Abstract
Hong Kong prides itself as a cosmopolitan city, often boasting of its status as the culinary capital of Asia. Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian dishes have become very popular and taken root in the staple of local diet. Yet in the plethora of cuisines, one remains starkly absent – that from the Philippines. With 300 000 Filipinos making up 3% of the local population, the under-representation is striking. How does this gap in the gastronomic landscape shed light on the imagination of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitanism? This paper takes the culinary border as a trope to explore issues surrounding the question of borders. As Balibar writes, borders are meant to be the same for all, but in fact they mean different things to different people. I will be presenting my ethnographic case study of the World Wide House – a shopping complex that is run by and caters almost exclusively for Filipinos, in order to illustrate the polysemic nature of these borders and how we have yet to become a cosmopolitan city.
| Original language | English |
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| Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2012 |
| Event | Hong Kong Sociological Association 14th Annual Conference: Social Inequalities in a Globalized World = 香港社會學會第十四年度會議: 在全球化世界下的社會不平等 - Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China Duration: 1 Dec 2012 → 1 Dec 2012 http://www.hksa2012.ust.hk/index.html (Link to conference website) http://www.hksa2012.ust.hk/uploads/1/2/5/8/12586810/hksa2012_final_program.pdf (Link to conference programme) http://www.hksa2012.ust.hk/uploads/1/2/5/8/12586810/hksa2012_paper_abstracts.pdf (Link to conference paper abstract) |
Conference
| Conference | Hong Kong Sociological Association 14th Annual Conference: Social Inequalities in a Globalized World = 香港社會學會第十四年度會議: 在全球化世界下的社會不平等 |
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| Country/Territory | Hong Kong, China |
| Period | 1/12/12 → 1/12/12 |
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