Philip Crang

The World On a Plate: Culinary Culture, Displacement and Geographical Knowledges

This article uses claims about the local globalization of culinary culture to stage an argument about the character of material cultural geographies and their spaces of identity practice. It approaches these geographies in two ways. First, it views foods not only as placed cultural artefacts, but also as dis-placed materials and practices, inhabiting many times and spaces which, far from being neatly bounded, bleed into and mutually constitute each other. Second, it considers the geographical knowledges, or understandings, of foods geo graphies, mobilized within circuits of culinary culture, outlining their pro duction through processes of commodity fetishism, and arguing for forms of critical intervention that work with the fetish rather than attempt to reach behind it.

It's Showtime: On the Workplace Geographies of Display in a Restaurant in Southeast England

The geographies of one particular restaurant workplace in the southeast of England are considered. It is argued that such workplace geographies—broadly of surveillance, display, and location—help to constitute the character of an employment. Here, this is demonstrated through an examination of the performative geographies of display in waiting work in Smoky Joes restaurant. This examination is then used in two ways: both to draw out some implications of the interpersonal nature of this particular job; and to establish some broader analytical dimensions—sociospatial relations of consumption—to aid the understanding of how and why other jobs may be similar or different.

Displacement, Consumption, and Identity

Increasingly attention is being paid to the ways in which consumption is a geographically constituted process. In this paper the notion of ‘displacement’ is used to reflect on these constitutive geographies, and in particular as a way of understanding contemporary consumption neither as a homogenising nor a locally bounded social activity. Two aspects of the geographies of displacement within consuming worlds are highlighted: the representations of origins, travels, and destinations—or geographical knowledges—that surround and in part comprise commodities; and the juxtapositional character of the arenas in which consumption takes and makes place. These geographies are illustrated and critically analysed through examples of commodities that deploy representations of the ‘global’, the ‘ethnic’, and the ‘hospitable’.

Biographies and geographies: consumer understandings of the origins of foods

This article argues for a biographical and geographical understanding of foods and food choice. It suggests that such an approach highlights one of the most compelling characteristics of food ‐ that being the way in which it connects the wide worlds of an increasingly internationalised food system into the intimate space of the home and the body. More specifically, and based on ongoing empirical research with 12 households in inner north London, the article explores one aspect of food biographies, through an interlinked consideration of what consumers know of the origins of foods and consumers’ reactions to systems of food provision. It concludes that a structural ambivalence can be identified, such that consumers have both a need to know and an impulse to forget the origins of the foods they eat.

Fashioning ethnicities: The commercial spaces of multiculture

This article discusses the entanglement of commerce and culture in the production of ethnicized commodities. Drawing on a case study of fashion label Ghulam Sakina and its designer Liaqat Rasul, we explore how he engages with a notion of `multicultural as both sociological, aesthetic and commercial. We argue that commodification is not something done to pre-existing ethnicities and ethnic subjects, but is a process through which ethnicities are reproduced and in which ethnic subjects actively engage with broader discourses and institutions. We conclude by arguing that commodity culture does not inevitably result in the production of superficial, thin and bland ethnic differentiations. Nor does it inevitably involve the appropriation of ethnic forms constructed as `authentic. Rather, our case study suggests that commodity culture can mobilize varied `multicultural imaginaries.

Eating into Britishness: Multicultural Imaginaries and the Identity Politics of Food

Lurking behind the simplicity of the aphorism that ‘you are what you eat’ are much more complex relations between food and identity practice. In this chapter we will be trying to suggest some of that complexity by exploring two aspects of those relations in the British context. First, we will be outlining how everyday practices of commodified food provision and consumption involve the production and consumption not only of foods but of social imaginaries, which position individual dietary practices within wider discursive framings. Second, we will be concentrating on one particular set of such imaginaries: those constituting a multicultural space of different foods, peoples and places. This latter focus is not chosen at random. The postwar internationalization of food provision and consumption within the UK has been widely noted within studies both of the food system and of British diets and tastes (Mennell, 1985; Goodman and Redclift, 1991; Arce and Marsden, 1993; Cook, 1994). It is not only driven by the large retailers’ desire to establish global supply chains that counteract the seasonality of production and ensure the cheapest possible sourcing, but also involves a set of promotional commentaries on the global culinary reach of British food providers.

Mrs Thatcher's Vision of the ‘New Britain’ and the other Sides of the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’

Over the past decade, the city of Cambridge has been used increasingly by academics and the media as an exemplar of the role that entrepreneurial high-technology development can play in local and national economic growth. Politically, this symbolism has found a ready resonance with the Thatcher governments vision of the ‘new Britain’. In this paper the reality and rhetoric behind this use of Cambridge is critically examined. First, the politics and polemics of locality under Thatcherism are highlighted. Second, the dominant account of the much-celebrated ‘Cambridge phenomenon’ is outlined to reveal its ideological leitmotivs of entrepreneurship, high-technology, postindustrialism, the small firm, and the union of academic science and business. Third, it is shown how these rhetorical constructions of a ‘boomtown’ locality are in reality weakened by a number of tensions within the ‘phenomenon’ itself. Moreover, it is then shown that there are important silences in the dominant view of Cambridge, certain ‘other sides’ to the city that portray a rather different set of meanings, both about Cambridge as a success story and about high-technology development as the basis of economic prosperity. These other sides of Cambridge provide a much more complex and, in some important respects, a very different expression of the socioeconomic renewal championed by Thatcherism.

The transnational spaces of things: South Asian textiles in Britain and The Grammar of Ornament

South Asian, or ‘Indian’, textiles have long been both apparent and appreciated within British culture. They form an important part of what we can see as a British Asian transnational space of things. This paper examines this space and the cultural exchanges that constitute it, in order to raise wider issues concerning the relations between transnationality, space and histories of material culture. The paper starts with some contextual observations on approaches to transnationality that foreground material culture. The appeal and problems of accounts that ‘follow’ things transnationally are reviewed, and matters of ‘design’, ‘style’ and ‘pattern’ are argued to be a fertile edge to this approach. As an illustration, the paper then focuses more specifically on a case study, Owen Joness The Grammar of Ornament (first published in 1856), relating its representation and reproduction of Indian patterns to the material collections of South Asian textiles within the Victorian ‘exhibitionary complex’, examining the material transformations made to Indian ornament in these processes, and setting these acquisitions and alterations in the context of Victorian British design culture. By way of conclusion, the paper draws out what this narrative of The Grammar of Ornament says more generally about how we approach transnationality, and specifically transnational space, through things and material culture.

Book Reviews : Indifferent boundaries: spatial concepts of human subjectivity. By K. M. Kirby. New York, Guilford Press. 1996. xiv + 170 pp. £16.99, paper. ISBN 0 89862 572 6

theme ’Making and breaking geographies’. Section 2 asks: ’What difference does geography make?’, examining ways in which geographies constitute social practice. The role of geography in shaping social identity is then examined in Section 3. Next is a consideration of the politics of representation in which essays challenge the old dichotomy between ’real’ objective geography and the fanciful depictions of artists and others. The final section returns attention to the domain of academic geography, re-presenting manifestos by David Harvey and David Stoddart, as well as a closing essay by Mona Domosh in which she foregrounds

Book Reviews : The field of cultural production. By P. Bourdieu. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1993. viii + 322 pp. £45.00 cloth. ISBN 0 745 60986 4. £12.95 paper. ISBN 0 745 60987 2

of the urban environment’ (concerning the early Renaissance period); ’The difficult adjustment to the laws of perspective’ (taking the story up to the Industrial Revolution and also highlighting the divergence of the English experience from the rectilinear model adopted elsewhere in Europe); ’The industrial city’ (actually a chapter more given over to discussion of Haussmannization than to a consideration of urban form