Moving Food: Gustatory Commensality And Disjuncture In Everyday Multiculturalism

Abstract

Cosmopolitanism is often conceived as an ethical stance holding the potential to overcome racist, nationalist identity orientations which undermine an individual's capacity to embrace, define, and inhabit the multicultural nation and multi-ethnic city on non-assimilative terms. While cosmopolitanism has become a topic of considerable attention from philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and others, Beck has astutely asked, how do cosmopolitan democracy, justice, solidarity, legality, politics, statehood and so forth become possible? (1) To that I would add, how does one become the kind of person who might hold a 'cosmopolitan world view' with the capacity to enact this in everyday life? In addition, given that this was a traditionally bourgeois concept, (2) how do class, gender, age and other forms of difference and overlapping hierarchies inflect the process of 'becoming cosmopolitan'? There is a recently emerging literature that differentiates between cosmopolitan ethics, which define it in utopian, normative terms, and cosmopolitan practice. (3) Only very recently, however, has attention begun to turn to the question of 'becoming cosmopolitan'; that is how it is that the dispositional and affective capacity to take the 'cosmopolitan perspective' might evolve. (4) This does seem a pressing question since it lies at the heart of (questionable) anxieties expressed by individuals such as Trevor Philips, Britain's former Racial Discrimination Commissioner. In a controversial 200 (5) speech, Phillips argued that Britain was 'sleepwalking into segregation'. This he viewed as contributing to recent race riots and ethnic conflicts because 'we have allowed tolerance for diversity to harden into effective isolation of communities'.5 In his analysis of race-based riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham, influential policy thinkers like Ted Cantle responded to Phillips' concerns with calls for more 'mixing' across race and ethnic difference in a bid to build 'community cohesion'. (6) Consequently, the 'more mixing' discourse is now firmly embedded within public policy in the UK, Europe, Australia and elsewhere. (7) And these policies are clearly oriented towards working class forms of 'mixing' of the everyday variety. Implicit within these 'mixing' discourses is an assumption that quotidian contact with the Other will loosen identities, produce affective ties across difference, and produce more cosmopolitan dispositions amongst those involved in the 'mix'. Putting aside some of the obvious problems with Philips' and Cantle's reading of the extent, causes, and outcomes of 'segregation', it remains that 'mixing' continues to be a key aspect of contemporary community cohesion policies. However, to some extent the outcomes of mixing are typically presumed to be positive while more difficult aspects are often glossed over. (8) This poses the question then, under what conditions does 'intercultural mixing' change dispositions and orientations to the other? Food is frequently at the centre of much intercultural contact, figuring prominently in the deeply contested terrain of race, ethnicity and cultural diversity. Food travels diasporic and migratory routes, reproducing and recreating identities abroad; it can interweave with other foodways, creating hybrid or transversal identities, or reinforce the boundaries of old ones. It can be the subject of both disgust and desire, mediating cultural difference in multicultural settings. This all occurs in everyday settings; eating in an 'ethnic' restaurant, partaking in a multicultural feast, or eating at a multicultural festival. Because it is at once everyday, deeply embodied, and yet so symbolic of difference, food also appears regularly in community cohesion 'mixing' interventions to bring people together and foster intercultural conviviality. (9) However, such initiatives often simply assume that eating the food of the 'other' in intercultural situations will have positive outcomes for race and interethnic relations. …