Research Update

I am currently in the throws of writing a dissertation chapter, but I stopped long enough to present the chapter theme(s) at a conference.  Here is an excerpt …

Orienting memories: taste and comfort food in hospice care

For hospice clients, food and memories are important domains of social practice as they negotiate their social death. Among hospice clients, memories of food and important social relationships are linked to one’s memory of taste, orienting the ‘self’ back-toward past experiences of ordinary food-events, ritual celebrations, and important kin relationships.

I used a specific ethnographic vignette from my fieldwork as a hospice volunteer that allowed me to witness a client eating some favourite childhood candies.  I could not believe the effect!

What did I see?

Comfort food/candy triggered an embodied memory, which in turn appeared to have alter her pain threshold.  In this specific case, the consumption of childhood candy triggered the comforting memory of a specific kin relationship.  The taste of the candy evoked a time of ontological security whereby my client tasted comfort and temporary pain relief in the face of her social fragmentation and corporeal diminishment.

The consumption of these memories involved a spatial re-orientation of significant kin relationships and the commensality of family food-events.

Building upon Hertz’s primary thesis that, for the social body, the process of death involves a transition into the ancestral world, it is my contention that the re-ordering of the dying person and their social world necessarily occurs in the present, while consuming these moments of orienting-forward, past memories of commensality and kin relationships.

As I continue to write this chapter I will explore the phenomenological boundaries of taste as it evokes embodied memories in the phenomenal field. The consumption of these memories seems to help clients negotiate a certain ontological security that helps restore coherence to one’s social identity in the midst of its disassembly during the liminal process of the social death.