit spirituality expressed in performance and practice as well as in fiction and film. Where that book tracked, through the end of the twentieth century, the nature of the supernatural in the post-Reformation popular imagination, Gothicka attempts to describe the surprising new turn toward the light taken in the increasingly transformed subgenres of the Gothick. Still accessed through the grotesque and monstrous but displaying some striking new features, the twenty-first-century Gothick is showing signs of outgrowing the dark supernaturalism it inherited from its eighteenth-century ancestor.

We recently spoke with Nelson for an episode of the HUP podcast, wherein you’ll learn all about avatars of self-realization, Protestant iconoclasm, and the watershed moment of Interview with the Vampire. Have a listen:

 

The book covers an awful lot of ground, but Nelson was kind enough to prepare a little “playlist” for us – call it the greatest hits of the new supernatural:

Fiction

• Max Brooks, World War Z
• Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
• Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk
• H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
• Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
• Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
• William P. Young, The Shack

Film and Television

• Alan Ball, True Blood series
• Park Chan-wook, Thirst
• Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland
  
• Patrick Lussier, Dracula 2000
  
• George Romero, Night of the Living Dead
  
• Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and Hellboy

Graphic Novels

• Jamie Delano, John Constantine: Hellblazer series
• Garth Ennis, Preacher series
• Neil Gaiman, Sandman series

Roleplaying Games

• Chaosium, The Call of Cthulhu
• White Wolf, Vampire: The Masquerade

Videogames

• Capcom, Resident Evil
• Cyan, Myst
• Electronic Arts, Left 4 Dead
• Konami, Castlevania

Those are the primary sources for your crash course in the fusion of post-Christian spirituality and mass media.

And, for super extra credit, pair Gothicka with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, or at least spin their podcasts back to back. Here’s Gregory:

 

The End of the Luzin Affair

One of the hopes of any book publisher, especially a University Press, is that its books will have an impact out in the world. And there’s no single metric for that. Sometimes books find a wide audience, sometimes they revolutionize a discipline, sometimes they win awards, or sometimes they become mainstays of college courses. At HUP we’re fortunate to have grown familiar with our books having these kinds of impact, but we recently learned of a real-world effect that’s almost certainly the first of its kind for an HUP publication: a large Russian bureaucracy has officially changed its position in large part because of an HUP book.

The presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences has passed a resolution clearing the name of the mathematician Nikolai Luzin, whom it had condemned in the 1930s because of his ideological views. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, authors of Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, have received word from the Academy that their book played a large part in the discussions that led to the passing of this resolution.

Naming Infinity, which we described on publication in 2009 as “an exciting mathematical mystery tour,” is about the founding of set theory, and a conflict between French and Russian mathematicians over the nature of infinity. The debate centered on the relation between math and mysticism, and we’ll take a stab at an explanation, though surely an oversimplified one.

Mathematicians deal in geometric perfection (like perfectly round circles and perfectly straight lines), but such things can’t actually be found in the natural, physical world. The same is also true of numbers, in that they must consist of perfectly equal units (speaking purely in mathematical terms, you cannot count two oranges if the two oranges you count are not exactly, perfectly similar). Okay, so if the objects studied by mathematicians don’t exist in this world then they must exist in another transcendent realm, one where perfection is possible. Or so said mathematicians.

The problem, though, was the question of how mathematicians gained knowledge of the objects in this other transcendent realm, or how anyone’s physical brain could grasp a non-physical reality. Now, you can basically get around this problem by using your imagination and a little common sense (you’ve experienced an orange, and you can pretend that the two you’re counting are identical). But the concept of infinity throws a roadblock on that shortcut, because we have no physical experience of the infinite. We cannot encounter a full infinity in the natural world. And, given the trouble conceptualizing a single infinity, wrapping one’s mind around the thought of an infinity of infinities, which calculus logically required, was nearly impossible. It presented such a complication that Aristotle actually banned infinity from Greek thought, but modern applied mathematics really couldn’t do without.

For French mathematicians, who were as advanced as any but still very much Descartes’ intellectual descendants, a phenomenon couldn’t be understood if it couldn’t be stated clearly. They resisted fuzziness, shunned metaphysics as theology. Not so for a group of Russian mathematicians who happened to be influenced by a heretical religious sect that practiced “Name Worshipping.” They believed that they could achieve union with the divine by chanting the name of God over and over; they believed, in other words, that Name Worshipping could connect them to another, transcendent realm. Just the sort of portal the concept of infinity seemingly required. So this sect of Russian mathematicians, Nikolai Luzin among them, “named” infinity. And this is one of the central arguments of Graham and Kantor’s book: that a religious heresy in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church (Name Worshipping), was actually instrumental in helping the birth of a new field of modern mathematics.

The Journey of Mary Walker

There’s a claim, one with quite a lineage in both historical analysis and social science circles, that slavery destroyed African American families. It was compelling evidence against that claim, found in both Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and Alex Haley’s Roots, that led historian Sydney Nathans to shift his focus years ago from work on nineteenth-century American political leaders to the social history of African Americans. Now comes the completion of a book he started researching in 1988, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker.

Nathans first learned of Mary Walker in a remarkable letter referenced in Gutman’s book. Sent in 1859 from a University of Pennsylvania professor named J. P. Lesley to Mildred Cameron, one of North Carolina’s wealthiest women, the letter was written on behalf of “Mary Walker, formerly in your family,” a polite way of referring to Cameron’s ownership of Walker. Cameron would have well remembered Walker, for Walker’s family had belonged to the Camerons for generations, and though Walker herself had escaped eleven years prior, her children and mother remained. From Lesley’s letter:

I have been lately touched to the heart with a case of heart breaking distress which you have it entirely in your power I find to cure… I have come to know one Mary Walker formerly in your family, and I have seen how sick at heart she is about her mother and especially her two children… She thinks of nothing but her children, and speaks of nothing else when she speaks of herself at all, which is very seldom. Her mother-heart yearns unspeakably after them… She has saved a considerable sum of money to buy them, can command more from friends, and will sacrifice anything to see them once again and have their young lives renew the freshness of her own weary spirit. It is in this behalf that I address you,—to realize this hope of hers.

Walker had fled from slavery while accompanying the Camerons to Philadelphia, only making the agonizing choice to leave her family behind in North Carolina after her master threatened to banish her to an Alabama plantation. In the years between Walker’s escape and Lesley’s letter to Mildred Cameron, Walker had made a life for herself in the North with the aid of a network of allies and friends. To Free a Family is based on thousands of letters written by these allies, chiefly the Lesley family, and by Walker’s adversaries, the Camerons.

We recently spoke with Nathans for an episode of our podcast (which you can listen to below), and he explained some of the particulars of Walker’s story, as well as some of its broader implications:

The larger story is that we think of antislavery people as single-minded, focused on the attack against slavery and on the emancipation of the slaves—which they were. But at the same time, a good number of them were engaged in trying to help individual slaves recover family members… For a good many of them, they had no idea when emancipation would come about, when antislavery would triumph, and so these personal cases were their ways of dealing with slavery on a human basis, one by one.

 

With To Free a Family, Nathans has restored a story as indelible as that of Harriet Jacobs, whom Walker knew. The book now serves as a tribute to the memory of a brave woman—and as a reminder of how history is painfully, triumphantly lived.

You can learn more about Mary Walker in stories from Radio Boston and WBUR, or read an excerpt from To Free a Family at the Ms. Magazine blog. Those in the Boston/Cambridge area can also catch Sydney Nathans on February 23rd at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, which is the current occupant of the Brattle Street Blacksmith House once owned by… Mary Walker.

Changing How We Talk About Habitat Preservation

The Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1973. Surprisingly, from the vantage point of today’s political climate, it was an act passed with a great deal of bipartisan support. Protecting animals just seemed like the right thing to do. What quickly became clear, though, was that the act was about preserving habitats, which sometimes overlapped with land held by people and developers. And so the Endangered Species Act became a controversial lightning rod in a country that’s always been deeply concerned with its property.

In the most infamous clash, the Supreme Court was compelled by the act to block construction of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River because it would destroy the habitat of a three-inch fish called the snail darter. That innocent little swimmer with its silly little name became a much-mocked emblem for all that anyone could dislike about conservation. In response to the kerfuffle, Congress maneuvered to change the rules of the E.S.A. Al Gore sided with the dam, while Newt Gingrich voted for the fish. Conservation and constituencies make for strange politics, no? The E.S.A. was changed, the dam was built, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee.

In Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act, the organismic and evolutionary biologist Joe Roman makes a new case for why the E.S.A. is so important, and why the debates still surrounding it need to be reshaped. In a recent episode of the HUP Podcast, which you can hear below, Roman succinctly explained the root of the issue:

“People can sort of rally behind the idea of protecting species… If we could just protect species in zoos, then there would probably be no conflict. You could invest a little bit of money and put all these species aside and if that was the goal then that would be fine. The issue is that of course it really is about ecosystems. You can’t protect a species without protecting its ecosystem, and you can’t protect an ecosystem without protecting its species, so it’s a combination of the two. That’s the only sustainable way of really protecting species, is by protecting their habitat. Now, that can put (protection) at conflict with private landowners, for example.”

You can use the player below to hear the podcast, or point your browser here.

HUP Podcast - Joe Roman

 

The key argument of Roman’s work is that we should shift the conversation from the economic costs of protection to the economic benefits, for which he says there is overwhelming evidence. In the book he describes any number of these, from Florida communities whose entire tourist industry is built around visitors clamoring to see the endangered manatee, to coastal areas where whale watching ventures have helped to replace some of the jobs and money lost by the decline in fisheries, to the storm-protection benefits of preserving Louisiana’s wetlands.

The current issue of Harvard Magazine includes an excerpt adapted from Listed that tells another one of these stories. This one’s about, well, whale poop.  And, for real, from now on when you hear “whale poop” you should think “Joe Roman,” because he’s been the leader in imagining and then documenting its benefits, both ecological and economic. It’s a great story of how a eureka moment becomes a game-changing scientific finding. As Roman put it, “One of the great joys of science has to be turning a thought that surfaced one night over a few beers into a full-blown field project.” You can read the story online here.

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

The general story we tell about boys’ friendships does not include a lot of intimacy. We tend to think boys mostly bond over sports and roughhousing. Not a lot of emotional vulnerability there, we think; that's for girls’ friendships. Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets is an ethnographic study of boys’ friendships that helps us to rewrite those stories we tell.

As Way learned through years of watching boys develop, their friendships in early adolescence are often marked by intense emotional feeling. She quotes a fifteen year old as saying of his closest friend “My best friend and I love each other. That’s it. You have this thing that is deep. So deep it’s within you. You can’t explain it… I guess in life sometimes two people can really really understand each other, and really have a trust respect and love for each other. It just happens, it’s human nature.” Such responses are typical of 14 and 15 year old boys, she found.

However, usually around age 16 boys begin to experience what Way calls a “crisis of connection” as they grow up and encounter the pressures imposed by our hypermasculine culture. Boys, in other words, are not “naturally” emotionally detached and “independent”; rather, they learn how to be this way, at the cost of their relationships with their friends. The consequences can be extreme, as Way notes that the suicide rate for boys in late adolescence spikes to four to five times the rate of girls just at the age when boys lose the emotional language that they had in early and middle adolescence.

We had a conversation about the topic with Niobe Way on the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear by clicking the icon below, or pointing your browser here.

 HUP Podcast - Niobe Way

As she explains in the conversation, the crisis being faced by boys and young men is not necessarily their lack of male role models, as is often assumed. What boys need, she says, is what everyone needs: “People that allow them to express a full range of human capacity. So (they) are allowed to be empathic, allowed to be emotional. Have intimate friendships, express the desire for those intimate friendships. They need models in their lives that foster those kinds of human needs and allow boys to thrive.”

Those models don't have to be men. Way shows how, in fact, male role models sometimes can compound the problem, in that they’re often products of this same culture and thus can serve to reinforce the crisis of connection. Deep Secrets helps us to break through the stereotypes around the dominant culture of masculinity that all too often result in strict and harmful images of boys and men in society. The book tells a sadly unfamiliar story that has important implications for parents, teachers, and others who work with and live with boys.

What Was African American Literature? - A Podcast with Kenneth W. Warren

We’ve just published a new book by Kenneth W. Warren, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago. In the book, What Was African American Literature?, Warren provocatively asserts that that label belonged to a specific category of writing from a specific time that has passed. This genre called “African American Literature,” he says, was the umbrella for creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. As Warren says in a podcast that you can hear below, “Black writers during this period knew that their work would be read in terms of whether it challenged or justified racial segregation.”  Given that this defining characteristic no longer applies to literature written by Black Americans, Warren calls for moving past the term in ways that will enable us to recognize and appreciate the vast and varying concerns and content of literature written by Black Americans since the legal dismantling of Jim Crow.

(Click on the icon below to listen to the full interview with Kenneth W. Warren on What Was African American Literature?  If your browser has any trouble with this embedded podcast player, you can also hear the interview here.) 

Interview with Kenneth Warren

 

As Warren explains, his designation of African American Literature as an historical phenomenon does not indicate any belief that we’ve entered some post-racial utopia. “This doesn’t mean that racial inequality has disappeared, it doesn’t mean that Black Americans have stopped writing literature—obviously we’re in a moment of a great flowering of writing by Black Americans—but what it does mean is that the relation of literary production to social inequality has changed, and it is that relation, or was that relation, and that relation only, that constituted African American Literature.”

HUP On the Air - David Garland and Suzanne E. Smith

On this vaguely snowy morning in Cambridge, we have a couple of public radio interviews with HUP authors to share.

Yesterday, David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, took part in an extended conversation about the death penalty with Leonard Lopate on his WNYC show. The two covered a lot of ground in their discussion of the peculiarities of America’s history with capital punishment, including the roles of religion and race. You can listen to their conversation here.

And this morning, Suzanne E. Smith, author of To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death was interviewed by Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. As part of a series called “American Lives,” they discussed A.G. Gaston, an African American entrepreneur who made funeral homes the cornerstone of what became a wide-ranging portfolio of business interests. Gaston played a behind-the-scenes role in the Civil Rights movement in Alabama, and Smith and Inskeep discussed the general lack of historical attention to the role of entrepreneurship in the Civil Rights era. You can hear their conversation and read an excerpt from To Serve the Living here.

Slow down?

With all the discussion about marketing -- Twitter is fun, but I'd rather do it than read one more think-piece about What It All Means -- there seems to be comparatively less talk about the actual content of what we're selling. Do ideas requiring more than 140 characters have a future among the young, the well-off, the "connected?" Will more evidence emerge suggesting that the medium really is the message, that the rapid-fire stream of info-bits that characterizes today's content delivery could actually change the way our brains process information? Are we trading in considered thought for a new model, a kind of broad but not-too-deep savviness?

HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters is a well-known proponent of "slow reading." It's not a concept set up in stodgy opposition to an emergent online world, but rather a technique for preserving what's of value in the humanistic tradition. Waters explains his advocacy in a new interview from ABC Radio International (that's Australia, by the way, not "our" ABC). Would Nietzsche have been proud?

||| "The Push for Slow Reading" -- ABC Radio International

Oology podcast!

That's not a typo -- oology (or oölogy, perhaps, if you're writing at The New Yorker) is the branch of zoology that deals with the study of eggs. You can extend the term to include the study of nests, or if you prefer, you can use the term "caliology" for that.

But instead of titling renowned photographer Rosamond Purcell's latest book Oology and Caliology, we titled it Egg & Nest. Having won access to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology's extraordinary collection of ornithological delights, Purcell took the opportunity to photograph them, and with the help of the Foundation's team of bird experts, turn them into a book that's rather an artifact in itself.

The New York Academy of Science's "Science and the City" podcast managed to collect Purcell, as well as Linnea Hall and René Corrado of the FVZ, to conduct an aural exploration of the Foundation's collections. And you can see some nice reproductions from the book at the web feature we did up for the book -- the photos shine, even on the screen.