We can also conceptualize the “local” in two ways. On the one hand it is the bounded concrete space that is characterized by face-to-face contact and by the shared common ground of customs and traditions. In imperialist discourses it is often conceptualized as a backwater left out of modernist “progress”. But “local” can also be symbolic, “it relates to the distinctive identities and interests of local and regional communities”(P. 37). The British pub in your locality is literally your “local”. Local can be about nostalgia for things now past. It can be a lament for lost authenticity in changing times. As well, the media can now create “locals” that are not tied to physical space. We can see the McSpotlight Internet site as a kind of local response to McDonaldisation, even though paradoxically it attracts a global audience. The local here is the symbolic site for resistance against the domination of the global.
“Every local story is part of a global ‘big picture’” (Dirlik, 1996, p. 37). Dirlik stresses the futility of setting up the global and the local as binary opposites, preferring to stress the dualities and interplays rather than the polarization. It is important to see how the local “operates within the logic of globalization” (van Elteren, 1996, p. 58). An extreme example of this interplay is that of the stranger in an exotic land, for whom that archetypal global symbol the Big Mac can provide the familiarity of the local. The global/local debate comes in many guises, but the tensions between the forces of homogenization and heterogenization and the interplay between standardization of culture and its fragmentation can be used to “illuminate” the changing role of food to the extent that it acts as a marker of cultural identity.
The global – cultural imperialism
Though we no longer “map the globe into binary opposites of center and periphery”(Wilson & Dissanayake, 1996, p. 3), the strand in the global/local debate of cultural imperialism can help conceptualize food as a marker of identity. Imperialism is based on the assumption that ideological messages and cultural forms are sent from the “West to the rest” and are then accepted by the local unchanged. Global media play a major part with their bombardment of images that “take the viewer beyond stable sense” (Featherstone, 1991, p. 15). The discourse comes in many forms, from the sinister notion of American military and industrial alliances deliberately subordinating peripheral nations by flooding them with cultural goods (Schiller, 1969), to the more light-hearted representation of “Cocacolonization” (Hannerz, 1996) in the movie “The Gods must be Crazy”, where the finding of a coke bottle sees the complete transformation of a Kalahari Desert society.
One variation, Robin’s (1997) “McDonaldisation” thesis, stresses the link between the foods we choose and the cultural values embedded in them. The fast food chain exports more than the burger. It exports “identities waiting to be consumed” (James, 1996, p. 82). The burger involves principles of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. It is about the standardization of production and the homogenization of taste. A whole way of life sweeps the globe. Our sense of choice is undermined and so is our sense of cultural identity. We recognize that this global movement can involve “glocal strategies” (Robertson, 1992), in that the dominant producer can factor in local conditions. Mcdonalds in India, for example, has announced it is to be beef free, in a response to local conditions that is not needed in its homeland. But the power remains with the global organization.
Imperialism theses are subject to criticism for ignoring the strength of local resistance and failing to give due credit to the consumer’s ability to subsume the import through processes of creolization and indigenization. But the McDonaldization thesis still has relevance in this discussion as we identify a recognizable trend towards a universal culture, dominated by American culture, that Robins (1997, p. 19) calls everyone’s second culture. This standardized second culture weakens the role of food as a cultural marker.
The local – creolization
Howes (1996, p.1) relates an anecdote of cultural clash in West African villages. A multinational introduced a new line of American baby food with a smiling baby on the label. The villagers were horrified. According to their cultural framework, “the jar must contain food not made for babies, but made of babies”. This anecdote illustrates how imperialism discourses fail to take account of the active nature of local reception. Local cultures do not passively receive messages, ideas and values, but are discriminatory and selective in their consumption and sense making. They can adapt and transform these messages for their own purposes, or they can reject their values. Using a food analogy “they can ‘season’ them with their own values and customs” (Howes, 1996, p. 183).
Chinese tacos, curry and chips, vegetarian haggis. “Creolization is the process of recontextualization, whereby foreign goods are assigned meanings and uses by the culture of reception” (Howes, 1996, p. 5). When cultural messages are cut off from their original framework of understanding they lose their original significance. New “hybrid” forms can result that may share features with the original culture but may not be recognizably part of either culture. Food is particularly prone to creolization. Consider for example the tinned corned beef on South Auckland supermarket shelves. It came originally to the Pacific Islands as a European food used to feed sailors. Islanders assigned their own meaning to it. For them, fatty foods had value in providing reserves for survival on ocean going voyages. They creolized it by combining it with a variety of Island foods such as taro and coconut milk. Then, along with the influx of Islanders seeking work, the tinned beef came back to Auckland, now labeled “Palm” with evocative Island scenes on the label. The deterritorialized Islanders see it as a symbol for the lost “local”, an attempt to return symbolically to the homeland.
This process of deterritorialization is a strong feature of the global/local debate. Robins (1997, p. 33) contends it is “one of the central forces of the modern world”. Flows of people across borders create new markets for foods that supply the alienated with a sense of contact with the homeland. Gradually these foods are assimilated into the new culture, often creolized as original ingredients and methods are not easily obtained. Only five years ago in Canada, sushi existed only in expensive restaurants catering for the wealthy Asian tourist. Today the increasing Asian population has made it a food hall takeaway. It has been accepted, and creolized when it comes without Wasabe or with local ingredients to cater for the American palate. It is to be found downtown with whole mussels wrapped round the seaweed, surely a denial of the whole point of sushi as an economical use of protein. Deterritorialization with its themes of alienation and displacement is linked to the creolization of food. The process undermines food’s signification. We can no longer be certain of what values and ideas belong to what stereotype. Food is no longer a stable identity marker of culture.
Local – a site of resistance
Culturally unifying global processes have ironically brought a renewed interest in the local as a site of resistance. Partly this is inspired by the “postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives” (Dirlik, 1996, p. 24), and partly it is inspired by the rise of social movements such as feminism that explore perspectives of the “other” (p.23). Partly it is a reaction to the sense of loss of distinctive identity under global homogenization. Local resistance uses food to reassert traditionalism or ethnicity, since food has always acted as a boundary marker between groups. Resistance can take the form of the extreme xenophobia of France in refusing to allow McDonalds into its land, or of fundamentalist hard-line, as with the Hindu boycott of Coca Cola and Pepsi. Or it can be the family cooks pouring over Grandma’s recipe book, or the “real ale” movement in British pubs. It can be about reviving food rituals or trying to reproduce original stock plants. James (1996, p. 89) points out that the desire for “authenticity” is generally not a mass movement but the province of the well off. In Auckland there is a “Pudding Club” where, for a price, you indulge in English “Plum Duff” and “Spotted Dick”- nostalgia for a colonial past.
But this nostalgia is more romantic ideal than reality. At one extreme, Appadurai (1996, p. 90-1) in a global twist shows how Filipinos “look back to a world they have never lost”, an American world which for them is “nostalgia without memory”. Dirlik (1996, p. 40) argues that authenticity is “daily disorganized by global forces that seek to assimilate it”. James (1996, p. 89) believes that in Britain we might just as well argue for the “authenticity” of curry and chips, given that Indian takeaways outnumber fish and chip shops. The discourse of local resistance to the global again reiterates how under these conditions, food has become unstable as a marker of culture.
Conclusion
Although we may still attempt to use food to express our individual identity, in cultural terms the juxtaposition of global and local, the impossibility of distinguishing the one without reference to the other, the endless adaptations made on the “field” of globalization, the creation of fluid and multiple identities under these new conditions and the close-up experience of multiculturalism all mean that old identifications, old stereotypes, old borders do not apply in the world of late capitalism. We can no longer assert that we are moving towards a unified common culture. We can no longer assert that there are cultural boundaries that create fixed stable categories. Food is no longer a stable marker of cultural identity. This is the extent to which the global/local debate can “illuminate” the topic of food.
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Term Paper for Communications 247
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Michael Arneja
‘I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’
Mahatma Gandhi