Lauren Berkovitch: Salt and Honey / Chris Barry: Atonement
It was Proust, with his use of the madeleine motif, who initially drew attention to the role of the senses as triggers of memory. More recently, cultural theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has questioned the adequacy of a purely ideological approach to modern identity construction. He finds many of the proponents of the theory of 'the invention of tradition' guilty of concentrating exclusively on the ideas propagated by modern nation states, thereby ignoring the importance of sensory training in the imparting of tradition:
No 'invention of tradition' is effective without a simultaneous invocation of affect, of sentiments, emotions, and other embodied practices… Practices of subjectivity are embodied, our senses are culturally trained-smelling, tasting, touching, seeing and hearing. Ideas alone cannot provide a genealogy of tradition. Ideas acquire materiality through the history of bodily practices. They work not simply because they persuade through their logic; they are also capable, through a long and heterogeneous training of the senses, of making connections with our glands and muscles and neuronal networks. This is the work of memory... The past is embodied through a long process oftraining the senses...'1
It is because our feelings are constructed from sensual memories, not only ideas, that we can continue to respond emotionally to nationalistic songs and flags, to religious hymns and icons and to the aromas of festival fare, even though we may have rejected nationalism and religion intellectually.
Though employing different media, both of the exhibitions that were staged simultaneously in adjacent spaces at the Jewish Museum in Melbourne through August and September 2002 shared a focus on memory and highlighted the central rqle