Cuisine Worlds: Professional Cooking, Public Eating, and the Production of Culture in Contemporary Moscow

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the individuals, groups, and institutions that comprise Moscow's contemporary restaurant industry, this dissertation explores the production and consumption of Moscow's postsocialist culinary culture and landscape. Approaching cuisine as both a social product and a cultural process, I examine the agents and avenues of the local globalization of culinary culture. In my analysis, these "agents" include restaurateurs, chefs, cooks, professional associations, and educators and educational institutions, among others. I attend to the various meanings, practices, and contexts of their work, as well as to the political, aesthetic, and performative dimensions of cooking, cuisine and restaurants. I also examine how Russian consumers engage with and make sense of Moscow's emerging culinary culture and restaurant scene. I see these producers of cuisine and restaurants as authors of the capital's postsocialist consumer landscape and intermediaries between the local and the global. Articulating global culinary culture into local contexts, these cultural producers redeploy contemporary and historical culinary practices, aesthetics, and forms as representations of culture on both local and global stages. I call these practices culinary strategies and argue that they are vehicles through which new social actors struggle over the meanings and values at stake in the marketization of Russian society. Cuisine and restaurants are thus contested sites for the construction of Moscow as a world-class city and the production, dissemination, and negotiation of community, nation, identity, and class. I suggest that cuisine and restaurants play important roles in processes of globalization, serving as sites for reproduction and contestation of global hegemonies of form. Drawing on and expanding work in the anthropologies of food, visual communication, postsocialism, and globalization, my project suggests how ethnography and micro-analysis of the visual, sensual, performative, and structural dimensions of cultural production can open critical understandings of the complex and shifting interactions between local, national, and global contexts.