Meeting in the market: The constitution of seasonal, ritual, and inter-cultural time in Malaysia

Abstract

Markets transform the streets of Malaysia with smells, textures, sounds, colours, and flavours that shift with daily, seasonal, and ritual time. Time is experienced through the consumption, production, ingestion, and practice of food; and this experience is mediated by the senses. In multiethnic Malaysia different temporalities coexist, patterning public space and the marketplace with the varying signs of their passing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, and by mapping the transformation of Malaysian markets through ritual and everyday food, this article brings together the phenomenal and the semiotic to explore how culturally embedded temporalities express themselves spatially through food in shared, and sometimes contested, locales.