Symbols of and for the nation: practicing imagined communities

It has been two weeks since July 4^th and while walking along the avenues of Los Angeles I can still see small flags on the sidewalk on the dividing line between the sidewalk and the front garden of houses.  During the course of three weeks I have appointed myself with the game of observation on the flags: I first noticed them all around the area. They had been meticulously placed in front of every house: that captured my attention and sparked my enthusiasm.  I first thought of a kind of “tradition” with which people gladly keep up. But then I noticed a small piece of paper attached to the flag pole. So I took a closer look and read both sides of the paper. One side read: happy 4^th of July. The other side provided with contact details of the man in charge of the flags. If anyone wished to remove the flag, he should contact the responsible. This gave more food to my thoughts and assumptions: I thought that a civil servant was in charge or even a police officer.

I made a note of the email address and contacted the person-Chad Lund.  He gladly provided information over the phone, allowed me to take pictures of flags and use them for this post. What is at the core of this however is that  I was happy to discover an individual initiative which aimed at reinforcing peoples’ sense of belonging to this nation and celebrating the day of independence-not letting it pass by unnoticed. As I found, this private initiative started 10 years ago, after Chad’s friend suggested it and he adopted the idea. Chad pays some people to walk around and place the flags. Such a move is met with positive attitudes and a very small percentage (10 out of 8000 is a small number, he replied to me) complain or think that he is trespassing. Still, he agreed in that he aims at communicating a message to people and that is no other than refueling their “Americanness”.

If we wish to interpret this move, we can bring forward two variables. The first is about the sense of belonging to the nation. This sense is here mediated by a man: the sense of “Americaness” includes a relation between Chad and locals. We can then see Chad’s act as a practice of what is called “imagined community”. People come together, even if they cannot know each other across a country only by virtue of doing the same thing. Benedict Anderson who introduced the term in his work on imagined communities focuses on the role of Print so as to bring people together and imagine each other by reading a newspaper across the country.  In our case it is by accepting the placement of the flag and thus endorsing their sense of belonging that helps bring people closer once more. I take it as a silent convention to which both the responsible and the inhabitants adhere –the quality of relation which Chad has eventually constructed and maintained over the years with locals in the area- and that is another aspect of practicing imagined communities.

 We can definitely take another turn in interpreting these acts. We can use a second variable and that is the concept of space organization or manipulation and see how space is transformed. The two variables are inextricably liked to each other: Chad’s relation to locals is limited to placing the flags, hence getting a permission to use a fragment of the space they own and use. This fragment of space-that little corner- is however imbued with meanings and becomes a “more”, something big-to my understanding. It is big because of the practice of imagined community as I described it above.  I consider this double relationship (Chad to people and people to the nation) and its annual confirmation more important than the use of space.  At the same time  the flag itself- a symbol of the whole nation and a synecdoche already itself- is imbued with a further meaning: it is the symbolic representation of this double  relationship.

This image as seen in every single house stands for the whole of this nation. The totality (the nation) is replaced by a fragment (the flag on the corner and all inherent meanings). Let us clarify this last point by going back to Michel de Certeau and his writings on manipulation of spatial organization (The practice of everyday life, pp 100-103). The rhetoric of walking, as we have already mentioned in another post consists of two stylistic figures, one of which is asyndeton and the other is synecdoche. We are here concerned with synecdoche.  According to de Certeau: “Synecdoche consists in using a word in a sense which is part of another meaning of the same word.  In essence, it names a part instead of the whole which includes it (p.101).  Synecdoche expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a more (a totality) and take its place (the bicycle or the piece of furniture in a store window stands for a whole street or neighborhood). Synecdoche replaces totalities by fragments (a less in the place of a more). Synecdoche makes more dense: It amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole (ibid). A space treated in this way and shaped by practices is transformed into enlarged singularities (p 102).

As I kept observing the flags and contemplating on them, it all came to sharp contrast with neglected statements of Greekness as I have been experiencing them happening  in my home town, Argostoli. People used to  hang  big flags by their balconies or front  house walls. I can easily recall this kind of “ritual” starting the evening before our National days and ending the day following the celebration. Every household had its own big flag attached to a  wooden pole. Both were taken care of and kept in a convenient place inside the house all year long. The aesthetics was very pleasing: roads full of the “blue-white”- (γαλανόλευκη) as we call our flag in Greece- in full wave on a sunny October and March day. Today, only exceptions to this “tradition” can be seen: the broad image is that of non-statements: of flags not being shown in public.

I am just wondering: if few Angelinos allow flags in their private space, how many Greeks would allow for a  similar act?

The photograph on the right shows the Greek flag on the March 25th national day. It is easily seen that no other house on this side of the road bears the flag.

Can you tell by the smell?

                                   Can you tell by the smell?

My weekly  shopping  is characterized by a kind of a “ritual” to which I most happily engage when having to select  particular fruit-and a couple of vegetables- during summer time. Melons, water-melons, tomatoes and cucumbers  give a very distinct and most fine smell. Such a smell works as a sign for quality and guarantees full taste.

I had just engaged in this ritual this past Saturday morning-and obviously turned a public space into a sensory landscape, much like all customers do in a supermarket- when a lady who happened to be standing right next to me  noticed my practice and asked: “can you tell by the smell?”. I was surprised and felt as if I had been suddenly awaken by her. My “journey” to the senses was interrupted. I turned to her and replied positively: “yes, I can. See, melons, water melons and cucumbers have a fine smell. And you can tell by the smell. If there is no smell or the smell is annoying, then they are bad.” “How interesting, very interesting” she stressed in a bright face. I left her wondering and continued my shopping.

I can recall having seen, touched, smelled and eaten fresh fruit and vegetables just picked from the field when living at home. Over the years, I developed an attachment to what anthropologists call the sensory landscape. I taught myself to distinguish sweet taste from bitterness just by smelling cucumbers and while cutting them. I also learnt to distinguish sweet from non sweet melons again by smelling them. Different smells could reveal different things to me. I was led to this conclusion after tasting bitter cucumbers and tasteless melons and water melons. My first experiments to “tell by the smell” were successful, so I decided to cling on the sense of smell so as to foresee the quality of taste of raw food.

This use of senses, during which one is used for the sake of the other, is called synaesthesia. D. Sutton[1] describes the term as encompassing different relations between senses. He quotes Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1999): “From color, steam rising, gloss and texture, we infer taste smell and feel. . . .Taste is something we anticipate and infer from how things look, feel to the hand, smell (outside the mouth), and sound”.

D. Sutton, in concluding his review on works on food and the senses, advises us to turn to “everyday life and the multiple contexts in which the culturally shaped sensory properties and sensory experiences of food are invested with meaning, emotion, memory, and value”. (p 220) His article on the food and the senses emphasizes the role of the taste and refers to relations between taste and other senses.

I would here like to agree with and emphasize the fact that sensory experiences are invested with meanings and values and want to touch briefly on this by unfolding my personal relation to smell and its meanings as seen through synaesthesia. It is my conviction that people can learn to tell by the smell-even though I am fully aware of the slippery ground on which I touch, given the modern techniques of food production and consumption in urban areas in particular. Still, experimenting with the sense of smell while in Los Angeles, I found that it is safe enough a guide on which to rely.

Such an emphasis on smell does not allude to an exclusive role of memory or to a passive attachment to personal experiences (from early childhood up to a few months ago) when accessing local farms full of seasonal plants and tress and occasionally helping with the daily harvest. I do not reproduce this kind of past, nor I do not imagine it. I only use the particular sense as a form of “knowledge” in order to imagine- and somehow predict- another sense. I am drawing a causal relation between the two senses and incorporate a feeling of time: if smell is good right now, then taste will be good as soon as I consume the product. I recycle the outcome of my previous direct engagement with fruit and vegetables, I advance my own preference for smell instead of sound and I continuously test the value of smell.  

I impose an aspect of my subjectivity to the process of fruit selection thus investing smell with a specific meaning. To the extent that I prove right, the sense of smell confirms itself as an infallible guide, it invites for more trust and hence for future use and it strengthens its relation to taste. This is the meaning that I attribute to smell within the framework of synaesthesia.

  This preference can be further illustrated by the fact that I have noticed how other people seem to tell by the sound. I have seen them knocking on melons and water melons while bending over the fruit to listen to the produced sound. When first noticing this practice, it appeared very strange to me and completely unsafe to trust, so I asked my friend who engaged in this very process too. She replied that: “you can tell by the sound that the fruit is good enough and ripe or not”.

It is my belief and constant practice that we need to let “culturally shaped sensory properties” aside for a moment (if we think of them as influencing and directing individuals to specific cultural practices) and turn to subjective experiences and uses of them so as to explore  a broad nexus of relations between senses that people can draw or manipulate. By this I mean the limits, errors or new alternatives and possibilities to which they are open and thus understand how people invest them with meaning.

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[1] D. Sutton (2010): “Food and the senses”. In: Annual Review of  Anthropology,  39:209–23.

The original farmers' market in Los Angeles at 3rd Street and Fairfax: a photo essay