Globalizing Tastes

Abstract

This chapter extends the conceptual reach of our discussion of taste to incorporate a direct engagement with the global. In keeping with the general aim of the book to examine debates about tastes in a number of dimensions which are often kept separate and distinct, it explores how questions of taste have been, and continue to be, shaped by processes of what has come to be termed ‘globalization’. This a concept which generated manifold forms of heat and light upon its emergence into the sociological and social scientific imagination in the late twentieth century and has become, as Bauman describes it, something of a ‘shibboleth’ (Bauman, 1998: 1), invoked to account for and explain a range of phenomena, from new forms of economic organization and transaction, to new forms of war and new forms of culinary experience. Such a short-hand is always likely to lose the nuance of specific detailed inquiry. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this chapter and book to do justice to the complexities of these debates, but it is notable from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, as the global-ness of the social world continues to be lived with and experienced through various everyday mechanisms and representations that aspects of these debates concerned with the ‘reality’ or ‘inventedness’ of globalization — what Giddens (2002) pejoratively characterizes as between ‘sceptics’ and ‘radicals’ — are more settled.