[KS] Golden Arches East

Sat Aug 29 23:58:57 EDT 1998

The H-Net Review Project, an academic list that circulates reviews of
current historical writing, recently e-published a review that I
personally found quite stimulating. Although the focus of the book under
review is not limited to Korea (Japan, Taipei, Beijing and Hong Kong are
also covered), Uri-Nara figures very prominently, and the author of the
review is currently teaching at a Korean university.  Thinking that the
review is likely to interest many members of this list, I am appending it. 
I do so with the permission of the reviewer and the encouragement of one
of our list's moderators, but also with apologies to any list-members who
feel burdened by its length. 

David Kosofsky
Hankuk University
Seoul
--------------------------------

H-NET BOOK REVIEW 
Published by H-PCAACA at msu.edu (August, 1998) 

James L. Watson, ed.  _Golden Arches East:  McDonald's in East 
Asia_. Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1997.  xvi + 256 pp. 
Bibliographical references and index.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 
0-804-73205-1; $16.95 (paper), 0-804-73207-8. 

Reviewed for H-PCAACA by Samuel Collins, Dongseo University, Korea 

When I first moved to Korea, I was frequently confronted with 
occasionally egregious comparisons between "American" and "Korean" 
culture.  "Koreans eat lunch quickly; Americans east slowly." 
"Koreans eat vegetables; Americans eat meat."  "Koreans eat rice; 
Americans eat bread."  During those first weeks, it was difficult to 
refrain from arguing.  Didn't Koreans eat meat?  What were all those 
bakeries doing in Korea if no one ate bread?  And who, finally, eats 
faster than Americans?  We invented McDonald's! 

I know enough now not to challenge those suspect generalizations. 
In them, as in so many other discoursive locutions contrasting 
"self" and "other," "Korea" and "America" are less actual places 
than figural, rhetorical strategies for reflecting on Korea's 
contradictory modernities and tumultuous modernization.  In a 
country where food is a national symbol (i.e., the infinitely 
varied, pickled vegetable, "kimchi"), incongruous discourse on 
foodways is a way to think about the whiplash changes wrought by 
capitalism's creative destruction:  the mass migration to the city, 
the rise of a comparatively wealthy, consumer class, and, more 
recently, the unwelcome intrusion of international (read American) 
imports and capital under the aegis of IMF restructuring.  Is 
"tradition" being squandered for a fitful, problematic "modernity"? 
Is Korea becoming "Westernized," or, worse yet, a vassal to foreign 
powers who would denude it of culture, language and history? 

In Korea we can telescope all of this contentious debate on 
modernization into an argument over the merits of McDonald's.  The 
_sine qua non_ symbol of aggressive, American capitalism, McDonald's 
is the subject of endless peroration in newspapers, on television, 
and in the day-to-day conversations of Korean people.  More than 
simply a question of market share, the effects of McDonald's and 
other fast food on Korea is a question of _identity_, the 
authenticity of the Korean self, culture and social life amidst the 
anomie of global "McDonaldization."  Yet, whatever their fears of 
Western imperialism, Korean people flock to McDonald's, stuffing 
their faces with Big Macs and slurping down shakes, each consumer in 
happy, geosynchronous concert with their counterparts in Russia, 
India, France and Canada. 

Confronted by the near-ubiquity of McDonald's, a particularly viral 
example of what Sidney Mintz calls "a special number of foods, 
representative of a single, modern society," the contributors to 
_Golden Arches East_ enjoin the fast food debate in Korea, Japan, 
Taipei, Beijing and Hong Kong, not to castigate "McDonaldization" or 
even to celebrate the promulgation of postmodernism a la 
Baudrillard, but to "produce ethnographic accounts of McDonald's 
social, political and economic impact on five local cultures" (p. 
6).  In a refrain now familiar to students of cultural studies, 
these anthropologists conclude, as James Watson writes in his 
introduction, that "consumers are not the automatons many analysts 
would have us believe" (p. 36) and that McDonald's is important 
enough to anthropology to be studied as part of the warp and weft of 
everyday life. 

Throwing off the hypostatized opposition of "East" and "West," 
"authentic" and "mass produced," they follow the cultural studies 
made popular by the Richard Hoggart's Centre for Contemporary 
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and its 
occasionally problematic progeny in the United States and treat the 
"trifling" consumption of mass culture with a rigor and gravity 
heretofore reserved for "canons" of literature, art and "high" 
culture. 

Arising from a panel at the 1994 American Anthropological 
Association Meeting in Athens, Georgia, the book's five "local 
culture" studies display a similar scansion:  1) tracing the history 
of McDonald's in each country; 2) evoking the complexity of consumer 
behavior towards the franchise; and 3) suggesting ways in which 
McDonald's forms part of an inclusive discourse within what Watson 
terms "local culture."  As Sidney Mintz sums up in a thoughtful 
afterward, "its patrons are 'buying' much more than food" (p. 195). 

McDonald's now has a firm hold on Asian markets, from its first 
restaurant in Japan in 1971 to its first restaurant in Beijing in 
1992.  Anti-U.S. imperialism notwithstanding, McDonald's is 
devastatingly popular and, together with other fast food franchises 
that make up what has been called the "first industrialization of 
eating," has changed the foodways of a nation.  This involves much 
more than the industrialization of food--the hamburger Taylorism for 
which McDonald's is famous--but also the industrialization of the 
consumer.  As James Watson explains in his chapter on McDonald's in 
Hong Kong: 

     For the system to work, consumers must be educated 
     --or "disciplined"--so that they voluntarily fulfill 
     their side of an implicit bargain: We (the corporation) 
     will provide cheap, fast service, if you (the customer) 
     carry your own tray, seat yourself, and help clean up 
     afterward. (p. 92) 

"Queuing" and "self-service," for example, are neither a natural nor 
inevitable response to crowds and congestion, yet McDonald's had to 
discipline its customers into orderly lines.  This has meant 
adapting the rigor of McDonald's factory-dining to the exigencies of 
local culture.  In Hong Kong, the "queue" and "self-bussing" 
separate the cosmopolitan from the country yokel.  In Japan, 
customers' long relationship with McDonald's has introduced a host 
of eating practices heretofore antithetical to polite society. 
While an older generation of Japanese has long equated "eating while 
standing"  with the behavior of animals, the practice has been 
institutionalized in restaurants too small to accommodate seated 
diners.  In Beijing, customers bus their own tables to signify their 
middle-class respectability (and middle-class aspirations): 
"Interestingly enough, several informants told me that when they 
threw out their own rubbish, they felt they were more "civilized" 
("wenming") than other customers because thy knew the proper 
behavior" (p. 53). 

McDonald's has also introduced a new concern for public hygiene in 
restaurant kitchens and bathrooms, an innovation that has 
transformed consumer expectations in all of the countries studied. 
In Beijing, the newly emergent, professional middle-class worries 
over foods served from street stalls by recent migrants.  These 
middle-class consumers look to McDonald's for its beneficent "health 
food."  As Youngxiang Yan finds, "The idea that McDonald's provides 
healthy food based on nutritional ingredients and scientific cooking 
methods has been widely accepted by both the Chinese media and the 
general public" (p. 45).  In Hong Kong, McDonald's has changed 
perceptions of "clean" and "dirty":  bathrooms once considered 
acceptable are now suspect and customers have become, in general, 
more careful about the restaurants they patronize.  "For many Hong 
Kong residents, therefore, McDonald's is more than just a 
restaurant; it is an oasis, a familiar rest station, in what is 
perceived to be an inhospitable urban environment" (p. 90).  And in 
Taipei, McDonald's hamburgers are considered a fitting--even 
nutritious--school lunch.  As one school principal told David Y.H. 
Yu, "They learn hygiene behavior and proper etiquette by eating 
hamburgers.  What is bad about fast food?" (p. 133). 

But while McDonald's insistence on clean kitchens and bathrooms 
makes it a symbol of purity, to others the restaurant can represent, 
a la Mary Douglas, danger.  In Korea, where McDonald's has been 
relatively slow to spread, the restaurant is seen as an economic and 
cultural affront to Korean autonomy.  As in Japan, the foreign, 
unhealthy hamburger stands in contrast to healthful, locally grown 
rice.  As Sangmee Bak reports: 

     In 1992, when trade negotiations were under way, the 
     Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing and NACF 
     jointly produced a poster to promote the consumption of 
     local agricultural produce.  The slogan read "Healthy eating 
     = Eating our Rice," and the poster depicted a large grain 
     of rice trampling a greasy hamburger.  (p. 137) 

This all suggests that McDonald's, despite legendary standardization 
insuring that your Big Mac will taste exactly the same in Moscow, 
Tokyo and New York, does not have complete control over its 
_meaning_ to its varied consumers.  In the "local cultures" 
analyzed in _Golden Arches East_, hamburgers do not constitute a 
meal; at most, they can be a sort of hyperbolically caloric snack. 
In one interview with a college student, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney finds 
that, "Any food with bread is not considered "filling," and so for 
lunch he and his university friends look for _donburi teishoku_--a 
large bowl of rice topped with various ingredients" (p. 164).  And 
in Beijing, "at best a hamburger is the equivalent of _xianbing_, a 
type of Chinese pancake with meat inside, which no one would treat 
as a daily meal" (p. 47). 

Additionally, consumers in Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan have a 
distinctly different idea of "fast food."  While "fast food" may 
mean _fast service_, it need not, as the contributors to _Golden 
Arches East_ show, mean _fast consumption_.  While the "table time" 
at U.S. fast food restaurants averages 11 minutes, customers in East 
Asia tend to dawdle, with groups of women averaging 33 minutes in 
Korea and Hong Kong customers (men and women) averages 20-25 
minutes.  On the margins of those averages lie students, elderly 
people and courting couples, all of whom might spend hours over a 
cup of tea, transforming McDonald's in an inexpensive version of a 
more traditional tea shop.  In Korea, where coffee is 800 Won at 
McDonald's but between 2000-3000 Won at a coffee shop, this practice 
seems to have only intensified in the "IMF era."  As more of a 
center of social life than a stopover, McDonald's is a place to hold 
children's birthdays (Beijing, Hong Kong, Korea), do homework 
(Taipei), or even conduct study groups (Korea).  One woman in David 
Y.H. Yu's study spent every day at McDonald's, from 7:00 am to 3:30 
pm, in order to meet her grandson. 

These examples and others serve to sufficiently differentiate the 
East Asian McDonald's experience from its occidental counterparts 
and throw the "McDonaldization" thesis into serious question.  In a 
by-now familiar cultural studies coda, consumers are shown to exert 
a sort of plucky, subterranean control over otherwise monolithic 
corporations.  Faced with a uniformity of production, consumers are 
nevertheless free to creatively appropriate apparently homogeneous 
product into the Geertzean webs of local culture and localized 
experience.  To borrow a metaphor from _Re-Made in Japan_, a 
collections of essays on Japanese consumption edited by Jeffrey 
Tobin, the West is less borrowed than "domesticated" into East Asia 
(Tobin 1992).  That is, for "the foreign" to have meaning in Japan, 
Korea, China or Taiwan, it must first be incorporated into a context 
of cultural practice, nationalism and identity uniquely Korean, 
Japanese, Chinese or Taiwanese.  In other words, the contributors to 
_Golden Arches East_ argue that the _global_ becomes _local_:  "Who 
is to say that Mickey Mouse is not Japanese, or that Ronald McDonald 
is not Chinese?" (p. 10). 

But is this really the most useful way to think about McDonald's? 
In the 1980s, there was a tendency to conflate such acts of 
quotidian appropriation with bonafide "resistance," or, even more 
egregiously, "counterhegemony."  But these variegated fanfares for 
the common consumer missed one of the more insidious features of 
modern marketing:  consumers are _encouraged_ to "appropriate" 
product into their lives.  Advertisers are well versed in a version 
of cultural studies concerned with "heterologies" of "dominant" 
discourse.  The notion that consumers exert some control over their 
purchases and "create emergent, personalized consumption meanings" 
is, of course, of great interest to a multinational world of 
corporations marketing product to in different countries to 
different demographics (Cf. Thompson and Haytko 1997).  From this 
perspective, the "McDonaldization" thesis is a bit of a straw man. 
Do corporations imbricated in global capitalism want the 
"McDonaldization" of the world or just more profits?  I would submit 
that corporations are more than happy in a postmodern world of 
proliferating alterity:  it's an advertiser's dream, endlessly 
fecund, endlessly generative of new equations of culture, identity 
and _consumption_:  "James Cantalupo, President of McDonald's 
International, claims that the goal of McDonald's is to 'become as 
much a part of the local culture as possible.' He objects when 
'[p]eople call us a multinational.  I like to call us a 
_multilocal_, meaning that McDonald's goes to great lengths to find 
local suppliers and local partners whenever new branches are opened" 
(p. 12).  I would suggest that multinationals, far from advocating 
homogeneous "global cultures," are comfortable with a notion of 
culture similar to James Watson's "local culture."  In business 
schools across the nation, MBA students are cracking open books on 
"international marketing" that advocate the sensitive understanding 
of cultural difference, not for altruistic, anthropological 
understanding, but for _increased profits_. 

The question, then, dogging this collection of essays is not, in my 
mind, whether or not to take McDonald's seriously as an object of 
inquiry, but the usefulness of Watson _et al_ in delineating 
consumer behavior already well developed in countless marketing and 
consumer behavior journals, e.g., _Journal of Consumer Research_, 
_Journal of Marketing_ and so on.  What special insights can 
anthropology bring to the study of consumer behavior, when marketing 
departments routinely use qualitative research methodologies (focus 
groups, interviews, participant observation) to "customize" their 
strategies to the interstices of local culture and niche marketing? 
That is, much of _Golden Arches East_ seems to trail in the path of 
research McDonald's has already done; the job of the anthropologist 
in this collection seems less to generate new understandings of 
culture and social life than to graciously concede that McDonald's 
has done its cultural homework. 

     In other words, to build on their initial success, 
     McDonald's restaurants must localize their foods (and some 
     of their cultural associations as well), converting them 
     into something that is routine and ordinary for Beijing 
     residents, while somehow maintain their image as the 
     symbol of the American way of life.  That is why McDonald's 
     has gone to such extraordinary lengths to fit into the 
     local cultural setting.  (p. 73) 

The wily corporate head is _like an anthropologist_; does that mean 
we should become more like corporate executives?  Why theorize 
McDonald's when we can just ask the experts? 

Without charging that Watson _et al_ are in league with McDonald's 
(as some participants at the 1994 American Anthropological 
Association Meeting did), we can still question the efficacy of an 
anthropology that resembles the evaluative stage of longitudinal, 
marketing research.  Is the task of a "post-fordist" anthropology 
merely to confirm the "cultural fit" of product and consumer?  If 
McDonald's is important in our understanding of people and culture, 
then how should it be studied?  Part of the problem here lies in 
Watson's decision to concentrate on "consumption." 

     Previous studies of fast food have focused on _production_, 
     emphasizing either management or labor [ . . .] But we 
     are primarily concerned with another dimension of that 
     fast food system, namely _consumption_.  What do 
     consumers have to say about McDonald's?  (p. ix) 

While it's unclear why Watson thinks his research novel at a time 
when the anthropological study of commodities (and consumption) has 
blossomed into a subfield in its own right (Cf. Miller 1994; 
Appadurai 1986), I have to wonder about the utility of the 
parsimonious reduction of culture to instances of _production_ or 
_consumption_.  If the contributors to _Golden Arches East_ are 
correct and "patrons are _buying_ much more than food," than perhaps 
analysis privileging the _consumption of commodities_ is 
self-limiting.  While the "postmodern" has given us increasingly 
lively commodities (and less lively selves), to undertake a study of 
_consumption_ is to be part, rather than an analyst, of capitalism's 
culture.  While I want to avoid the inevitably circular ontologies 
of what might constitute "inside" or "outside," we might 
nevertheless take Stuart Hall's comments to heart: 

     The "culture" is those patterns of organization, those 
     characteristic forms of human energy which can be discovered 
     as revealing themselves--in "unexpected identities and 
     correspondences" as well as in "discontinuities of an 
     unexpected kind" (p. 63)--within or underlying *all* social 
     practices.  (Hall 1994: 523) 

We should see this as less a shallow valuation of novelty (the 
"surprise" of the unexpected correspondence, a la Joseph Campbell) 
than a warning against following well-worn paths of disciplinarity. 
By considering the question of McDonald's relative success in 
selling its product to new generations of East Asian consumers, 
_Golden Arches East_ is limited at the outset to what might be 
called highly descriptive consumer research.  This would explain, 
perhaps, the book's enthusiastic reception in _The New York Times_ 
and _The Economist_. 

Perhaps taking the wider approach would force Watson _et al_ to 
consider possibly unpleasant realities contrary to their initial 
goals, i.e., to describe the "impact" of McDonald's without judging 
it "a paragon of capitalist virtue" or an "evil empire" (p. 6). 
"Neutrally" evaluating McDonald's evidently requires them to dismiss 
a political economic approach grounded in an understanding of global 
capital and to embrace a localized appreciation for identity and 
consumption.  "Economic and social realities make it necessary to 
construct an entirely new approach to global issues, one that takes 
consumers' own views into account" (p. 79).  But why are these 
mutually exclusive?  Is it possible to both critique McDonald's and 
understand its importance in the lives of people in East Asia?  Why 
not?  Without repeating the fusillade of carefully argued critiques 
available on the McSpotlight website (http://www.mcspotlight.org), 
it is fair to say that McDonald's impacts environments, economies 
and health in deleterious ways that deserve to be taken seriously by 
anthropologists.  Where in these essays is there mention of the 
alarming increase in childhood obesity in Hong Kong, Korea and 
Japan?  In Korea, at least, this is a puissant topic in newspapers, 
magazines and television.  And what about the low pay of McDonald's 
employees and the ways it reinforces or even exacerbates gender 
inequalities in labor?  To dismiss these as extraneous to a 
"consumer study" is to privilege an analytical (and highly 
ideological) artefact.  To study them would require contributors to 
wander far afield from McDonald's narrowly considered, to culture 
change centered around fast food, e.g., increased mobility and the 
challenges modernity and modernization pose to culture and identity. 

Yet, there are tantalizing glimpses of other possibilities.  Emiko 
Ohnuki-Tierney, for example, seems quite aware of the pitfalls of 
Watson's approach:  "I think we must shift our attention from the 
obsession with consumer behavior and focus instead on how new 
commodities become _embedded_ in culture" (p. 161).  In her study, 
McDonald's is an example of "Japanese Americana," a concatenation of 
cultural alterity drawn on by Japanese people as an alternative to 
"tradition."  Sangmee Bak, too, looks at how McDonald's is central 
to a circle of debates on what might constitute "the Korean" and 
what makes up "the foreign."  "These controversies are closely 
linked to a Korean dilemma:  people wish to be, simultaneously, 
nationalistic and global" (p. 137).  And in Taipei, David Y.H. Yu 
convincingly explains the apparent contradiction of a coeval growth 
in both hypertraditionalism (betel nut chewing, traditional 
Taiwanese cuisine) and hyper-modernism (McDonald's). 

Even more interesting is the place McDonald's holds in emergent 
lifestyles centered around middle-class neolocality.  With the 
fractionation of multi-generational residence into smaller 
households, children have become more powerful, the focus of family 
consumption:  "Many grandparents have resigned themselves to the new 
consumer trends and take their preschool children to McDonald's for 
mid-morning snacks--precisely the time of day that local teahouses 
were once packed with retired people" (p. 101).  McDonald's has 
become a part of the arrangement of kind and sociality in 
middle-class life:  a place to take children for birthdays, to meet 
grandparents, to talk to friends. 

But studying these aspects of social life would take the 
contributors to _Golden Arches East_ far away from the "golden 
arches" into the homes, schools and workplaces of informants.  But 
that would be better, I think, than staying planted in the Formica 
perfection of a world of "consumption." 

References 

Appadurai, Arjun (ed.).  _The Social Life of Things_.  New York: 
Cambridge University Press. 

Hall, Stuart.  "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms."  In _Culture/ 
Power/History_, ed. by Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry Ortner. 
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. 

Miller, Daniel.  _Modernity, An Ethnographic Approach_.  New York: 
Berg, 1994. 

Thompson, Craig J. and Diana L. Haytko.  "Speaking of Fashion." 
_Journal of Consumer Research_ 24 (June 1997). 

Tobin, Joseph J. (ed.).  _Re-Made in Japan_.  New Haven: Yale 
University Press. 

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       Popular Culture and the American Culture Associations. 
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