Hi Alison
Great post. Thanks.
Two things - quickly - in response:
1) I'm wondering if people involved in this blog might like to know why you were invited to be a co-author. What are you researching that's connected to these 2 reviews? You don't do food. You're not a geographer. Nobody would hold either against you, of course! And I didn't know you were getting into plastic fruit until you posted. Can you post some background?
2) the Carmen Miranda connection. I've quoted a couple of sections from a paper that Phil Crang, Mark Thorpe and I wrote (2004) which talks about Miranda's tropical fruitiness as an illustration of 'getting with the fetish', which seems to be something I should be posting about to follow up that theme from others. Here we go (sorry, no page numbers as I haven't got the book at home)...
"Through displacing 'her florid femininity ... onto her costume and make-up, the drag queen's tools of first resort' (Dibbell 1991, 45), Miranda 'acknowledged and openly participated in her (own) fetishisation' but 'knowingly' stared back at the audience implicating them in the process of constructing ludicrous stereotypes of Latin American 'ethnicity' and 'femininity' (López 1993, 76)."
"Going back to our initial critique of the veils of commodity fetishism neatly concealing exploitation, then, it is important to emphasise how Miranda brought such issues into the tropical commodity fetish she was supposed to inhabit, as did her many fans and imitators. She was the subject of a colonising gaze which made particular connections between nature, people and culture in the tropics. She inhabited a fetish where culture was nature, nature was female, and each willingly offered its fruits to the outside world. Yet her embodiment and knowing exaggerations of stereotypes, her persistent use of double and triple meanings, her humour, and her sheer 'in your face' tropical 'fruitiness' meant that she was no passive subject of that colonising gaze. The extent to which she 'got with this fetish' has been seen as something from which a great deal can be learned. As Dibbell (1991, 43 and 47) has argued: 'identity and difference, the central problems of (her) life, have become the central problems of our politics ..., and they are problems we seem doomed to take at once far too seriously and not seriously enough. Perhaps camp, the refined art of being serious about the frivolous and frivolous about the serious, is just the finesse we need to tiptoe through the mine field of multiculturalism ... and come out alive.'"
More to come. Thanks to everyone for their inputs so far. All really interesting and provocative. What's next?
Cheers
Ian
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3 comments:
Ah, to explain research, in a nutshell… always tricky. Here goes.
It is the story of the pound store commodity- its journey from factory, to ship, to store, to home, to trash, and back to factory. It is also the story of a fast developing China, creating new subjectivities which maintain a scorn for the individual at some level whilst wholly embracing Deng’s awakening call that ‘to get rich is glorious’.
My connection to these two reviews is simply through thing-following methodology. However, I think there are other connections in all of our work- connections concerning the great global/local question and ceaseless glocal babble that ensues, questions concerning the potential to level wealth and opportunity along commodity chains, and perhaps questions that attempt to grapple with new ways of theorizing value that resist both the calculative future-predicting work of economists and the traditional concerns of sociologists and anthropologists (i.e. ‘values’ as morals).
A brief word on my own use of thing-following. I have been/am attempting to take stock from ‘circuits of culture’ thinking, which sees the chain as a circuit of meanings that do not ‘loop’, but rather are an unfixed set of linkages. This has the advantage of questioning any essential link between peoples and places and disallows ideas of segmented knowledge as a lack/ignorance in the chain. It also helps us understand which segments certain accounts intentionally leave out and why- we can assess information held in gaps. I am also drawing upon ‘critical fetishism’, and the way it challenges the view that globalization is a slowly spreading ink-stain, seeping across the planet in a smooth homogenous manner. Instead, the emphasis on uneven-ness and instability allows in the crucial
notion of rupture, which is both a continuous and strengthening phenomenon within the pound-commodity chain.
Drawing upon both of the above, much of my research so far has tended to re-describe the network as a place of constant risk and rupture which work to strengthen the fabric of capitalisms by increasing the efficiency of its coping mechanisms. Despite hi-tech harbour facilities, immense and efficient factories, and booming low-end economics, much of the ‘flow’ of pound commodities involves risk, tough decision-making, loss, the need for tough spontaneous action and political damage-limitation. All along the pound-commodity chain we see rupture as an intrinsic part of its operations:- workers exposed to lethal carcinogens, western companies changing designs mid-production, rival factories stealing popular designs, workforces leaving on masse when asked to comply to legal working hours, wholesale buyers whose order never arrives, illegally dumped waste upsetting the balance of ecological and economic systems, rural migrants forced to leave their villages in search of the means for survival in urban settings, family-run pound store owners put out of business by vast discount chains…the list continues.
Rupture as intrinsic in this manner cements uneven allocation of resources, increases the necessity of risk-taking with potentially devastating consequences for less powerful actors, and therefore heightens the way in which what I have so-far called survival capitalism operates with collateral damage as inherent.
Phew. That should give you a rough idea. October sees me heading out to China for two months (mainly a 'commodities city' called Yiwu- google it if you like) to work with wholesale buyers sourcing pound commodities for UK stores.
Wow, Alison, that sounds like an amazing project. I just want to add that these "following" methodologies also dovetail with the call for more mobile methods currently being proposed in the field of mobilities research. See, e.g., Sheller and Urry 2006, and Urry 2007, and various issues of the journal Mobilities. I would be interested to hear what others think about the way that following things as a method intersects with the complicated mobilities of how people, goods, capital and information all travel in different ways, under different forms of regulation and surveillance, and how these divergent but overlapping mobilities affect food-movement-spaces.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) "The new mobilities paradigm", Environment and Planning A, 38: 207-26.
Urry, J (2007) Mobilities (London: Polity).
Alison, is this 'critical fetishism' phrase Robert Foster's? His (2006)'Tracking globalisation' review chapter - where this is outlined - is great for those interested in this following work more widely. See left for reference.
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