Food, Family, and Memory: Belgrade Mothers and Their Migrant Children

Abstract

This article explores the link between food, memory, and cultural transmission in the context of migrant adult children and their mothers left behind. Since the fall of Yugoslavia in 1991 these women have experienced severe social, financial, and emotional disruption caused by the consequences of war, hyperinflation, post-communist turmoil, and the loss of children to migration. All this had a profoundly disorienting effect on these elderly women, leaving them to their own means to re-establish the sense of “wholeness” in their lives. Sending food to migrant children served to instill a memory of who these women are to their children and to remind migrants of their family. It also served mothers themselves to reiterate their role as “mothers” within a wider social network and society. Cultural transmission in the sphere of domesticity is one of few available ways for these elderly women to attain at least some sort of power in a male-dominated patriarchal Serbian society. Food, it will be argued here, does not only help migrants restore sense of “wholeness” (Sutton 2001:75), but it serves as a powerful tool in the process of social reproduction.