(De)constructing distinction: Class inequality and elite authenticity in mediatized food discourse

Orienting to recent work on language materiality (Cavanaugh and Shankar 2017 ) and elite discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski 2017a), I examine the discursive production of class status and the management of distinction/privilege in mediatized food discourse. Specifically, this paper presents a critical discourse analysis of a New York Times food section corpus comprised of 259 articles (e.g. restaurant reviews, celebrity chef profiles, features concerning cooking techniques or trending ingredients, etc.) in which I identify an over‐arching discourse of elite authenticity. I show how elite authenticity is a key strategy by which distinction is nowadays both (re)produced and (dis)avowed in food discourse, and that it is accomplished via five rhetorical strategies: historicity, simplicity, pioneer spirit, lowbrow appreciation, and locality/sustainability. Thus, food discourse, rooted in familiar bourgeois anxieties and privileges, sustains the post‐class ideologies (Thurlow 2016 ) and omnivorous consumption (Khan 2014 ) at the heart of contemporary class formations.     

Constructing the Reality of the Immigrant Life

This study focuses on one discursive construction of social reality, the construction of self-identity. To survive in a new culture, immigrants must come to know the facts and the ethos of the society. That knowledge, however, is not passively absorbed by the people, but is at least in part constructed by them from the information verbally transmitted through conversations. Four discourses among immigrants were analyzed to point out important aspects of the participants' understanding of their New World, as well as their own place in it. Optimistic outlook for the future, determination, language competency, and racial and ethnic problems were prominent. Tenets of the social constructionist perspective and the Hermeneutic–Dialectic method are also outlined.     

Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era

The increasing prevalence of digital social technologies in everyday life affects processes of self and identity in theoretically and empirically interesting ways. Based on face‐to‐face interviews (N = 17) and synchronous text‐based exchanges (N = 32) from a Facebook‐based population, I examine the conditions of identity negotiation in a networked era, and explore how social actors strike a presentational balance between ideal and authentic. I identify three key interaction conditions: fluidity between digital and physical, expectations of accuracy, and overlapping social networks. I argue that social actors accomplish the ideal‐authentic balance through self‐triangulation, presenting a coherent image in multiple arenas and through multiple media. I differentiate between two degrees of triangulation: networked logic and preemptive action.     

Consumption Styles and the Fluid Complexity of Punk Authenticity

Subcultures are distinguished in terms of what they are not, highlighting differences with broader cultural characteristics. From this perspective, authenticity is drawn from external contrasts. This ethnographic study of a local punk scene shows that internal comparisons among participants centered on consumption styles also construct authenticity. This activity was dominated by three indigenous cultural processes: the publicized possession of consumer goods, stylized presentations of self, and conversational display of acquaintance with punk esoterica. In contrast to previous studies, this article shows how the interpretive particulars of consumption in talk and interaction move beyond style alone to feature the fluid complexity of punk authenticity.     

The dynamics of dining out in the 21st century: Insights from organizational theory

The world of restaurants—as organizations as well as indicators of social status and cultural tastes—has, thus far in the 21st century, become especially dynamic in the United States and elsewhere. Social scientists have begun to engage seriously with issues concerning germane shifts in the culinary profession and the emergence of new forms of cooking and dining out. For sociologists interested in consumption, organizations, and creative work, this offers a number of timely topics, such as restaurants' financing strategies and ownership models, the institutionalization of new culinary trends, the expanding roles of chefs, and the labor practices of upmarket restaurants. This article synthesizes recent scholarship on the modern culinary field in the United States, specifically examining three interrelated themes: tensions between concurrent demands for creativity and financial returns, new ways of catering to consumer desires for authenticity, and issues of inequality in professional kitchens. It concludes by discussing several issues facing the future of dining out, as forecast by field leaders themselves, which offer further opportunities for burgeoning sociological and organizational inquiry.     

Constructing ethnicity in interaction

In the present study, I continue ongoing efforts to incorporate social constructionist viewpoints into sociolinguistics by demonstrating how two interlocutors use linguistic resources to project and shape ethnic (and other facets of) identity in unfolding talk. The interaction is a sociolinguistic interview from a large‐scale sociolinguistic study of a rural tri‐ethnic community in the southeastern U.S. I examine a range of features and types of features and in addition use both quantitative and qualitative methods. Further, I examine the linguistic usages of both the researcher (the interviewer) and the research subject. The analysis confirms that identity is dynamic and multifaceted and is very much a product of ongoing talk, although pre‐existing linguistic and social structures also come into play. In addition, the analysis demonstrates that identity is dialogic as well as dynamic and that researchers play a large role in shaping the linguistic usages of those they study.     

Study on the cultural identity of the Chinese-Indians in Kolkata,Sihui and Toronto

Although the Chinese in Kolkata have preserved their Chinese identity, they have been acculturated by various cultural elements from India. It is this mixture of Chinese and Indian practices that gives them a unique cultural identity. When members of this Chinese community in Kolkata and its vicinity emigrated to Toronto or were forcibly deported to China in the aftermath of the 1962 conflict, they carried with them, both knowingly and unknowingly, some of these Chinese-Indian cultural traits. By focusing on the Chinese-Indians living in different geographical and cultural settings, this essay examines the formation of a Chinese-Indian identity in Kolkata and its preservation by some of those who are now residing in Sihui in China and in Toronto, Canada. It also explains some of the main similarities and differences among the three groups of Chinese-Indians. It concludes with an analysis of cultural identity as it manifests among the Chinese-Indian communities.     

Constructing citizenship at the margins: the case of young graffiti writers in Melbourne

Young people engaging in graffiti are often portrayed as the anti-thesis of the ‘good citizen’. As politicians and the media fight the ‘war on graffiti’, these young people are tagged as criminals and misfits, overlooking the ways this arts practice reclaims their ability to tell stories and unhinge traditional ways of practicing citizenship. Using ideas from Michelle Fine et al.’s social psychology of spatiality as a conceptual lens, this paper explores the tensions, contradictions and binaries these young people find themselves caught between, particularly; art or vandalism, professional or amateur, artist or criminal, and legitimate or illegitimate citizens as young people and transgressors of ‘normal behaviour’ in public spaces. Using multiple methods, including ‘hanging out’ and participatory visual methods, this study explores how young graffiti artists’ experiences in and out of a legal ‘street art’ programme, speak back to ‘normative’ conceptualisations of citizenship. Their experiences of differential belonging and contested citizenship, which are played out in public spaces (and beyond), highlight the importance of alterative arts programmes and the creation of sanctioned spaces in negotiating young people’s ‘right to the city’.     

Subculture wars: The struggle for the vape industry

Drawing on a 2-year study, I argue that the UK vape industry is engaged in a classificatory struggle between a subcultural industry and its “other”, the mainstream industry. I build on Thornton's analysis of club culture to characterize the subcultural vape industry as a community of taste built round a masculine aesthetic and a commitment to authenticity and DIY practice. Its attachment to complex systems and masculine spaces risked excluding customers without specialist knowledge or interest. The mainstream industry included tobacco companies which promoted vaping as a complementary category to smoking, linking their own vaping products to historic meanings of the cigarette as a lifestyle product. This task was hampered by the toxic legacy of combusted tobacco and its increasing reversion to a generic category rather than a branded product. Finally, the success of the price-focused vaping industry has been largely overlooked, but suggests that for most consumers, electronic cigarettes are still a contrasting category to combusted tobacco and are purchased largely on price. I conclude that the exclusion of a feminized, classed “other” is a defining element of subcultural formation, itself an overwhelmingly male mechanism of group identity construction.     

Civic,ethnic, hybrid and atomised identities in Central and Eastern Europe

While the topic of identity of ethnic minorities abounds in theoretical insights, most discussion is still clustered around the civic–ethnic divide while assuming conclusions with limited empirical evidence. By contrast, this article uses a four-category typology of identity that considers both in-group and out-group attachments to address hypotheses about competing identities and about factors influencing minorities to adopt one identity type over others. Based on unique data evidence of 12 ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, this study concludes that the ‘hybrid’ identity, rather than the literature-assumed ‘ethnic’ identity, tops the identification preference of minorities, although there are differences in levels and patterns when controlling for various covariates. The choice of identity depends on the socialisation process, the economic status, the perceived discrimination and intergroup tensions, reflecting variations in the system of values common to a region with complex ethnic dynamics.     

Understanding the Alteration and Decline of a Music Scene: Observations from Rave Culture1

The sociological study of scenes—music and otherwise—has flourished in the latter twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Most research has documented a scene’s origins or its “evolution” into mainstream culture. Fewer studies have systematically addressed what leads to a scene’s alteration and decline, although many scholars have partially addressed it in authenticity studies anchored in the Frankfurt School’s claims about culture and economics. Are culture industries sufficient in explaining music scene transformation? The present article attempts to explain the cultural transformation of the Philadelphia rave scene and to articulate its relevance for other kinds of social worlds. Using a multimethod ethnographic approach, I show that five forces (generational schism, commercialization, cultural otherness/deviance and self destruction, social control, and genre‐based scene fragmentation) help explain the alteration and decline of the rave scene from its high point in the mid to late 1990s to its diminished and fragmented state presently. In describing these forces, I hope to move beyond culture industry narratives toward a broader explanation of cultural change, one that is lacking not only in music scene studies, but also in literatures on many other kinds of social worlds.     

Images of Jewish identities in Lithuanian literature of the twentieth century: Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris

This paper deals with the identity concept of two Lithuanian Jewish writers, Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris. Kanovich, as a member of the Holocaust generation, writing in Russian, depicts his protagonists as spiritual and hardworking people with strong self‐confidence, resting on religion and custom. By means of the narrative technique of memory, Kanovich creates a literary resurrection of the Lithuanian Jews as a people which was almost completely exterminated during the Holocaust. Omnipresent pictures of cemetery and grave transform the Lithuanian space into a metonymy of death and, grotesquely, to the only place of home, being the “shelter” for the killed bodies of the Lithuanian Jewry. Markas Zingeris, growing up in post‐war Soviet Lithuania, represents the concept of open identities, changeable in time and place. Calling himself a Lithuanian writer who has been raised within a Lithuanian, Jewish, and, not least, Soviet milieu, Zingeris depicts his protagonists in in‐between situations. Writing in Lithuanian, speaking several languages fluently and working as translator, Zingeris embodies the cosmopolite. At the same time, though, he is a writer of collective memory. He comments on the apparent loss of the great utopia of an autonomous identity with ironic melancholy, pointing instead to the rich variety of hybrid identities.     

African music: negotiating a space in contemporary society

This paper explores the notion of African music as a way forward to negotiate a ‘space’ in contemporary society. The word ‘space’ is used as a metaphor to explore and experiment with the dynamics of culture and hybridity. The authors view themselves as ‘agents of change’ and knowledgeable professionals in the teaching of African music, one based in South Africa (Johannesburg) and the other in Australia (Melbourne). They reflect on examples from their own teaching and learning experiences as they argue that the translation of ‘traditional’ African music can only be brought about by means of cultural dialogue, within cultures and between cultures. This paper also addresses the issues of cultural authenticity as a redefined and renegotiated space when teaching and learning African music. The authors also consider the difficulties of addressing ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ when teaching African music, with South Africa and Australia both previously seen as outposts of the British Empire. They contend that such differences can prove to be productive and rewarding through subtle mediation and accommodation when crossing cultural borders.     

New York City's Latino ethnolinguistic repertoire and the negotiation of latinidad in conversation

Latino collective politics has received greater attention from scholars and policy analysts than the micro‐processes of everyday interaction among U.S. Latinos – the stuff with which collective efforts are constructed. In this article, I argue that latinidad – a sense of shared Latino identity – is best understood by taking into account the negotiations of collective identities in everyday, situated social practices. I ask: how do Latinos invoke latinidad in their everyday interactions, and to what end? In doing so, I present a conversation between two New York City Latinos, Roberto and William, who subtly invoke latinidad as they explore a possible business connection. Through discourse analysis of their exchange, I show that within one conversation two people can invoke latinidad through the adoption of different strategies of affiliation. Drawing on Benor's ( 2010 ) ethnolinguistic repertoire framework, I show some of the linguistic resources that New York City Latinos access to index latinidad. I find that Benor's framework could be expanded to account for the arsenal of distinctive linguistic features used by members of panethnic groups. For U.S. Latinos, such an arsenal includes features of multiple varieties of both Spanish and English. The results further suggest that shared Latino identity implies a basis for cooperation, in this case, cooperation with the potential to yield economic benefits.     

Pride and popcorn: consuming the idea of community at film screenings in the Turkish diaspora

A range of studies have revealed the interrelatedness of identity construction, community formation and media among diasporas, mostly focusing on domestic contexts. Seeking to add further nuance to the understanding of the social lives of diasporas, we concentrate on media culture in the public environment of the film theatre. The significance of diasporic film consumption is investigated through a local audience study of Turkish film screenings in Antwerp. The phenomenon of the screenings was analysed through a multi-method approach, including 536 questionnaires among audiences, 19 in-depth interviews and 3 group interviews, along with previous findings (on distribution and exploitation) of the same project. The results show that Turkish films are almost exclusively attended by people with Turkish roots, creating a Turkish diasporic space within the boundaries of the urban and the public. The audience study shows that the screenings fulfil a major social role but also affect understandings of community.     

Safaris into Subjectivity: White Locals,Black Tourists,and the Politics of Belonging in the Okavango Delta,Botswana

The elite safari lodges in Botswana's Okavango Delta provide an intriguing site through which to explore processes of identity construction, as people from vastly different backgrounds meet and explore ontological possibilities through and against each other. Drawing on a dinner table dispute between an African American tourist and his white Motswana guide, I explore contested notions of what constitutes African identities. The encounter shows that colonial histories and the racialization of space continue to be central to African identity politics, and I describe how white citizens' claims to belonging are challenged on these grounds. In response to such challenges, white Batswana assert a strongly nationalistic identity, distancing themselves from other southern African white populations and their colonial histories. They staunchly defend their claims to belonging through mobilising a partial view of Botswana's history and contemporary sociopolitical conditions, which has made possible a deep sense of emplacement within the social and natural environments of the Okavango.     

Hybridizing the canon: Russian-American writers in dialogue with Russian literature

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Russian-American writers – that is, Russian-speaking Jews who immigrated to North America from the late 1970s to the early 1990s – have garnered both a wide readership and critical acclaim. Although they live in the United States and write in English, their works manifest a marked focus on Russian-related themes, including the frequent employment of Russian literature. Three Russian-American texts engage in sustained intertextual play: Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K. with Lev Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina; Lara Vapnyar’s Memoirs of a Muse with the diary of Fedor Dostoevskii’s mistress, Polina Suslova; and Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis with Osip Mandel’shtam’s poem “Na strashnoi vysote bluzhdaiushchii ogon'” (“At a terrifying height a wandering fire”). This article has two interrelated aims. The first is to demonstrate that, similar to postcolonial and other diasporic writers, Russian-American writers’ intertextual use is inextricably linked with a negotiation of cultural identities. The second is to offer a close analysis of the ways in which Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K., Vapnyar’s Memoirs of a Muse, and Ulinich’s Petropolis recast Russian texts as Russian-American elaborations of cultural hybridity and immigrant sensibility.     

“Where the Danger Lies”: Race,Gender, and Chinese and Japanese Exclusion in the United States, 1870–19241

Race too often is used as the explanatory variable for understanding immigration exclusion, marginalizing the significance of race making, ethnic differentiation, and gender construction in particular. This article explores these processes by examining exclusionary policies implemented against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the mid‐1870s to 1924, the year the National Origins Act was passed. Politicians, intellectuals, and moral reformers used a gendered logic—the construction of idealized gender norms, roles, and sexual propriety and the attachment of these meanings to male and female bodies—to distinguish Japanese immigrants from the Chinese immigrants they followed, allowing for ethnic differentiation and dissimilar policies. The convergence toward exclusion rested on a racialized logic—the construction and attachment of inferior status and meanings to immigrant groups through discourse, formal and informal categorization, or social closure—which claimed that the Japanese were unassimilable and racially undesirable like the Chinese. Exclusionists focused on the immigrant women, decrying their sexual and gender impropriety as evidence of the groups’ threats to the sanctity of white families, which imperiled the nation. Gender and race both mattered in these logics and their meanings were constructed as their salience interconnected.     

Constructing Masculinity in the Building Trades: ‘Most Jobs in the Construction Industry Can Be Done by Women’

Construction is one of the most gender‐segregated sectors of the UK economy; men constitute over 99 per cent of the employees in the building trades. This article focuses on the role of discourse in reflecting and reproducing the absence of women in the construction trades. A small excerpt from an industry report is described, interpreted and explained using critical discourse analysis. The analysis takes as its starting point one phrase, ‘most jobs in the construction industry can be done by women’ and places it in its structural, institutional and historic context, showing its dependence on presuppositions about women's abilities, and the ideological basis of those assumptions. Male construction workers' masculine identity is defined in relation to their ‘tough’ job. The culture of taking safety risks, and working long hours in primitive working conditions suits some employers very well. The report's assertion that women can do ‘most jobs’ in construction appears to challenge the dominant ideology but it actually reproduces it, helping to maintain gender segregation. Thus it contributes in a small way to sustaining existing power relations by containing potentially transformative movements.     

Constructing Gender and Occupational Segregation: A Study of Women and Work in Fishing Communities

Based on data from in-depth interviews and field work in rural fishing communities, this article examines how the process of gender construction works to keep women from being fisher[men]. A number of common explanations for occupational sex segregation are considered to explain why women do not fish, including biology, gender role socialization, cultural traditions, and discrimination. The article then presents a complementary explanation, the social construction of gender. In fishing communities, where man is defined as a fisherman, women maintain boundaries between themselves and fishing as they construct gender. They define their work as not fishing, even when they work on fishing boats. The consequence is that women do not aim to work or succeed in one of the few and most lucrative industries in a rural community. When examined from this perspective, occupational segregation appears to be more difficult to eliminate than prevailing explanations suggest.