英文摘要 |
Food is memories? Many case studies in the fields of dietary culture and historical memory in contemporary Taiwan intend to explore the dialectic relationship between food and identity and memory making, but very few of them look theoretically into the specific mechanisms by which food is transformed into individual or collective memories. Beginning with a close reading and interpretation of the "Madeleine Moment" in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, this article intends to propose a theoretical and analytical framework for studying food memories and then apply it in the interpretation of the "Madeleine Moment" in the dietary writing of mainlanders in postwar Taiwan. For the purpose of this article, I first illuminate the social and cultural significance of the food by exploring various research approaches to dietary culture since the late nineteenth century. Based on the discussion in the first part of this article, I then go on to demonstrate the ways in which food is transformed into memory from the perspectives of the physiology of memory, anthropology, and historical studies, through an understanding the concepts of "bodily memory," "communicative memory," and"cultural memory." Finally, the third part of this article moves to use this theoretical and analytical framework to explore the changing features of the "Madeleine Moment" in the dietary writing of the first and second generations of Mainlanders as well as in the literature of the military dependents' villages (juancun wenxue) in the 1990s. In doing so, this article aims to show the dialectic relationship between the ever-changing configurations of the social identity of Mainlanders and their narratives of food memories under the larger context of Sinification and Taiwanization in postwar Taiwan. I show that food memories not only function as the media of memory to construct and reconstruct identities by storing, maintaining, and circulating certain social groups' understanding and knowledge of certain pasts, but also work as a window to see how social memory is ever-changing with social, political, and cultural shifts. |