The set of scapes proposed by Appadurai in Modernity at large to describe the flow of culture is an idea with which I was previously unfamiliar. This idea might not have changed my thinking about the world completely, but it has certainly predisposed and led me to think about my surroundings trying to discern the scapes present in my everyday life.
Last week I was standing in the “Spanish food” isle in the supermarket and, after seeing the variety of products available in a neighborhood with an almost non-existent hispanic population, I thought about the many products that have made their way into the common diet of the average american. As I walked back home, I realized that the flow of culture that is evident by the availability of food products originally from other countries is also manifest in the diversity of restaurants found in the shopping center. Athough it is a small shopping center, there is an Italian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a sushi place and a Chipotle. The only “American” establishment available is a Dunkin’ Donuts. Halfway home I entered a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine for dinner. Since the wine is not divided by type, but by its origin, the most notable feature in the liquor store are the signs and flags (Argentina, Chile, Spain, France, Italy, Australia, and California). This foodscape is an effective example of culture flow. In addition, it can be related to Paul Jay’s conception that culture travels with commodities.
I’m starting to think that I see transnational processes everywhere. It is something similar to buying a car and then noticing how everyone seems to own the same model. That same day after dinner, Melissa and I watched a clip from John Oliver’s Las Week Tonight about gay rights in Uganda. Anti-gay laws in Uganda were introduced during the British colonization of the country. Nonetheless, their enforcement was strengthened after a group of American evangelicals came to Uganda speaking against homosexuality. Fortunately, the laws were revoked some time afterwards because they were approved without a quorum. This is reminiscent of the ethnoscapes put forward by Appadurai, which refers to the moving of individuals from one place to another. As this example shows, ideas, and therefore culture, travels with them.
Furthermore, last Thursday I was reading the online edition of El País and came across an article about the attempt by some retailers to popularize the Black Friday model in Spain. The first retailers that tried to attract shoppers with such a model have their headquarters in the United States. However, there are also Spanish retailers participating. Spain is not the only country that has imported this shopping event. In Mexico a similar event, known as El buen fin (The good weekend), has been taking place since 2011. The event lasts four days and was promoted by business associations and the federal government. Appadurai explains that financescapes have their own constraints and incentives. This is the logic working on the particular implementation of the Black Friday model in Spain and Mexico.
As you can see, the idea of culture flows and transnationalism in general is persistent on the back of my head in my everyday life. For this reason there are great possibilities that in the future I will approach literature and other media from this perspective. I have no doubts that in the future I will be trying to publish an article or participating in a conference about transnationalism in contemporary Latin American literature.
What you said here about Black Friday being adapted in Spain and Mexico reminded me of a conversation I had last week with my German speaking partner, who is from Berlin. We were talking about the differences in how Christmas is celebrated in our respective countries, and I was asking my partner what a Weihnachtsmarkt – a Christmas market – is really like, because he’d complained previously about the lack of “Christmas foods” in the grocery stores here, and I’d therefore been picturing a Christmas market as being a seasonal section of a store or something like that. It turned out I was way off the mark, and a Weihnachtsmarkt is somewhat closer to the tree-lighting and winter craft fair my hometown has every year, but bigger and with more food and things to do (and alcohol; to the best of my knowledge they don’t serve mulled wine at the craft fair).
In describing it to me, my partner remarked that he thinks it’s strange that the markets haven’t been adapted in the U.S., because it seems like the sort of thing commercial America would be all about. This made me wonder what an American “German” Christmas market would look like. How much of what one would traditionally find at a German Weihnachtsmarkt would one find at a Christmas market in Maryland? How much would be too out of context for American consumers to appreciate, and how much would be adapted or altered?
After considering this for a bit I remembered a) that there is a year-round Christmas theme park an hour from my house in New Hampshire, and b) that my experiences at the Lovettsville, Virginia, Oktoberfest earlier this semester bore only a vague and disappointing relationship to anything German at all. Given these possible subjects of comparison, I wonder if a regularly-held Christmas market in the U.S. would end up being more commercialized than traditional and either way, how popular would it be? I suppose it would likely depend on the purposes behind creating such a space in the U.S. and which of Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ best apply.
I can identify completely with the experience of seeing the motions of Appadurai’s scales everywhere — perhaps it’s partially because we read it so early in the semester, but Modernity at Large just seems to keep coming back up for me. I’m interested in the food and economic features that you pointed out. Is it possible, I wonder, to determine whether the presence of diverse ethnic traditions via food constitutes appropriating or embracing a culture? What might the difference between the two be? Perhaps a recognition and appreciation of the source culture, which I don’t think is part of the experience of, for example, Chipotle. I also wonder what makes a product or an establishment representative of a particular culture. Chipotle is unquestionably Mexican-themed, yet it was created by an American who trained in French cooking. The complexity of cultural signifiers that are mobilized for contexts and audiences that are separate from the original culture is an interesting issue, particularly when, as you point out, so many of the products Americans consume are either literally or symbolically connected to other countries and cultures. The question of a source or an end point for anything becomes, perhaps, irrelevant, which I think might also relate to Appadurai’s concept of cascades that move through places, building, exploding, and reforming.
I really appreciate this fascinating application of Appadurai’s concept of the scape! In my mind I associated the idea with somewhat limited, defined presentations. The mediascape, for example, I associated with fairly traditional forms of media. I do think, however, that your examples highlight the transnational impact on the landscape around us. The multinational/transnational dimension of food highlights how easy it is to take these things for granted. Reading your descriptions make me think of the grocery store in my hometown, which has a separate aisle for “Oriental” food. From my shopping experiences, it’s seemingly arbitrary what constitutes “Oriental” cuisine, and what should be sold elsewhere in the store. Other aisles may have short-grain white rice, for example, but only in that aisle can you find Nishiki brand short-grain white rice. I wonder who makes these distinctions, and on what basis. This store was also one of the very first in my little town to sell sushi, nearly 15 years ago. It’s interesting to consider how rapidly, though subtly, the change in the foodscape around us mimics the changing cultural landscape.