Start Date

25-5-2020 5:00 PM

End Date

25-5-2020 5:15 PM

Description

The growing popularity of culinary tourism inspires many travelers to view local cuisines as a way to connect to the people and places that they visit. Such cross-cultural encounters appeal in part because they offer to disrupt conventional commodity chains and their associated hierarchies, bringing together consumers and producers who would otherwise be separated by significant geographic distances and not infrequently by racial/ethnic, cultural, and/or classed inequalities. At the same time, however, transnational tourists’ relative ease of mobility is a form of global privilege that contrasts sharply with the more limited mobility and economic disadvantage characterizing many of the societies to which leisure travelers are drawn. Similarly, culinary tourism reflects the popularity of ‘eating otherness’ as a form of cosmopolitan cultural capital, one which both obscures and reproduces the hierarchies of difference that enable some, typically more dominant, groups to consume the products of (often) subordinate and culturally distinctive others. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand, I explore how tourist-oriented cooking schools navigate this tricky terrain, engaging global tourists’ cosmopolitan privilege alongside their desire for a meaningful cultural and culinary encounter.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/y1e6-5g98

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May 25th, 5:00 PM May 25th, 5:15 PM

Thailand’s Tourist Cooking Schools: Disrupting Distance, Affirming Difference

The growing popularity of culinary tourism inspires many travelers to view local cuisines as a way to connect to the people and places that they visit. Such cross-cultural encounters appeal in part because they offer to disrupt conventional commodity chains and their associated hierarchies, bringing together consumers and producers who would otherwise be separated by significant geographic distances and not infrequently by racial/ethnic, cultural, and/or classed inequalities. At the same time, however, transnational tourists’ relative ease of mobility is a form of global privilege that contrasts sharply with the more limited mobility and economic disadvantage characterizing many of the societies to which leisure travelers are drawn. Similarly, culinary tourism reflects the popularity of ‘eating otherness’ as a form of cosmopolitan cultural capital, one which both obscures and reproduces the hierarchies of difference that enable some, typically more dominant, groups to consume the products of (often) subordinate and culturally distinctive others. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand, I explore how tourist-oriented cooking schools navigate this tricky terrain, engaging global tourists’ cosmopolitan privilege alongside their desire for a meaningful cultural and culinary encounter.