Rural cosmopolitanism: Performing locality and authenticity in Swiss food discourse

Mapes, Gwynne Erin (12 December 2017). Rural cosmopolitanism: Performing locality and authenticity in Swiss food discourse (Unpublished). In: City Talk: Urban Identities, Mobilities and Textualities. University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. 11.-12. Dezember 2017.

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Food, like language, plays a central role in the production of culture; it is likewise a
powerful resource for the representation and organization of social order. Status is
asserted or contested through both the materiality of food (e.g. its substance and raw
economics) and through its discursivity (e.g. the way it’s depicted and discussed). This
intersection of language and materiality (cf. Shankar & Cavanaugh 2017) makes food
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an ideal site for examining the place of language in contemporary class formations (cf.
Thurlow 2016). As a case in point, my paper examines a dataset of multimodal food
texts (e.g. online resources, signage, shop displays, and food tourism activities) drawn
from an artisanal cured meats producer in Switzerland who explicitly self-styles as the
height of modern, cosmopolitan food practices and trends. Combining critical
discourse analysis and social semiotics, I document the linguistic, verbal and material
tactics by which stakeholders produce a discourse of elite authenticity indexed by, for
example, claims to locality, sustainability, and especially rurality. This discourse hinges
on the iconization, romanticization and exploitation of agrarian life in ways that
strategically (dis)avow elitist distinction. In fact, I argue that the production – and
circulation – of this discourse erases the complex realities of the rural Other (cf. hooks
1992), while elevating the privileged consumption practices of urban life and
cosmopolitan elites. As such, particular ways of eating (and particular eaters) are hailed
as simultaneously fashionable and socially/politically virtuous (cf. Kenway and Lazarus
2017), while covertly reinscribing privileged standards of good taste (cf. Bourdieu 1984)
and class inequality.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of English Languages and Literatures > Modern English Linguistics
UniBE Contributor:	Mapes, Gwynne Erin
Subjects:	400 Language 400 Language > 410 Linguistics 400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages
Language:	English
Submitter:	Federico Erba
Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2019 11:09
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 12:31
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/122621