The Globalization of Asian Cuisines ― Transnational Networks and Culinary Contact Zones

This volume is a collection of historical and ethnographic accounts of Asia's increasingly globalized cuisines. Using extensive empirical research, the authors describe the increasingly transnational organization of culinary fields, multicultural culinary contact zones, and state-led culinary politics. Chapters include studies of the pathways in which Asian cuisines cross borders and subsequently interact with local culinary systems. Authors also study how cuisines from abroad enter into Asian cities and are modified in transnational urban settings. Multi-sited and cross-border ethnographic fieldwork and comparative qualitative case studies uncover the culinary networks and the cultural politics of these traveling cuisines. This volume shows that cuisines in Asia are less and less produced locally but rather in networks of producers, suppliers, entrepreneurs and patrons moving across borders.

James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. He has lived in East Asia for more than twenty years. He is the author of Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai and coauthor with Andrew Field of Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City.