Food and Multiculture

A Sensory Ethnography of East London

Alex Rhys-Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

In this book, Alex Rhys-Taylor offers a ground-breaking sensory ethnography of East London. Drawing on the multicultural context of London, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, he explores concepts such as gentrification, class antagonism, new ethnicities and globalization. Rhys-Taylor shows how London is characterized by its rich history of socioeconomic change and multiculture, exploring how its smells and food are integral to understanding both its history and the reality of London's urban present. From the fiery chillies sold by street grocers which are linked to years of cultural exchange, through 'cuisines of origin' like jellied eels to hybridized dishes such as the chicken katsu wrap, sensory experiences are key to understanding the complex cultural genealogies of the city and its social life.Each of the eight chapters combines micro histories of ingredients such as fried chicken, bush-meat and curry sauce, featuring narratives from individuals that provide a unique, engaging account of the evolution of taste and culture through time and space.With its innovative methodology, this is a highly original contribution to the fields of sensory studies, food studies, urban studies and cultural studies.

1
Coming to Our Senses

Halfway along Whitechapel Road on a warm early October evening in 2015. A congested patchwork corridor of clothing wholesalers, budget hotels, homeless hostels, high-street retailers and a street market packing up for the day. Shutters are pulled down as the daytime businesses close. Bassy dance music pummels through the panelling of a low-riding hatchback as it passes through the thick traffic. Yogic exhalations of vanilla ‘e-cig’ vapour intermingle with beedi and tobacco trails of pedestrians hurrying – back home, to the cinema, to the doctor, to the shop for dinner ingredients. The sweet rose and frankincense of a mirror-lined Arabic fragrance retailer, open for evening trade, competes with the high street choices of the emerging party crowd. Powdery, citrus, jasmine, lilies and rose for her. Woody, grassy spices and herbs for him.

Whitechapel sits to the immediate east of ‘The City’, London’s central business district. Looking east along Whitechapel Road, the apricot setting sun catches the glass curtains draped over buildings towering on the horizon – ‘The Gherkin,’ ‘The Cheesegrater’ and a cluster of several other less savoury sounding offerings. During the day, the white noise of riveters, buzz-saws and jackhammers accompanies the smell of concrete, sawdust, solvents and fresh paint; the sensory signatures of The City’s eastward creep. Paving the way for the new towers of luxury are the milky and nutty air of white-tiled coffee shops and a fog of herbs – stoned baked pizza and nouveau pan-Asian cuisine. The new constellation encroaches on the aromatic environs of fried chicken shops and curry canteens. An evening chorus of default ring tones and message alerts chirrups away. Plans for the final hours of the week are laid out.

Moving westward, approaching Brick Lane, once best known for its Bengali curry houses, a smoky fog of charred lamb and chicken (emanating from newly opened Turkish restaurants) catches the nose and refracts the light. Passing through the mist of meat fumes is a German couple, mother and daughter. Their hair glistens with the synthetic bergamot of budget hotel shampoo. ‘Es riecht nach Kreuzberg,’ says the mother to the daughter. It smells like Kreuzberg.

What, in a twenty-first century city like London, is the social significance of the transnational flow of ideas and materials that pass through it? How to conceptualize the city’s cultures, without recourse to crude and ill-fitting caricatures of ethnicity, class, the ‘local’ and the ‘global’? How to express the significance of an individual’s dreams and fears, while attending to the contingencies and histories that shape her sensibility? How to get beyond the ways in which we talk about both ourselves and each other, to the significance of the ways in which we feel? The following chapters argue that answers to each of these questions lie in a close attention to the sensory ambience of the city, and the everyday life that underpins it. More precisely, through honing a sensorial attention to a series of the spaces between ‘The City’ and the East End – over an eight-year period stretching from the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, through the 2011 riots and the Olympics, to the present day – the following book highlights experiences, artefacts and relationships that help understand early millennial London. The hope is to present the reader with an appreciation of the role that oftoverlooked multisensory experiences might play, within the key sociological processes of our age.

The Insensible Urban

Cities are sonorous, smelly and full of both delectable and stomach-churning things. As part of everyday life, urbanites’ evaluations of city’s sensoria inform an array of decisions. Where to sit on public transport? Next to a young woman guzzling a burger and fries? Next to the teenage boy whose personal soundtrack is spilling loudly out of his leaky headphones? Or next to the middle-aged man, who despite spreading his legs inhospitably, is wearing the same aftershave as a favoured uncle? Which way to get to work? Through the maelstrom of the high street, or through the shaded and notably quieter side streets? Who to approach for directions? Where to go for dinner? Where to buy a house? As Richard Webber demonstrates in correlations of housing choice and lifestyle type, the visual appearance of a given locale certainly plays a pivotal role in guiding like-minded city dwellers to the same neighbourhoods (Webber 2013). Although ‘big data’ on the matter is a long way from being gathered, the research upon which this book rests suggests the same seems true of the soundscapes and aromatic ambiences of neighbourhoods. Particular atmospheres seem partly to correlate with particular sensibilities. As the following chapters will demonstrate, there are a great many ways in which the visual, the sonic, the gustatory and olfactory landscapes of cities shape movements through urban space; drawing people towards that which they desire, providing comfort and reassurance while also alerting them to both real and imagined threats.

Whether luring, reassuring, or alerting, the senses – as this book demonstrates – inform many decisions of sociological significance. Much of the work of the senses, however, happens at a relatively microscopic, interpersonal level, invisible at the scale of the whole city. So microscopic, in fact, that such experiences are often felt to be of barely any sociological significance for the individual, let alone the broader mass of cities or societies. Yet, it is this book’s contention that, when aggregated, these experiences, and the sensibilities they are part of, often have significant consequences for the city and society of which they are part.

In this respect, this book works against the cautions offered by a number of influential urban theorists warning against trying to understand the contemporary city from amidst the thick, sensuous clamour of urban life. The sensuous experiences of the city dweller, it was once compellingly argued, are simply too microscopic, myopic, self-involved and localized to lend anything to our understanding of supra-personal processes shaping cities; processes that for the main part, operate at an increasingly global scale (Soja in Westwood and Williams 2003: 21). Accordingly, for macro theorists of pre-millennial urban space, the preferred means of representing cities, and understanding the life evolving therein, was to set up a lens – at least 20,000 feet, but ideally around 450 miles – above an urban form (Soja 1996: 152). Elevated out of the clamorous urban miasma, the ‘zenith view’ (Boeri in Koolhaas et al. 2000: 358), produces a spatio-temporal gestalt through which gargantuan, globe-spanning flows in capital, commodities, labour and information became clearly visible. Free of the transient clamour of urban life’s sounds, smells and textures, the position previously reserved for angels reveals ‘macro spatial’ maps delineating the apparent ‘organizing principles’ of contemporary cities (Soja 1996: 153). As seen from above, global cities such as London were revealed as centralized ‘command centres’, integral to the integrated global economy and as such, driving the becoming-one-none-place of the world – a world in which serially monotonous ghettos of affluence are surrounded by the undifferentiated squalor of slums (Harvey 1989: 23–43; Davis 2006, 2007). In both the centres and the margins of cities, and in both central and marginal cities, global urbanization visible from on high is credited with ‘overriding . . . history and culture’ (Sassen 1993: 22–34).

Doubtless, the tools and abstractions of macro-spatial urban theory have helped identify geographies of resource control, capital accumulation and environmental impact, of which today’s global cities are a central part. The global sprawl of suburban McMansions, luxury flats and the simultaneous processes of dispossession and the growth of ‘slums’ undoubtedly lend to the appearance of an increasingly divided yet homogeneously urban planet. Zooming out to a view of the city from 450 miles up does not, however, mean ‘more’ is subsequently encompassed within the ‘frame’. While revealing certain aspects of reality, such generalized representations of urban life are as vulnerable to hypermetropia as the perspectives of the city dweller are to myopia. That is to say, they reveal little of the actual corporeal experience of city dwellers and their relationship to the political economy of the city. Which is shame, for while, from certain angles, many twenty-first century cities look increasingly alike, rarely do they smell, sound, feel or taste like the same place. Or if they do smell or sound like somewhere else, it is not always the same somewhere else to which a city ‘appears’ to be similar. If nothing else, the discontinuity between relative visual homogeneity and the landscapes sensed by the other senses, ask serious questions of the extent to which today’s cities are successfully overriding local histories and culture (Sassen 1993: 22–34). At worst, the lack of attention to the actual experiences of city dwellers is of significant detriment to our understanding of the problems faced by today’s cities and the solutions to those problems.

Following these critiques, I want to argue that to understand properly the relationship between everyday urban lives and globe-spanning processes, urban scholarship needs to develop methodological tools, and analyses, that are sensitive to the specific textures on the ground of contemporary life. In particular, drawing on a range of pioneering and sensorially attuned scholarship (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994; Seremetakis 1996; Stoller 1997; Sutton 2001; Howes 2003; Vannini, Waskul and Gottschalk 2011; Back and Puwar 2012; Howes and Classen 2013), I argue that an understanding of the pressing social questions of the twenty-first century city is significantly enhanced by a sensitivity to the multisensory ambience of its everyday life.

Sensoria and Sensibilities

Beneath the city captured in aerial images and maps is a panoply of materialities (sensoria) – volatile aromatics, sonic vibrations, distributions of heat and cold – that, combined, serve to distinguish different urban spaces, as well as the types of activity that take place there. Consider, for instance, the aforementioned bassy beats, glowing lights and synthesized perfumes that create the atmospheres of the city’s night-time economy. Or, if you prefer something more genteel, consider an early morning autumn walk through one of London’s Royal Parks – the rustling branches of trees that accompany the sweet composting scent of fallen leaves decaying on an asphalt path while a woollen sweater scratches at the nape of your neck. These are just some of the many sensoria that fill a city.

A tree falling, or even rustling in the autumn breeze, only makes a noise if somebody is there to hear it. In other words, sensoria are only of sociological importance if somebody is there to experience them as a sensation (rustling branches, a portend of seasonal change, decaying leaves evoking memories of childhood walks home from school). But of course, such sensations are deeply personal and are often related to biography. For the purposes of this book, what marks one individual’s experience of sensoria from another, is understood as their sensibility. It is through sensibilities, a biographically, culturally and, to an extent, biologically specific filter, that sensoria become sensations. An individual’s sensibility is, as mentioned, partly a facet of the biological body – its ability to hear, see or touch to varying degrees. Sensibility is also, however, highly plastic, shaped by both individual life experience as well as broader social histories in which biographies are nestled, each of which work to determine how a particular sensation is evaluated. It is because of sensibility, the matrix through which sensoria are rendered into sensations, that London’s most expensive flat ends up being No.1 Hyde Park, deriving its value precisely in part because of its proximity to a romantically bucolic landscape of rustling trees, ornamental lakes and grassy lawns. It is because of sensibilities, that cheaper flats can be found above bars and pubs of the city’s night-time economy. Accordingly, alongside an attentiveness to the myriad sensoria that colour urban space, the book also aims to approach an understanding of the countless sensibilities through which sense is made of the materialities of urban space.

A Critique of Perspective

From Charles Booth’s illuminating maps (Booth and Argyle 1902), through Park and Burgess’ bird’s-eye representation of the concentric city’s ecology (Park and Burgess 2012), to the contemporary urban theorists’ preference for satellite images (Soja 1996; Longley 2002; Florida, Mellander and Gulden 2012), the zenith view has come to dominate representations of the modern city. That is not to say that other perspectives have been absent. The sociological and anthropological interest in urbanism has, in fact, given rise to a number of distinctly more human perspectives on the city, which have taken the analytical lens from on high, re-angling it closer and parallel to the ground. From the second generation of Chicago school urbanists rallying against the broad brushstrokes of their predecessors (Anderson 1961; Becker 1963; Whyte 1993; Cressey 2008; Goffman 2008), through increasingly close-up studies of urban British culture (Cohen 1997; Cohen 1998; Willis 1981; Young and Wilmott 2013) to the globally attuned urban ethnographies of the new millennium’s cities (Hannerz 1980; Back 1996; Alexander 2000; Bourgois 2003; Keith 2005; Wacquant 2007; Venkatesh 2009; Goffman 2015), urban scholars have provided rich insights into the social processes covering the last century of urban life.

Even the richest ethnographic representations of urban life, however, fall short of recording and representing the full range of forces carving the social morphology and cultural texture of cities. Urban ethnography’s historic shortcomings seem, in part, rooted in the inherently textual nature of ethnography itself. In recent years a number of ethnographers have started drawing on the opportunities afforded by increasingly accessible audio-visual technologies to develop a range of non-textual forms of analysis and representation. As a result, ‘visual sociology’ and ‘visual ethnographies’ of urban environments have made significant strides in addressing the erstwhile blind-spots generated by an over-reliance on reproducing spoken words and textual descriptions. A clear antidote to the totalizing vision of high-flying spatial theorists, reconstructed urban ethnographies have opened our eyes to the visual perspectives of the city’s homeless communities (Knowles 2005; Harper 2006), street booksellers (Duneier and Carter 2001), migrant domestic workers (Knowles and Harper 2009) and spectacles of consumption (Penaloza 1998), as well as revealing new angles on the infrastructure of cities (Dorrian and Rose 2003).

However, if the dominant way of understanding life in global cities has been to take the disembodied view from 450 miles up, and the critical response has been to privilege the optics of city dwellers, a significant portion of experience ‘down below’ (Certeau 1988: 92–93) is still missing from contemporary sociological investigations of urban life. Writing in 1882, Gustav Teichmuller developed a critique of the dominant ‘perspective’ deployed by science and philosophy. Noting that ‘all philosophies are [. . .] perspectival images of reality from a certain standpoint’, Teichmuller cautioned sternly against adherence to any one ‘perspective’ (Teichmuller in Ten 2003: 183). Teichmuller’s critique of perspective was not just a critique of the ‘angle’ with which the analytical lens had been set up. Rather, it was, above all else, a critique of the use of a ‘perspectival lens’ in the first place. ‘Lens’, here, is not simply a metaphor for how we ‘look’ at things. Rather, it points toward the ways in which a particular sensory modality came to dominate the production of modern knowledge. In short, Teichmuller wrote, ‘[p]hilosophy has been dominated by a bias in favour of sight’ (Teichmuller in Ten 2003: 183). This bias, we now know, is very real and skews not just Western philosophy but also the social scientific disciplines that emerged out of it. From Aristotle to Kant, through Freud and Foucault, big thinkers have made no bones of placing the visual at the top of a hierarchy prioritized for serious thinking and explorations of truth (Jay 1993; Korsmeyer 2014: 11–31). Vision is preferred for its purported objectivity, for the ability to see at a distance without being emotionally moved. Conversely, at the very bottom of the sensory hierarchy are taste, olfaction and touch, the ‘animalistic’ senses that have been thought to result in more visceral, emotional responses to sensoria. The result of this sensory hierarchy in Western thought, as Teichmuller and others since have argued, has been a very partial account of reality and is of significant detriment to our wider understanding of the world (Jay 1993; Pallasmaa 2005; Howes 2005; Korsmeyer 2014). Teichmuller’s solution to perspectival bias was ‘to over-throw this dictatorship and establish a kind of democracy of the senses’ (Teichmuller in Ten 2003: 183, emphasis added.) Yet despite a minor literature critiquing the ‘ocularcentrism’ (Jay 1993) of twentieth-century thought, the dictatorship of the eye shows no sign of abating. If anything, the new millennium has seen a proliferation of optical technologies, visual practices, theoretical lenses and points of view. There is then, more than ever, a pressing need to ask ‘what of the other senses?’ What of hearing, smell, taste and touch, let alone heat-sensitivity, balance and pain? There is, is there not, a great deal more to the formation of subjectivities and social forms in cities than ‘meets the eye’?

The Senses in Critical Thought

It is not that critical thinking about modernity and metropoles has been completely numb to ‘the other’ senses for the last two hundred years. As mentioned, modernity’s key thinkers – including, Nietzsche, Simmel and even Karl Marx – made serious efforts to theorize the relationship between the senses and epochal processes of industrialization and urbanization. Karl Marx, for instance, noted explicitly that, ‘The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world up to the present’ (Marx 2012a: 108).

Neither Marx nor Engels sustained a consideration of the senses as a distinct theme in itself. But in Marx’s vivid descriptions of the mills and factories of the nineteenth century (Marx 2012b: 275, 286, 290, 325) or in Engels’ bleak trudge through the congested streets of east London and Manchester (Engels 2012: 23–24), it is clear that both related to the distribution of sensory experience, and specific sensibilities, to the capitalist city’s social structure. Engaging more explicitly and consistently with the senses as part of his broader reflections on modernity, Georg Simmel channelled Teichmuller when he asserted that ‘every sense delivers contributions characteristic of its individual nature to the construction of sociated existence’ (Simmel, Frisby and Featherstone 1997: 110, emphasis added). Relating this theme to cities more specifically, in The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel also famously predicted the impact that the ongoing bombardment of sensory experiences had upon urbanites. He did so, in part, to account for the emergence of a newly blasé disposition (Simmel, Frisby and Featherstone 1997: 174–187), a phenomenon later dissected in more detail by mid-century urban social psychologists (Goffman 2008).

The reworking of Marx by mid-twentieth-century cultural theorists of the Frankfurt School also implicitly placed the sensory experiences of mid-century city dwellers at the heart of their interest in modernity’s accumulating catastrophes (Benjamin 1968; Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999; Adorno 2002; Horkheimer, Adorno and Noerr 2002; Benjamin 2009). From the palid ‘muzak’ that drifted around ‘places of amusement’ (Adorno 2002: 289) to the razzle-dazzle of the advertising industry and the warm glow of neon lights reflecting on wet asphalt (Benjamin 2009: 86), metro-sensory experiences were thought of, by these scholars at least, as both symptoms and causes of twentieth century society’s rapid transformation. In the decades following the Second World War, structuralist anthropology also sought to delineate the hidden organizing principles beneath culturally specific tastes. Again, never referring to the senses, sensibilities or sensoria as such, many of the last century’s most cited anthropological texts of the era are concerned with the ways in which human sensory experiences relate to the reproduction of social order (Douglas and Nicod 1974; Bourdieu and Nice 1984; Caplan 1992; Lévi-Strauss et al. 1992; Lévi-Strauss 1997). However, following the post-structural backlash against anthropology, phenomenology and the ‘subject’ at the centre of both, came two decades of desensitized critical thought enamoured instead with discursive analysis and word games. It was only in the final decade of the second millennium...