Call for papers
Restaurants in town (working title)
Ethnologie française Journal (http://www.puf.com/wiki/Ethnologie_française)
Issue Edited by Jean-Pierre Hassoun ([email protected])
Restaurant is today a focus of food habits specially in urban areas. But it is not only a focus for food habits. It is a work place known to be organised with a strong hierarchy. A place which is also prestigious, renowned to be able to alter street or neighbourhood identities. A place from where new tastes can be spread. A distinctive space which permits to assert itself. A daily (with company restaurants) or festive sociability place (with for instance birthdays which are now often celebrated outside home). A market place which is used as an economical indicator or can be a challenge in the Value added tax (VTA) debate. Eventually, it can also be a place where exotic signs or religious certifications are challenged.
If the restaurant is definitely a total social space, it is a social différentiation place (from Mac Donald’s to prestigious establishments). We would like that sociological and anthropological problems it gives rise be read, as far as possible, through the relation between the public and the private spheres. Indeed restaurants, from its birth in XVIIIe century in Paris (Spang, 2000) redefine borders between public and private spheres in relation with food habits. Restaurants have been and are always a place where commensality, renowned as intimate and domestic, is staged with a scenography where each eater becomes an urban eater close at hand with other urban eaters. In this frame, its social uses are numerous : we can there celebrate a wedding, but also choose it for a tête à tête dinner, for a professionnal meeting or to seal a business contract. But in this forthcoming issue, it is not our purpose to see only the social enchantment that restaurant wants to sell. Sometimes restaurant is (or was) a feared place. For some, the negative image of Mac Donald’s incarnates this possible bad reputation in our societies.
This Ethnologie française issue would like to address all these questions with new ethnographical and historical data and anthropological analysis. Papers can be focused on any country in the world but in priority should be situated in an urban area (global city, capital of an emerging country or a very dependant one, small province town, etc.) and on the basis of an original fieldwork or an original historical investigation. Papers which offer historical counterpoints are also expected.
For this call of papers we open a few avenues, but of course they are not restrictive.
Urban morphology, urbanity and intimacy
The analysis of the relations between the restaurant and the city will be particularly expected. How do certain restaurants manage to build national or regional cooking borders and how do others build their reputation on exotism and cosmopolitism ? In both cases we’ll expect a critical deconstruction of these two notions. We would also like to analyse the historicity of these proselyte « missions ». How do political and institutionnal powers – State, city councils, Chamber of Commerce, culinary institutions –influence the restaurant setting- up or why can it be a market protected from public and institutional spheres ? In this regard, we are interested in the relation between the restaurants (and their Chef) with the recent
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debates regarding the construction of a so called « national gastronomy », or French meals as a specific social moment, as a UNESCO immaterial heritage.
In its relation to a city, what kind of relations do restaurants maintain with health norms and from a more general point of view with « moral » certifications (bio, ethics, halal, kosher, etc.) seen as normative frames ? Do restaurants, in these contexts, play a resistance, innovative or militant part ?
At a more urban level, we should investigate how restaurant locations contribute to alter the symbolic morphology of a street or a city neighbourhood. In which ways are restaurants market indicators of city socio-economic level (gentrification versus impoverishment) ? We know that restaurants build themselves with a scenery which can be read as a narrative ; thus we expect to gather papers which decipher these narratives. But it would be more interesting yet to reconstruct their conception and evolving processes more than to describe simply from a synchronic point of view. In this perspective, an ethno- architectural approach could be relevant. Keeping in mind, this ethnographical point of view we could develop a similar investigation about menu genesis – layout, iconography, courses ‘ names.
The restaurant is a good laboratory to question relations between privacy and urban ways of life (Sennett, 1979). The customers’ ethnography (Warde, Martens, 2000), will be expected specially with data dealing with symbolical interactionism. Following Finkelstein (1989) and Berriss, Sutton (2007) with their conception of restaurant as « ideal » post modern place, we would like to publish some fieldwork explaining finely the interactions between customer and restaurant manager or Chef or waiter.
How do we select a restaurant ? How is the restaurant used in social life or in the life couple or a group of friends ? What is at stake when people order and choose their food from the menu ? How does the gender issue (on the customer side or the restaurant side) interfere with restaurant practices ? We have in mind, here, the symbolic division between the « cordon bleu » figure at home, which is mainly feminine and the Chef figure on the social stage, mainly masculine.
A market place. Restaurant managers and Chefs
We often forget that the restaurant is also a business with an entrepreneur or an owner –manager or a Chef owner-manager (Eloire 2010, Hassoun 2010). Papers which can describe finely enterpreneurship resources (in their historical context) will be expected. From this perspective, it could be interesting not to separate managers-owners from their customers.
What are the academic, social, professional trajectory of owner-managers or Chefs (Fergusson, Zukin, 1998) ? Can we reduce the opposition within the milieu between those educated in a culinary institution versus the self-trained ? How do these social trajectories perform the food offer ? In what ways, does this social place produce specific social relations ? (We think here about the mangificent Arnold Wesker theater play « La cuisine ».
An ethnographical equivalent is yet to be written).
What are the relationships between the food processing industry and the restaurants ? More precisely, how do restaurant owner-managers adapt their practices to market trends ? How do their life story and their life story narrative – essential today to become a Chef of repute – can match with health norms and « moral » certifications (ethic, bio, religious, etc) which are constraints more and more present in the urban areas ? How do these entrepreneurs deal with their customers ? We know that personalization is essential in the restaurant manager- customer relation while it is in opposition with the theory of the market relations anonimity.
If in affluent societies, restaurants are associated with leisure or luxury spending, what aboutin poor ones ?
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All these questions (and others) are not only aimed at downtown restaurants (should they be fast food or chic ones). In order to draw this research field map (at the intersection of urban anthropology, economical sociology and food anthropology) we would also like to explore other places of restauration less known from an ethnographical and historical point of view. We think of hotels, university, vegetarian or dietetic, enterprise, hospital or penitentiary restaurants, plane, train or freeway catering, or private catering when Chefs cook at their client’s homes.
Papers proposals will be sent to Jean-Pierre Hassoun ([email protected]) who is the eidtor invited by Ethnologie française for this issue. Papers can be written in French or in English. They can be translated (or not) as authors wish it.
Papers proposals (about one page) should provide a summarry of the topic and the ethnographical or historical investigation, as well as a problematic which can evolve in the due course of completing the paper. Deadline to receive the paper proposals is April 30.
Authors will receive an answer by May 15. Once the proposal is accepted, Ethnologie française will send the author the norms of the Journal. Final papers should arrive not later than January 2013. Papers will be then anonymously evaluated by two referees. The issue (2014-1) will appear on January 2014.
Few references
BERISS D., et SUTTON D., 2007, « Restaurants, ideal postmodern institutions » in Beriss D. and Sutton D. The restaurants book. Ethnographies of where we eat, New-York, Berg, 1-13.
CORBEAU J.-P ,1997, « L’exotisme au service de l’égotisme. Nourritures vietnamiennes et métissage des goûts français », Etudes vietnamiennes, (Pratiques alimentaires et identité culturelles) 3-4, 323-346.
ÉLOIRE F., 2010, « Une approche sociologique de la concurrence sur un marché : le cas des restaurateurs lillois », Revue française de sociologie, 53-3 : 281-517.
FISCHLER C., 1996, « La « macdonaldisation des mœurs », in J.-L. Flandrin et M. Montanari, Histoire de l’alimentation, Paris, Fayard : 859-879.
FERGUSSON P., 1994, Accounting for taste. The triumph of french cuisine, The University of Chicago Press.
FERGUSSON P., ZUKIN S.,1998, « The careers of Chefs », in Scapp R. and Seitz B. (eds.), Eating culture, Albany, State University of New York Press : 92-111.
FINKELSTEIN J., 1989, Dining out. A sociology of modern manners, Cambridge, Polity Press
GARNIER J., 2010, « Faire avec » les goûts des autres. La petite restauration africaine, une nouvelle venue dans les villes moyennes en France », Anthropology of Food 7.
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HASSOUN, J.-P., 2010, « Deux restaurants à New York: l'un franco-maghrébin, l'autre africain.
Créations récentes d’exotismes bien tempérés », Anthropology of Food 7.
HELFST LEICHT COLLACAO, J., 2010, « Das mammas’as ao restaurante cosmopolita. Um século de restaurantes italianos na cidade de São Paulo (Brasil) », Anthropology of Food 7.
MATTA, R.,2010, « L’indien » à table dans les grands restaurants de Lima (Pérou) . Cuisiniers d’élite et naissance d’une « cuisine fusion » à base autochtone », Anthropology of Food, 7.
PITTE Jean-Robert, 1996, « Naissance et expansion des restaurants in J.-L. Flandrin et M. Montanari, Histoire de l’alimentation, Paris, Fayard : 767-778.
RAY K., 2007, « Ethnic succession and the new American restaurant cuisine » in Beriss David and Sutton David (eds), The restaurants book. Ethnographies of where we eat, New-York, Berg, 97-114.
2009, « Exotic restaurants and expatriate home cooking : Indian food in Manhattan », in Inglis D. et Gimlin D.,The globalization of food, Oxford, New York, Berg, 212-226.
SAMMARTINO G., 2010, « Peruvian restaurants in Buenos Aires (1999-2009). From discrimination to adoption », Anthropology of Food, 7.
SENNETT R.,1979), Les Tyrannies de l’intimité, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, « Sociologie », (1ère édition américaine 1974, The fall of public man).
SPANG R., 2000, The invention of the restaurant. Paris and modern gastronomic culture, Cambridge, Londres, Harvard University Press.
WARDE A. et MARTENS L., 2000, Eating out: social differentiation, consumption and pleasure, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
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