Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys

Abstract

In this paper I examine intersections of food, identity, and place within the imagined ‘regions’ of everyday practices, stories, and memories. As such, I continue traditions of writing in cultural geography exemplified by David Bell and Gill Valentine's [1997 Consuming Geographies (Routledge, London)] focus on connecting cultures of food and place, Jon May's (1996a, “‘A little taste of something more exotic’” Geography81 57–64; 1996b, “Globalization and the politics of place” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series21 194–215) nuanced explorations of ‘exotic’ eating in North London, and by Ian Cook, Phil Crang, and Mark Thorpe's [1999, “Eating into Britishness”, in Practising Identities Eds S Roseneil, J Seymour (Macmillan, London) pp 223–248] reflections on British culinary imaginaries and their ‘multicultural’ inscriptions. Specifically, this paper is concerned with ways that conceptions of ethnicity delineate and divide everyday spaces: how meanings of Britishness and Australianness, based in the primacy of ‘tradition’, ‘the West’, and Anglo-Celtic belongings, permeate everyday life in London and Sydney and shape their food cultures. The paper traces moments in the culinary biographies of two women, one English and one Australian of British descent, living in London and Sydney, respectively, and close to shopping streets known for the diversity of their ‘ethnic’ communities. The women's narratives are instructive in their continuities, as much as in their disjunctions. The argument follows some of these, including unexpected engagements with ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ and ‘cosmopolitan identity’. Resonances from these engagements contribute to a more complex and ambivalent sense of belonging than first supposed. This is still the region of ‘mainstream’, ‘Anglo’-identity, yet it is one marked by constant spatial redefinition and by occasional porosity of boundary.

‘Dad says I'm tied to a shooting star!’ Grounding (research on) British expatriate belonging

“…Although in other writing I have represented the polyphony of expatriate voices and identities that my research encountered from this sampling method (Walsh 2005), in this paper I have adopted a different approach by focusing on a single research subject. Recently, several geographers have chosen to conduct and write through their research using in‐depth geographies of one or two subjects, whether that be in order to challenge historical assumptions through biographical accounts of unique lives (Bressey 2005), give adequate depth to qualitative exploration of identities (Duruz 2005), or use the author's own experiences to get at the physicality of everyday practices (Jones 2005). Indeed, a series of pieces on biographical approaches in migration studies have stressed the importance of in‐depth consideration of individuals’ biographies in order to emphasize the situatedness of the migration process within everyday life and reveal an understanding that other approaches do not (Halfacree and Boyle 1993; Findlay and Li 1997a 1997b).…”

Transnational disruptions: materialities and temporalities of transnational citizenship among Somali refugees in Cairo

“…One might think that a small-scale ethnographic case would thwart extensive comparative analysis across groups of migrants from different national backgrounds and legal and socio-economic conditions, thus limiting the scope of the analysis (Walsh 2006b). However, an approach based on extensive, in-depth engagement with single individuals or small groups in a specific locale can be very productive in the study of transnational belonging (Duruz 2005;Walsh 2006b). As Walsh argued, devoting research time to a single subject, family unit or small group of people provides in-depth insights into biographical trajectories and allows one 'to include the unexpected, unpredictable, disruptive moments and resonances' in the everyday lives of transnational migrants (Walsh 2006b: 271, see also Duruz 2005).…”

“…However, an approach based on extensive, in-depth engagement with single individuals or small groups in a specific locale can be very productive in the study of transnational belonging (Duruz 2005;Walsh 2006b). As Walsh argued, devoting research time to a single subject, family unit or small group of people provides in-depth insights into biographical trajectories and allows one 'to include the unexpected, unpredictable, disruptive moments and resonances' in the everyday lives of transnational migrants (Walsh 2006b: 271, see also Duruz 2005). Similarly, although multi-sited ethnography continues to be the privileged methodology, scholars frequently adopt the single-sited approach in analyses that aim to 'ground' research on transnational migration (Gielis 2011;Walsh 2006b).…”

Critical Geographies of Body Size

“…It is clear that ‘everyday places and facilities are planned for specific body shapes’ (Bell and Valentine 1997, 36), and so people's negotiations of these everyday places are crucial in advancing critical geographies of body size. There is work about retailing locations (Colls 2004, 2006; Crewe 2001), public spaces (Longhurst 2000), food and consumption practices (Duruz 2005; Valentine 1999) and certain workplaces (McDowell 2005) in terms of thinking about bodies, identities and places. However, what about the microgeographies associated with people's everyday experiences of their body size?…”