Academic literature on the topic 'Harvard College (1780- ). Class of 1993'

David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds. Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Nashville: American Assocation for State and Local History, 1984. Pp. xxiii, 436. Paper, $17.95 ($16.15 to AASLH members); cloth $29.50 ($26.95 to AASLH members). Review by Jacob L. Susskind of The Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. Salo W. Baron. The Contemporary Relevance of History: A Study in Approaches and Methods. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 158. Cloth, $30.00; Stephen Vaughn, ed. The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985. Pp. 406. Paper, $12.95. Review by Michael T. Isenberg of the United States Naval Academy. Howard Budin, Diana S. Kendall and James Lengel. Using Computers in the Social Studies. New York and London: Teachers College Press, 1986. Pp. vii, 118. Paper, $11.95. Review by Francis P. Lynch of Central Connecticut State University. David F. Noble. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. xviii, 409. Paper, $8.95. Review by Donn C. Neal of the Society of American Archivists. Alan L. Lockwood and David E. Harris. Reasoning with Democratic Values: Ethical Problems in United States History. New York and London: Teachers College Press, 1985. Volume 1: Pp. vii, 206. Paper, $8.95. Volume 2: Pp. vii, 319. Paper, $11.95. Instructor's Manual: Pp. 167. Paper, $11.95. Review by Robert W. Sellen of Georgia State University. James Atkins Shackford. David Crocketts: The Man and the Legend. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Pp. xxv, 338. Paper, $10.95. Review by George W. Geib of Butler University. John R. Wunder, ed. At Home on the Range: Essays on the History of Western Social and Domestic Life. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. xiii, 213. Cloth, $29.95. Review by Richard N. Ellis of Fort Lewis College. Sylvia R. Frey and Marian J. Morton, eds. New World, New Roles: A Documentary History of Women in Pre-Industrial America. New York, Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1986. Pp. ix, 246. Cloth, $35.00. Review by Barbara J. Steinson of DePauw University. Elizabeth Roberts. A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Pp. vii, 246. Paper, $12.95. Review by Thomas T. Lewis of Mount Senario College. Steven Ozment. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1983. Pp. viii, 283. Cloth, $17.50; Paper, $7.50. Review by Sanford Gutman of State University of New York, College at Cortland. Geoffrey Best. War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 336. Paper, $9.95; Brian Bond. War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 256. Paper, $9.95. Review by Bullitt Lowry of North Texas State University. Edward Norman. Roman Catholicism in England: From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 138. Paper, $8.95; Karl F. Morrison, ed. The Church in the Roman Empire. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 248. Cloth, $20.00; Paper, $7.95. Review by Raymond J. Jirran of Thomas Nelson Community College. Keith Robbins. The First World War. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. 186. Paper, $6.95; J. M. Winter. The Great War and the British People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. xiv, 360. Cloth, $25.00. Review by Roger D. Tate of Somerset Community College. Gerhardt Hoffmeister and Frederic C. Tubach. Germany: 2000 Years-- Volume III, From the Nazi Era to the Present. New York: The Ungar Publishing Co., 1986. Pp. ix, 279. Cloth, $24.50. Review by Abraham D. Kriegel of Memphis State University. Judith M. Brown. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. xvi, 429. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $12.95. Review by Steven A. Leibo of Russell Sage College.

Introduction There is, as Andrew Rowan dubs it, a “constant paradox” in the way we treat, relate to, and consume animals in our everyday lives (Arluke and Sanders 4). This paper examines this paradox in relation to the rise of vegetarianism as a new taste and consumer culture in the West. The first part of the paper, drawing upon Bourdieu, argues that vegetarian “taste” is fundamentally a social practice linked to class and gender. It then offers a preliminary theoretical sketch of the sociological drivers and consequences of vegetarianism in late-modernity, drawing on social theory. Having established the theoretical framework, the second part of the paper turns to an empirical analysis of the moral motivations and experiences of a selection of Australian bloggers. The key argument is that the bloggers narrate vegetarianism as a taste practice that entangles self-care with a larger assemblage of non-human responsibility that works to re-enchant a demoralised consumer modernity. Vegetarianism as Taste Practice “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”, Pierre Bourdieu famously claimed (xxix). Bourdieu demonstrated the classificatory power of taste not only in relation to music, home décor, and art but also in relation to food. Taste, for Bourdieu, is a social process by which people actively communicate social position through classification of the judgements and preferences of both themselves and others. For example, he highlighted how the working-class dislike for fish was part of a wider class system of dispositions where the middle-class favour “the light, the refined and the delicate” defined in negation of working-class taste for “the heavy, the fat and the coarse” (182–83). How then do we read vegetarianism as a taste practice? First, we need to take Bourdieu’s point that vegetarianism is not simply an expression of personal preference, but is a social practice that articulates identity, group membership, and systems of cultural distinction. Bourdieu, while not writing about vegetarianism, did link meat eating to masculine and working-class displays of embodied strength and power—“warrior food”, as Nietzsche called it (Bennett 141). Meat, Bourdieu wrote, was “nourishing food par excellence, strong and strong-making, giving vigour, blood, and health is the dish for men” (190). On this reading, meat avoidance can be located as part of a middle-class taste for the “light” and the “healthy” but also a rejection of working-class and masculine food taste practices. Vegetarianism, like buying fair-trade, organic, and eco-friendly, might be theorised as a symbolic device for enacting middle-class displays of cultural distinction based on claims to moral purity and virtue. On the gender front, female vegetarians conform to taste trends for middle-class women—light, not fattening, and healthy—whereas for men, vegetarianism is linked to the rejection of “hegemonic” masculinity and patriarchy (Bourdieu; Connell). Empirical research partially lends support to this depiction, showing that vegetarianism is predominantly practiced by female, middle-class, university-qualified professionals working in service-sector or white-collar occupations (RealEat; Keane and Willetts). This kind of Bourdieuian analysis is important in drawing attention to the social configurations of vegetarianism as a taste practice. It, however, misses the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the wider social and cultural changes that are driving its growth in the West. The following section addresses this gap. Theorising Vegetarianism Adrian Franklin explains the growth of vegetarianism in the last part of the 20th century as part of a process of “de-centring” human-animal relations in conditions of late-modernity. Franklin suggests that vegetarianism is part of a wider social and cultural shift where animals make new types of moral claims on humans as they form closer and more intimate emotional bonds. He argues that in the context of widespread feelings of moral decline and disorder, animals are constructed as morally pure and innocent, and humans morally blameworthy and destructive (Franklin 196). From this perspective, vegetarianism is less about an ethical regards for animals but more about what animals reveal about human moral worlds: the reflections are less about an ethical consideration of the “Other” and more about a moral consideration of “ourselves” (Franklin 196). A sticker plastered on the door of my local vegetarian café encapsulates this perspective: it reads, “humans are the real pests.” Unlike Bourdieu and Franklin, Tester is important in moving from a narrow focus on what humans “do” with animals as symbolic or communicative acts to the ethical significance of vegetarianism. Tester makes a critical distinction between the “ethical” and “lifestyle” vegetarian. In Tester’s terms, the “lifestyle” vegetarian avoids meat for health and well-being reasons while the “ethical” vegetarian is concerned for the ethical treatment of animals. The “lifestyle” vegetarian is problematic for Tester due to “the being of the ethical conduct of life” being substituted for “the doing of the consumer” (218). Vegetarianism becomes emptied of moral meaning as it turns into big business marked by the growth of a multi-billion dollar faux meat industry, trendy vegetarian restaurants, lifestyle converts, and celebrity endorsements. In “lifestyle” mode, Tester argues, vegetarian concern for animal cruelty, slaughter, and death is colonised by a narcissistic concern for slimming, youth, and health—for the promotion of a contented consumer self (Humphery). Although Tester highlights the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the challenges it faces in a consumer world, like the rest of the accounts, it tends to be anthropocentric. Animals tend to speak solely to human worlds, ignoring the vitality and “distributed agency” (Bennett 38) of the non-human. The non-human animal tends to be construed as a passive and inert resource existing solely for human intentionality, rather than acknowledging their “vital power” and “liveliness” outside human agendas (133). Bennett claims that eating highlights the inseparability of humans and edible matter, and the capacity for both human and nonhuman bodies to effect social and political change. She proposes that through a greater sense of ourselves as entwined with, and part of, nature as physical entities, we can enchant the world and become energised as co-participants. Here vegetarianism can be understood as part of recognition of the “assemblage” of human and non-human actions, where self, body, nature and planet become mutually constituting and supportive. Vegetarian taste is not just about middle-class concerns for distinction, but an ethics of the non-human. What does vegetarianism as an ethical taste practice look like “on the ground”? What are the moral motivations for becoming vegetarian, and how is this understood and experienced? What roles do lifestyle and ethical motivations play in vegetarian eating behaviours? In the following section, I turn to a selection of Australian bloggers to make a modest contribution to understanding these questions in the contemporary Australian context. The bloggers are taken from a wider study that analysed 44 urban Australian blogs as part of a project on everyday Australian moralities. The blogs were sampled from the blog hosting website LiveJournal (LJ) between 2006 and 2007. Blog usernames used have been fictionalised to maintain anonymity. Specifically, I focus on a selection of three blog case studies: Universal_cloak, a 32-year-old female artistic designer from Melbourne, Starbright, a 28-year-old female student from Brisbane, and Snig, a 25-year-old male paramedic from Melbourne. The bloggers are a representative selection from a wider sample of blog writing on vegetarianism and human-animal relations. The blog narratives complicate Tester’s simplistic distinction between the “ethical” and “lifestyle” vegetarian, articulating vegetarianism as form of ethical practice that works to morally enchant the world in a dialogue between self-improvement, personal well-being, and ethical relationships with animals and the planet (Taylor). Vegetarianism in Practice: “Positive for Me, Positive for Others” Universal_cloak writes how “being hippy—wearing hippy clothes, eating healthy organic food and being full of positive energy” makes her “feel healthier […] like I’m doing a better thing for the world (society in particular) […] like I’m doing something good”. Being “authentic” to a “hippy” identity—“being true to herself”—is connected for Universal_cloak to a wider concern for the non-human—for animals, nature, and the planet. An important component of this link between self-fulfilment and “doing a better thing for the world” is not eating the “corpses of animals.” Universal_cloak describes this in detail, at the same time underlining the environmental dimensions of her vegetarianism: I feel sick to my stomach to think that an animal dies so I can eat. Why is it any different to feel the same way that people are abused, tortured and killed, that eco-systems are ravaged and torn up and irreversibly damaged, just so I can have the choice of four kinds of marinated tuna in a can? So I can have two newsagents to choose from? So I can have Alice Cooper iron-on patches, miniature plastic bowling pins, disposable cameras, instant oats, microwavable popcorn, extra-soft, quilted and fucking fragranced toilet paper? McDonalds fucking everywhere [...] ugh, I can't take it. I need to go to bed. No wonder depression is on the rise—we have a kingdom of putrid revulsion to look down upon. Vegetarianism figures for Universal_cloak as a form of ethical consumption that enables resistance to feelings of modern demoralisation, to the feeling of being “swallowed up by the great hulky polluted monster, with ads and consumer shit everywhere around you.” For Universal_cloak, vegetarianism works to both critique and re-enchant modernity: a way of saying “she doesn’t agree with the modern world” but also building a “better world around herself.” She writes that following her “ideal diet” of “fair-trade, veg-o, organic and local” and not “white bread and processed meat” gives her a strong sense of “staving off her fear that I’m fucking up the planet”. Universal_cloak locates vegetarianism within an assemblage of self-interest, nutritional advantage, ecological sustainability, and anti-consumerism (Bennett). Universal_cloak, ­as Tester distinguishes, is neither a straightforward “lifestyle vegetarian” or “ethical vegetarian” (218), neither avoiding meat-eating solely because of reasons to do with health, well-being, and risk avoidance or due to an ethical regard for the being of animals. Universal_cloak shows up Tester’s critique on two fronts. First, she highlights how vegetarianism comes alive in an assemblage that includes not only the needs of the non-human animal but also the materiality of food production, marketing, consumerism, and issues of ecological unsustainability. Universal_Cloak’s practice reflects a wider “greening of the ‘vegetarian assemblage’.” As an advertisement on the Australian Vegetarian Society’s website states: “reduce your eco footprint—GO VEGO.” Secondly, Universal_cloak underscores how Tester is bound to an overly pessimistic reading of contemporary lifestyle cultures of well-being or self-improvement. Tester reads the “lifestyle vegetarian,” focused on well-being and health, as morally inferior. In contrast, Universal_cloak reveals how vegetarianism built around a culture of self-improvement—being true to her “hippy” identity—connects her to a larger web of interacting material flows and forces constituted between self, body, non-human animals, and planetary concern. As Bennett argues, recognising the entanglement of self within a larger assemblage of the non-human means that self-interest is refashioned as ecological and interconnected ­(119). Starbright, a 28-year-old woman from Brisbane and newly practising Buddhist, further captures the expansion of self-interest within the larger aggregate of ecological and non-human concern. Picking up a copy of Peter Singer’s call to arms Animal Liberation in a second-hand bookshop while travelling in Laos, Starbright describes how she initially decided to make “a firm decision to stick to vegetarianism.” Now a devoted vegan, Starbright abstains from eating and using “anything that comes from an animal”, including clothing and footwear (e.g., wool, silk, and leather), food sources such as eggs, milk, honey or cochineal (red dye from beetles) and cosmetic products that may either contain animal derivatives or have been tested on animals. While requiring rigorous discipline and regulation of the self—a kind of secular version of Weber’s Protestant ascetic—Starbright depicts her decision to become vegan as being “one of the easiest and most rewarding changes I've made in my life.” In explaining this, Starbright, in a manner similar to that of Universal_cloak, invokes the interconnections between humans and ecological and animal life as the basis of her moral motivation. She writes: “I’m just another well-informed individual who has discovered the virtues of not eating meat, like being environmentally and ethically aware.” Starbright positions her choice not to eat meat as both an ethical and political act, which compounds to improve the lives of both human and non-human animals: If I don’t support the meat industry, I make a tiny dent in the consumption rate. Others around me take on vegetarianism, and the effect increases. Others eat less meat around me, and the dent gets slightly bigger [...] Less grazing land needed means less environmental destruction as well. Less crops to feed the animals as well. Veganism is a “rewarding change” not only because “its good to reduce suffering” but also because it is “positive to [her] health”, that she is “happier now” and she “get[s] a positive feeling out of it.” Starbright adds: “it just makes me happy, and it reduces the suffering in the world—that’s the main reason I do it.” Vegetarianism enables Starbright to engage in clearly defined morally “good works,” where there is mutual reinforcement of the “feel-good factor” (Franklin 36) between personal wellbeing and “care for the Other” (Bauman 8): “it just seems positive for me, and positive for others.” This is a form of care not perpetuating a human centred approach, which Bennett (88) warns against, but one that recognises the entanglement of human lives with non-human lives—where humans are called upon to recognise that the plight of animals and the environment is also our own plight. Snig similarly places his practice of vegetarianism within a dialectic of self-fulfilment and interconnection with the non-human world. For him, vegetarianism is about maintaining what he refers to as “internal balance,” enabling him to avoid “over-filling” his “physical needs” bucket at the expense of his “emotional bucket.” Snig believes that much of the “physical or psychic illness, unhappiness and dissatisfaction” experienced in the contemporary West is due to an “over-filling” or “over-satisfaction of one at the expense of another.” Accordingly, he advocates the “positive effects” of “filling the emotional bucket” by “doing good works” which downplay the negative psychological consequences of an “excess of sex but no romantic love” and an “excess of shallow entertainment but no deeper intellectual life.” Snig writes: If you put yourself in a position where you have a greater capacity to do good works, the path to do so becomes easier. But if you’re hopelessly mired in your own filth, any benefit you do to the world will be by accident. If you’re so locked up in your tiny little world of tv-fast-food-boring job, you can’t see what the big wide world has to offer, and what you have to offer it. Step outside and it can become much clearer. Similar to Universal_cloak, there is an emphasis in Snig’s blog on how “doing good works” (which includes vegetarianism, alongside working as a paramedic, living in small flat in the city, and volunteering on conservation projects) enables a kind of moral renewal in a perceived demoralised consumer modernity. Abstaining from eating meat—sometimes alone, but often in conjunction with a range of other eco-friendly acts—works as a way of distancing oneself, of “stepping outside,” from the excess and waste of modernity and a practical way of “doing good,” of “trying to make a better world.” Conclusion This paper has analysed vegetarianism as a contemporary taste and consumer practice. Drawing upon Bourdieu, the first part argued that it is important to recognise vegetarianism as a taste practice with distinct social configurations that are classed and gendered. Vegetarianism is linked to taste as a vehicle of distinction, making and reinforcing social divisions and distance. In such an analysis, Vegetarianism aligns with feminine and middle-class notions of food as “light, healthy and non-fattening” and for men can figure as a rejection of dominant forms of masculinity. It was argued that while Bourdieu is useful for highlighting the social dimensions of taste, this form of analysis underplays the ethical substance of vegetarianism and the wider drivers of change in contemporary human–animal relations. Here the paper drew upon the work of Franklin, Tester, and Bennett. The first two authors underline the tensions between ethics, consumerism, and lifestyle in late-modernity while Bennett highlights the distribution of agency across human/non-human “assemblages.” This theoretical background was used as a framework to investigate blogged accounts of vegetarianism. The bloggers highlight how vegetarianism works as a moral space for performing “good works” and re-enchanting a demoralised consumer modernity. In Universal_cloak’s words, vegetarianism serves as a way of saying “you don’t agree with the modern world”. Critiquing Tester’s distinction between the “lifestyle” and “ethical” vegetarian, the bloggers show how vegetarianism/veganism is constituted in a complex assemblage between health, personal well-being, animal, and environmental concerns. Drawing upon Bennett, it was suggested that vegetarianism emerges as part of a refashioning of self-interest where concerns for self and personal wellbeing are articulated within wider concerns for nature, animals and the planet. This paper raises bigger questions concerning how animals enter into human lives as “particular” Others in conditions of growing human–animal closeness. For example, to what extent will responsibility for and with the non-human grow and how will this impact upon meat eating in the West? Will vegetarianism flourish as part of contemporary middle-class taste trends toward “green,” “healthy,” and “organic” consumption? The question remains whether vegetarianism will primarily be an expression of middle-class distinction or part of a genuine ecological sensibility where the non-human—both animal and planetary—play a significant role in the working out of moral sensibilities. Perhaps Universal_cloak’s practice of vegetarianism provides an important model, where contemporary concern for self-fulfilment, health, and well-being are articulated within a large assemblage of interdependence and connection with animals, nature and the environment. The recent UN recommendation to either reduce meat-intake or adopt a plant-based diet to minimise carbon emissions (Steinfeld et al.) suggests that the nexus between human, animal, and environmental responsibility is, and will continue to be, central to everyday moral negotiation in late-modernity. References Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Sanders. Regarding Animals. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard UP, 1984. Franklin, Adrian. Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human–Animal Relations in Modernity. London: Sage, 1999.Humphrey, Kim. Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Keane, Anne, and Anna Willets. Concepts of Healthy Eating: An Anthropological Investigation in South-East London. London: Goldsmiths College, 1996. RealEat Survey Office. The RealEat Survey 1984–1993: Changing Attitudes to Meat Consumption. London: Vegetarian Society, 1995. Steinfeld, Henning, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, M. and Cees de Haan. “LiveStock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options”. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (2006). 10 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM›. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Tester, Keith. “The Moral Malaise of McDonaldization: The Values of Vegetarianism”. Resisting McDonaldization. Ed. Barry Smart. London: Sage, 1999. 207–222.

Postmodernism is supposed to identify the conditions of contemporary cultural production when human affairs in general, and the dissemination of prevailing ideas in particular, have become fully enmeshed in relations of commodity exchange. (Martin 2002, p. 30) The accumulation of capital within industrial economies keyed on the surplus value derived from the production of raw materials into mass manufactured products, and their subsequent exchange in the capitalist marketplace. Within what Poster (1990) described as the contemporary mode of information , surplus capital is generated from the manufacturing of product’s symbolic values, which in turn substantiate their use and ultimately exchange values within the consumer market. This, in essence, is the centrifugal process undermining the brand (Klein 1999), promotional (Wernick 1991), or commodity sign (Goldman and Papson 1996), culture that characterizes contemporary capitalism: Through the creative outpourings of “cultural intermediaries” (Bourdieu 1984) working within the advertising, marketing, public relations, and media industries, commodities—routinely produced within low wage industrializing economies—are symbolically constituted to global consuming publics. This postmodern regime of cultural production is graphically illustrated within the sporting goods industry (Miles 1998) where, in regard to their use value, highly non-differentiated material products such as sport shoes are differentiated in symbolic terms through innovative advertising and marketing initiatives. In this way, oftentimes gaudy concoctions of leather, nylon, and rubber become transformed into prized cultural commodities possessing an inflated economic value within today’s informational-symbolic order (Castells 1996). Arguably, the globally ubiquitous Nike Inc. is the sporting brand that has most aggressively and effectively capitalized upon what Rowe described as the “culturalization of economics” in the latter twentieth century (1999, p. 70). Indeed, as Nike Chairman and CEO Phil Knight enthusiastically declared: For years, we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool. What I mean is that marketing knits the whole organization together. The design elements and functional characteristics of the product itself are just part of the overall marketing process. (Quoted in (Willigan 1992, p. 92) This commercial culturalization of Nike has certainly sparked considerable academic interest, as evidenced by the voluminous literature pertaining to the various dimensions of its practices of cultural production (Donaghu and Barff 1990; Ind 1993; Korzeniewicz 1994; Cole and Hribar 1995; Boje 1998; Goldman and Papson 1998; Lafrance 1998; Armstrong 1999; Denzin 1999; Penaloza 1999; Sage 1999; Lucas 2000; Stabile 2000). Rather than contribute to this body of work, our aim is to engage a sporting shoe company attempting to establish itself within the brand universe defined and dominated by Nike. For this reason we turn to German-based Puma AG: a dynamic brand-in-process, seeking to differentiate itself within the cluttered sporting landscape, through the assertion of a consciously fractured brand identity designed to address a diverse range of clearly-defined consumer subjectivities. Puma’s history can be traced to post-war Germany when, in 1948, a fraternal dispute compelled Rudolf Dassler to leave Adidas (the company he founded with his brother Adi) and set up a rival sports shoe business on the opposite bank of the Moselle river in Herzogenaurach. Over the next three decades the two companies vied for the leadership in the global sports shoe industry. However, the emergence of Nike and Reebok in the 1980s, and particularly their adoption of aggressive marketing strategies, saw both Adidas and Puma succumbing to what was a new world sneaker order (Strasser and Becklund 1991). Of the two, Puma’s plight was the more chronic, with expenditures regularly exceeding moribund revenues. For instance, in 1993, Puma lost US$32 million on sales of just US$190 million (Saddleton 2002, p. 2). At this time, Puma’s brand presence and identity was negligible quite simply because it failed to operate according to the rhythms and regimes of the commodity sign economy that the sport shoe industry had become (Goldman and Papson 1994; 1996; 1998). Remarkably, from this position of seemingly terminal decline, in recent years, Puma has “successfully turned its image around” (Saddleton 2002, p. 2) through the adoption of a branding strategy perhaps even more radical than that of Nike’s. Led by the company’s global director of brand management, Antonio Bertone, Puma positioned itself as “the brand that mixes the influence of sport, lifestyle and fashion” (quoted in (Davis 2002, p. 41). Hence, Puma eschewed the sport performance mantra which defined the company (and indeed its rivals) for so long, in favour of a strategy centered on the aestheticization of the sport shoe as an important component of the commodity based lifestyle assemblages, through which individuals are encouraged to constitute their very being (Featherstone 1991; Lury 1996). According to Bertone, Puma is now “targeting the sneaker enthusiast, not the guy who buys shoes for running” (quoted in (Davis 2002, p. 41). While its efforts to “blur the lines between sport and lifestyle” (Anon 2002, p. 30) may explain part of Puma’s recent success, at the core of the company’s turnaround was its move to diversify the brand into a plethora of lifestyle and fashion options. Puma has essentially splintered into a range of seemingly disparate sub-brands each directed at a very definite target consumer (or perceptions thereof). Amongst other options, Puma can presently be consumed in, and through: the upscale pseudo-Prada Platinum range; collections by fashion designers such as Jil Sander and Yasuhiro Mihara; Pumaville, a range clearly directed at the “alternative sport” market, and endorsed by athletes such as motocross rider Travis Pastrana; and, the H Street range designed to capture “the carefree spirit of athletics” (http://www.puma.com). However, Puma’s attempts to interpellate (Althusser 1971) a diverse array of sporting subjectivies is perhaps best illustrated in the “Nuala” collection, a yoga-inspired “lifestyle” collection resulting from a collaboration with supermodel Christy Turlington, the inspiration for which is expressed in suitably flowery terms: What is Nuala? NUALA is an acronym representing: Natural-Universal-Altruistic-Limitless-Authentic. Often defined as "meditation in motion", Nuala is the product of an organic partnership that reflects Christy Turlington's passion for the ancient discipline of Yoga and PUMA's commitment to create a superior mix of sport and lifestyle products. Having studied comparative religion and philosophy at New York University, model turned entrepreneur Christy Turlington sought to merge her interest in eastern practices with her real-life experience in the fashion industry and create an elegant, concise, fashion collection to complement her busy work, travel, and exercise schedule. The goal of Nuala is to create a symbiosis between the outer and inner being, the individual and collective experience, using yoga as a metaphor to make this balance possible. At Nuala, we believe that everything in life should serve more than one purpose. Nuala is more than a line of yoga-inspired activewear; it is a building block for limitless living aimed at providing fashion-conscious, independant women comfort for everyday life. The line allows flexibility and transition, from technical yoga pieces to fashionable apparel one can live in. Celebrating women for their intuition, intelligence, and individuality, Nuala bridges the spacious gap between one's public and private life. Thus, Puma seeks to hail the female subject of consumption (Andrews 1998), through design and marketing rhetorics (couched in a spurious Eastern mysticism) which contemporary manifestations of what are traditionally feminine experiences and sensibilities. In seeking to engage, at one at the same time, a variety of class, ethnic, and gender based constituencies through the symbolic advancement of a range of lifestyle niches (hi-fashion, sports, casual, organic, retro etc.) Puma evokes Toffler’s prophetic vision regarding the rise of a “de-massified society” and “a profusion of life-styles and more highly individualized personalities” (Toffler 1980, pp. 231, 255-256). In this manner, Puma identified how the nurturing of an ever-expanding array of consumer subjectivities has become perhaps the most pertinent feature of present-day market relations. Such an approach to sub-branding is, of course, hardly anything new (Gartman 1998). Indeed, even the sports shoe giants have long-since diversified into a range of product lines. Yet it is our contention that even in the process of sub-branding, companies such as Nike nonetheless retain a tangible sense of a core brand identity. So, for instance, Nike imbues a sentiment of performative authenticity, cultural irreverence and personal empowerment throughout all its sub-brands, from its running shoes to its outdoor wear (arguably, Nike commercials have a distinctive “look” or “feel”) (Cole and Hribar 1995). By contrast, Puma’s sub-branding suggests a greater polyvalence: the brand engages divergent consumer subjectivities in much more definite and explicit ways. As Davis (2002, p. 41) emphasis added) suggested, Puma “has done a good job of effectively meeting the demands of disparate groups of consumers.” Perhaps more accurately, it could be asserted that Puma has been effective in constituting the market as an aggregate of disparate consumer groups (Solomon and Englis 1997). Goldman and Papson have suggested the decline of Reebok in the early 1990s owed much to the “inconsistency in the image they projected” (1996, p. 38). Following the logic of this assertion, the Puma brand’s lack of coherence or consistency would seem to foretell and impending decline. Yet, recent evidence suggests such a prediction as being wholly erroneous: Puma is a company, and (sub)brand system, on the rise. Recent market performance would certainly suggest so. For instance, in the first quarter of 2003 (a period in which many of its competitors experienced meager growth rates), Puma’s consolidated sales increased 47% resulting in a share price jump from ?1.43 to ?3.08 (Puma.com 2003). Moreover, as one trade magazine suggested: “Puma is one brand that has successfully turned its image around in recent years…and if analysts predictions are accurate, Puma’s sales will almost double by 2005” (Saddleton 2002, p. 2). So, within a postmodern cultural economy characterized by fragmentation and instability (Jameson 1991; Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Gartman 1998), brand flexibility and eclecticism has proven to be an effective stratagem for, however temporally, engaging the consciousness of decentered consuming subjects. Perhaps it’s a Puma culture, as opposed to a Nike one (Goldman and Papson 1998) that best characterizes the contemporary condition after all? Works Cited Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. London: New Left Books. Andrews, D. L. (1998). Feminizing Olympic reality: Preliminary dispatches from Baudrillard's Atlanta. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 33(1), 5-18. Anon. (2002, December 9). The Midas touch. Business and Industry, 30. Armstrong, K. L. (1999). Nike's communication with black audiences: A sociological analysis of advertising effectiveness via symbolic interactionism. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 23(3), 266-286. Boje, D. M. (1998). 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IntroductionCulinary education in Ireland has long been influenced by culinary education being delivered in catering colleges in the United Kingdom (UK). Institutionalised culinary education started in Britain through the sponsorship of guild conglomerates (Lawson and Silver). The City & Guilds of London Institute for the Advancement of Technical Education opened its central institution in 1884. Culinary education in Ireland began in Kevin Street Technical School in the late 1880s. This consisted of evening courses in plain cookery. Dublin’s leading chefs and waiters of the time participated in developing courses in French culinary classics and these courses ran in Parnell Square Vocational School from 1926 (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). St Mary’s College of Domestic Science was purpose built and opened in 1941 in Cathal Brugha Street. This was renamed the Dublin College of Catering in the 1950s. The Council for Education, Recruitment and Training for the Hotel Industry (CERT) was set up in 1963 and ran cookery courses using the City & Guilds of London examinations as its benchmark. In 1982, when the National Craft Curriculum Certification Board (NCCCB) was established, CERT began carrying out their own examinations. This allowed Irish catering education to set its own standards, establish its own criteria and award its own certificates, roles which were previously carried out by City & Guilds of London (Corr). CERT awarded its first certificates in professional cookery in 1989. The training role of CERT was taken over by Fáilte Ireland, the State tourism board, in 2003. Changing Trends in Cookery and Culinary Textbooks at DIT The Dublin College of Catering which became part of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) is the flagship of catering education in Ireland (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The first DIT culinary award, was introduced in 1984 Certificate in Diet Cookery, later renamed Higher Certificate in Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts. On the 19th of July 1992 the Dublin Institute of Technology Act was enacted into law. This Act enabled DIT to provide vocational and technical education and training for the economic, technological, scientific, commercial, industrial, social and cultural development of the State (Ireland 1992). In 1998, DIT was granted degree awarding powers by the Irish state, enabling it to make major awards at Higher Certificate, Ordinary Bachelor Degree, Honors Bachelor Degree, Masters and PhD levels (Levels six to ten in the National Framework of Qualifications), as well as a range of minor, special purpose and supplemental awards (National NQAI). It was not until 1999, when a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education in Ireland (Duff, The Story), that a more diverse range of textbooks was recommended based on a new liberal/vocational educational philosophy. DITs School of Culinary Arts currently offers: Higher Certificates Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts; Higher Certificate in Culinary Arts (Professional Culinary Practice); BSc (Ord) in Baking and Pastry Arts Management; BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts; BSc (Hons) Bar Management and Entrepreneurship; BSc (Hons) in Culinary Entrepreneurship; and, MSc in Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development. From 1942 to 1970, haute cuisine, or classical French cuisine was the most influential cooking trend in Irish cuisine and this is reflected in the culinary textbooks of that era. Haute cuisine has been influenced by many influential writers/chefs such as Francois La Varenne, Antoine Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Ferand Point, Paul Bocuse, Anton Mosiman, Albert and Michel Roux to name but a few. The period from 1947 to 1974 can be viewed as a “golden age” of haute cuisine in Ireland, as more award-winning world-class restaurants traded in Dublin during this period than at any other time in history (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). Hotels and restaurants were run in the Escoffier partie system style which is a system of hierarchy among kitchen staff and areas of the kitchens specialising in cooking particular parts of the menu i.e sauces (saucier), fish (poissonnier), larder (garde manger), vegetable (legumier) and pastry (patissier). In the late 1960s, Escoffier-styled restaurants were considered overstaffed and were no longer financially viable. Restaurants began to be run by chef-proprietors, using plate rather than silver service. Nouvelle cuisine began in the 1970s and this became a modern form of haute cuisine (Gillespie). The rise in chef-proprietor run restaurants in Ireland reflected the same characteristics of the nouvelle cuisine movement. Culinary textbooks such as Practical Professional Cookery, La Technique, The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking, The Art of the Garde Mange and Patisserie interpreted nouvelle cuisine techniques and plated dishes. In 1977, the DIT began delivering courses in City & Guilds Advanced Kitchen & Larder 706/3 and Pastry 706/3, the only college in Ireland to do so at the time. Many graduates from these courses became the future Irish culinary lecturers, chef-proprietors, and culinary leaders. The next two decades saw a rise in fusion cooking, nouvelle cuisine, and a return to French classical cooking. Numerous Irish chefs were returning to Ireland having worked with Michelin starred chefs and opening new restaurants in the vein of classical French cooking, such as Kevin Thornton (Wine Epergne & Thorntons). These chefs were, in turn, influencing culinary training in DIT with a return to classical French cooking. New Classical French culinary textbooks such as New Classical Cuisine, The Modern Patisserie, The French Professional Pastry Series and Advanced Practical Cookery were being used in DIT In the last 15 years, science in cooking has become the current trend in culinary education in DIT. This is acknowledged by the increased number of culinary science textbooks and modules in molecular gastronomy offered in DIT. This also coincided with the launch of the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts in DIT moving culinary education from a technical to a liberal education. Books such as The Science of Cooking, On Food and Cooking, The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy now appear on recommended textbooks for culinary students.For the purpose of this article, practical classes held at DIT will be broken down as follows: hot kitchen class, larder classes, and pastry classes. These classes had recommended textbooks for each area. These can be broken down into three sections: hot kitche, larder, and pastry. This table identifies that the textbooks used in culinary education at DIT reflected the trends in cookery at the time they were being used. Hot Kitchen Larder Pastry Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. The International Confectioner. 1968. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. 1914. The Larder Chef, Classical Food Preparation and Presentation. 1969. Patisserie. 1971. All in the Cooking, Books 1&2. 1943 The Art of the Garde Manger. 1973. The Modern Patissier. 1986 Larousse Gastronomique. 1961. New Classic Cuisine. 1989. Professional French Pastry Series. 1987. Practical Cookery. 1962. The Curious Cook. 1990. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. 1991. Practical Professional Cookery. 1972. On Food and Cooking. The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991 La Technique. 1976. Advanced Practical Cookery. 1995. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. 1994. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. 1979. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Culinary Artistry. Dornenburg, 1996. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach. 1985. Garde Manger, The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. 2004. Grande Finales: The Art of the Plated Dessert. 1997. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Fat Duck Cookbook. 2009. Modern Gastronomy. 2010. Tab.1. DIT Culinary Textbooks.1942–1960 During the first half of the 20th century, senior staff working in Dublin hotels, restaurants and clubs were predominately foreign born and trained. The two decades following World War II could be viewed as the “golden age” of haute cuisine in Dublin as many award-wining restaurants traded in the city at this time (Mac Con Iomaire “The Emergence”). Culinary education in DIT in 1942 saw the use of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire as the defining textbook (Bowe). This was first published in 1903 and translated into English in 1907. In 1979 Cracknell and Kaufmann published a more comprehensive and update edited version under the title The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery by Escoffier for use in culinary colleges. This demonstrated that Escoffier’s work had withstood the test of the decades and was still relevant. Le Repertoire de La Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, a student of Escoffier, presented the fundamentals of French classical cookery. Le Repertoire was inspired by the work of Escoffier and contains thousands of classical recipes presented in a brief format that can be clearly understood by chefs and cooks. Le Repertoire remains an important part of any DIT culinary student’s textbook list. All in the Cooking by Josephine Marnell, Nora Breathnach, Ann Mairtin and Mor Murnaghan (1946) was one of the first cookbooks to be published in Ireland (Cashmann). This book was a domestic science cooking book written by lecturers in the Cathal Brugha Street College. There is a combination of classical French recipes and Irish recipes throughout the book. 1960s It was not until the 1960s that reference book Larousse Gastronomique and new textbooks such as Practical Cookery, The Larder Chef and International Confectionary made their way into DIT culinary education. These books still focused on classical French cooking but used lighter sauces and reflected more modern cooking equipment and techniques. Also, this period was the first time that specific books for larder and pastry work were introduced into the DIT culinary education system (Bowe). Larousse Gastronomique, which used Le Guide Culinaire as a basis (James), was first published in 1938 and translated into English in 1961. Practical Cookery, which is still used in DIT culinary education, is now in its 12th edition. Each edition has built on the previous, however, there is now criticism that some of the content is dated (Richards). Practical Cookery has established itself as a key textbook in culinary education both in Ireland and England. Practical Cookery recipes were laid out in easy to follow steps and food commodities were discussed briefly. The Larder Chef was first published in 1969 and is currently in its 4th edition. This book focuses on classical French larder techniques, butchery and fishmongery but recognises current trends and fashions in food presentation. The International Confectioner is no longer in print but is still used as a reference for basic recipes in pastry classes (Campbell). The Modern Patissier demonstrated more updated techniques and methods than were used in The International Confectioner. The Modern Patissier is still used as a reference book in DIT. 1970s The 1970s saw the decline in haute cuisine in Ireland, as it was in the process of being replaced by nouvelle cuisine. Irish chefs were being influenced by the works of chefs such as Paul Boucuse, Roger Verge, Michel Guerard, Raymond Olivier, Jean & Pierre Troisgros, Alain Senderens, Jacques Maniere, Jean Delaveine and Michel Guerard who advanced the uncomplicated natural presentation in food. Henri Gault claims that it was his manifesto published in October 1973 in Gault-Millau magazine which unleashed the movement called La Nouvelle Cuisine Française (Gault). In nouvelle cuisine, dishes in Carème and Escoffier’s style were rejected as over-rich and complicated. The principles underpinning this new movement focused on the freshness of ingredients, and lightness and harmony in all components and accompaniments, as well as basic and simple cooking methods and types of presentation. This was not, however, a complete overthrowing of the past, but a moving forward in the long-term process of cuisine development, utilising the very best from each evolution (Cousins). Books such as Practical Professional Cookery, The Art of the Garde Manger and Patisserie reflected this new lighter approach to cookery. Patisserie was first published in 1971, is now in its second edition, and continues to be used in DIT culinary education. This book became an essential textbook in pastrywork, and covers the entire syllabus of City & Guilds and CERT (now Fáilte Ireland). Patisserie covered all basic pastry recipes and techniques, while the second edition (in 1993) included new modern recipes, modern pastry equipment, commodities, and food hygiene regulations reflecting the changing catering environment. The Art of the Garde Manger is an American book highlighting the artistry, creativity, and cooking sensitivity need to be a successful Garde Manger (the larder chef who prepares cold preparation in a partie system kitchen). It reflected the dynamic changes occurring in the culinary world but recognised the importance of understanding basic French culinary principles. It is no longer used in DIT culinary education. La Technique is a guide to classical French preparation (Escoffier’s methods and techniques) using detailed pictures and notes. This book remains a very useful guide and reference for culinary students. Practical Professional Cookery also became an important textbook as it was written with the student and chef/lecturer in mind, as it provides a wider range of recipes and detailed information to assist in understanding the tasks at hand. It is based on classical French cooking and compliments Practical Cookery as a textbook, however, its recipes are for ten portions as opposed to four portions in Practical Cookery. Again this book was written with the City & Guilds examinations in mind. 1980s During the mid-1980s, many young Irish chefs and waiters emigrated. They returned in the late-1980s and early-1990s having gained vast experience of nouvelle and fusion cuisine in London, Paris, New York, California and elsewhere (Mac Con Iomaire, “The Changing”). These energetic, well-trained professionals began opening chef-proprietor restaurants around Dublin, providing invaluable training and positions for up-and-coming young chefs, waiters and culinary college graduates. The 1980s saw a return to French classical cookery textbook such as Professional Cookery: The Process Approach, New Classic Cuisine and the Professional French Pastry series, because educators saw the need for students to learn the basics of French cookery. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach was written by Daniel Stevenson who was, at the time, a senior lecturer in Food and Beverage Operations at Oxford Polytechnic in England. Again, this book was written for students with an emphasis on the cookery techniques and the practices of professional cookery. The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking by Escoffier continued to be used. This book is used by cooks and chefs as a reference for ingredients in dishes rather than a recipe book, as it does not go into detail in the methods as it is assumed the cook/chef would have the required experience to know the method of production. Le Guide Culinaire was only used on advanced City & Guilds courses in DIT during this decade (Bowe). New Classic Cuisine by the classically French trained chefs, Albert and Michel Roux (Gayot), is a classical French cuisine cookbook used as a reference by DIT culinary educators at the time because of the influence the Roux brothers were having over the English fine dining scene. The Professional French Pastry Series is a range of four volumes of pastry books: Vol. 1 Doughs, Batters and Meringues; Vol. 2 Creams, Confections and Finished Desserts; Vol. 3 Petit Four, Chocolate, Frozen Desserts and Sugar Work; and Vol. 4 Decorations, Borders and Letters, Marzipan, Modern Desserts. These books about classical French pastry making were used on the advanced pastry courses at DIT as learners needed a basic knowledge of pastry making to use them. 1990s Ireland in the late 1990s became a very prosperous and thriving European nation; the phenomena that became known as the “celtic tiger” was in full swing (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The Irish dining public were being treated to a resurgence of traditional Irish cuisine using fresh wholesome food (Hughes). The Irish population was considered more well-educated and well travelled than previous generations and culinary students were now becoming interested in the science of cooking. In 1996, the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts program at DIT was first mooted (Hegarty). Finally, in 1999, a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education underpinned by a new liberal/vocational philosophy in education (Duff). Teaching culinary arts in the past had been through a vocational education focus whereby students were taught skills for industry which were narrow, restrictive, and constraining, without the necessary knowledge to articulate the acquired skill. The reading list for culinary students reflected this new liberal education in culinary arts as Harold McGee’s books The Curious Cook and On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen explored and explained the science of cooking. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen proposed that “science can make cooking more interesting by connecting it with the basic workings of the natural world” (Vega 373). Advanced Practical Cookery was written for City & Guilds students. In DIT this book was used by advanced culinary students sitting Fáilte Ireland examinations, and the second year of the new BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts. Culinary Artistry encouraged chefs to explore the creative process of culinary composition as it explored the intersection of food, imagination, and taste (Dornenburg). This book encouraged chefs to develop their own style of cuisine using fresh seasonal ingredients, and was used for advanced students but is no longer a set text. Chefs were being encouraged to show their artistic traits, and none more so than pastry chefs. Grande Finale: The Art of Plated Desserts encouraged advanced students to identify different “schools” of pastry in relation to the world of art and design. The concept of the recipes used in this book were built on the original spectacular pieces montées created by Antoine Carême. 2000–2013 After nouvelle cuisine, recent developments have included interest in various fusion cuisines, such as Asia-Pacific, and in molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomists strive to find perfect recipes using scientific methods of investigation (Blanck). Hervè This experimentation with recipes and his introduction to Nicholos Kurti led them to create a food discipline they called “molecular gastronomy”. In 1998, a number of creative chefs began experimenting with the incorporation of ingredients and techniques normally used in mass food production in order to arrive at previously unattainable culinary creations. This “new cooking” (Vega 373) required a knowledge of chemical reactions and physico-chemical phenomena in relation to food, as well as specialist tools, which were created by these early explorers. It has been suggested that molecular gastronomy is “science-based cooking” (Vega 375) and that this concept refers to conscious application of the principles and tools from food science and other disciplines for the development of new dishes particularly in the context of classical cuisine (Vega). The Science of Cooking assists students in understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking. This book takes traditional French techniques and recipes and refutes some of the claims and methods used in traditional recipes. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen is used for the advanced larder modules at DIT. This book builds on basic skills in the Larder Chef book. Molecular gastronomy as a subject area was developed in 2009 in DIT, the first of its kind in Ireland. The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy underpin the theoretical aspects of the module. This module is taught to 4th year BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts students who already have three years experience in culinary education and the culinary industry, and also to MSc Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development students. Conclusion Escoffier, the master of French classical cuisine, still influences culinary textbooks to this day. His basic approach to cooking is considered essential to teaching culinary students, allowing them to embrace the core skills and competencies required to work in the professional environment. Teaching of culinary arts at DIT has moved vocational education to a more liberal basis, and it is imperative that the chosen textbooks reflect this development. This liberal education gives the students a broader understanding of cooking, hospitality management, food science, gastronomy, health and safety, oenology, and food product development. To date there is no practical culinary textbook written specifically for Irish culinary education, particularly within this new liberal/vocational paradigm. There is clearly a need for a new textbook which combines the best of Escoffier’s classical French techniques with the more modern molecular gastronomy techniques popularised by Ferran Adria. References Adria, Ferran. Modern Gastronomy A to Z: A Scientific and Gastronomic Lexicon. London: CRC P, 2010. Barker, William. The Modern Patissier. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Barham, Peter. The Science of Cooking. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2000. Bilheux, Roland, Alain Escoffier, Daniel Herve, and Jean-Maire Pouradier. Special and Decorative Breads. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987. Blanck, J. "Molecular Gastronomy: Overview of a Controversial Food Science Discipline." Journal of Agricultural and Food Information 8.3 (2007): 77-85. Blumenthal, Heston. The Fat Duck Cookbook. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. Bode, Willi, and M.J. Leto. The Larder Chef. Oxford: Butter-Heinemann, 1969. Bowe, James. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin. 7 Apr. 2013. Boyle, Tish, and Timothy Moriarty. Grand Finales, The Art of the Plated Dessert. New York: John Wiley, 1997. Campbell, Anthony. Personal Communication with Author. Dublin, 10 Apr. 2013. Cashman, Dorothy. "An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks." Unpublished M.Sc Thesis. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Ceserani, Victor, Ronald Kinton, and David Foskett. Practical Cookery. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1962. Ceserani, Victor, and David Foskett. 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IntroductionFirmly located within the discourse of visible culture as the lofty preserve of art exhibitions and museum artefacts, the noun “curate” has gradually transformed into the verb “to curate”. Williams writes that “curate” has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded to describe a creative activity. Designers no longer simply sell clothes; they “curate” merchandise. Chefs no longer only make food; they also “curate” meals. Chosen for their keen eye for a particular style or a precise shade, it is their knowledge of their craft, their reputation, and their sheer ability to choose among countless objects which make the creative process a creative activity in itself. Writing from within the framework of “curate” as a creative process, this article discusses how the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, hosted by Irish President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in May 2011, was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity. The paper will focus in particular on how the menu for the banquet was created and how the banquet’s brief, “Ireland on a Plate”, was fulfilled.History and BackgroundFood has been used by nations for centuries to display wealth, cement alliances, and impress foreign visitors. Since the feasts of the Numidian kings (circa 340 BC), culinary staging and presentation has belonged to “a long, multifaceted and multicultural history of diplomatic practices” (IEHCA 5). According to the works of Baughman, Young, and Albala, food has defined the social, cultural, and political position of a nation’s leaders throughout history.In early 2011, Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant in Dublin, was asked by the Irish Food Board, Bord Bía, if he would be available to create a menu for a high-profile banquet (Mahon 112). The name of the guest of honour was divulged several weeks later after vetting by the protocol and security divisions of the Department of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Lewis was informed that the menu was for the state banquet to be hosted by President Mary McAleese at Dublin Castle in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland the following May.Hosting a formal banquet for a visiting head of state is a key feature in the statecraft of international and diplomatic relations. Food is the societal common denominator that links all human beings, regardless of culture (Pliner and Rozin 19). When world leaders publicly share a meal, that meal is laden with symbolism, illuminating each diner’s position “in social networks and social systems” (Sobal, Bove, and Rauschenbach 378). The public nature of the meal signifies status and symbolic kinship and that “guest and host are on par in terms of their personal or official attributes” (Morgan 149). While the field of academic scholarship on diplomatic dining might be young, there is little doubt of the value ascribed to the semiotics of diplomatic gastronomy in modern power structures (Morgan 150; De Vooght and Scholliers 12; Chapple-Sokol 162), for, as Firth explains, symbols are malleable and perfectly suited to exploitation by all parties (427).Political DiplomacyWhen Ireland gained independence in December 1921, it marked the end of eight centuries of British rule. The outbreak of “The Troubles” in 1969 in Northern Ireland upset the gradually improving environment of British–Irish relations, and it would be some time before a state visit became a possibility. Beginning with the peace process in the 1990s, the IRA ceasefire of 1994, and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, a state visit was firmly set in motion by the visit of Irish President Mary Robinson to Buckingham Palace in 1993, followed by the unofficial visit of the Prince of Wales to Ireland in 1995, and the visit of Irish President Mary McAleese to Buckingham Palace in 1999. An official invitation to Queen Elizabeth from President Mary McAleese in March 2011 was accepted, and the visit was scheduled for mid-May of the same year.The visit was a highly performative occasion, orchestrated and ordained in great detail, displaying all the necessary protocol associated with the state visit of one head of state to another: inspection of the military, a courtesy visit to the nation’s head of state on arrival, the laying of a wreath at the nation’s war memorial, and a state banquet.These aspects of protocol between Britain and Ireland were particularly symbolic. By inspecting the military on arrival, the existence of which is a key indicator of independence, Queen Elizabeth effectively demonstrated her recognition of Ireland’s national sovereignty. On making the customary courtesy call to the head of state, the Queen was received by President McAleese at her official residence Áras an Uachtaráin (The President’s House), which had formerly been the residence of the British monarch’s representative in Ireland (Robbins 66). The state banquet was held in Dublin Castle, once the headquarters of British rule where the Viceroy, the representative of Britain’s Court of St James, had maintained court (McDowell 1).Cultural DiplomacyThe state banquet provided an exceptional showcase of Irish culture and design and generated a level of preparation previously unseen among Dublin Castle staff, who described it as “the most stage managed state event” they had ever witnessed (Mahon 129).The castle was cleaned from top to bottom, and inventories were taken of the furniture and fittings. The Waterford Crystal chandeliers were painstakingly taken down, cleaned, and reassembled; the Killybegs carpets and rugs of Irish lamb’s wool were cleaned and repaired. A special edition Newbridge Silverware pen was commissioned for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to sign the newly ordered Irish leather-bound visitors’ book. A new set of state tableware was ordered for the President’s table. Irish manufacturers of household goods necessary for the guest rooms, such as towels and soaps, hand creams and body lotions, candle holders and scent diffusers, were sought. Members of Her Majesty’s staff conducted a “walk-through” several weeks in advance of the visit to ensure that the Queen’s wardrobe would not clash with the surroundings (Mahon 129–32).The promotion of Irish manufacture is a constant thread throughout history. Irish linen, writes Kane, enjoyed a reputation as far afield as the Netherlands and Italy in the 15th century, and archival documents from the Vaucluse attest to the purchase of Irish cloth in Avignon in 1432 (249–50). Support for Irish-made goods was raised in 1720 by Jonathan Swift, and by the 18th century, writes Foster, Dublin had become an important centre for luxury goods (44–51).It has been Irish government policy since the late 1940s to use Irish-manufactured goods for state entertaining, so the material culture of the banquet was distinctly Irish: Arklow Pottery plates, Newbridge Silverware cutlery, Waterford Crystal glassware, and Irish linen tablecloths. In order to decide upon the table setting for the banquet, four tables were laid in the King’s Bedroom in Dublin Castle. The Executive Chef responsible for the banquet menu, and certain key personnel, helped determine which setting would facilitate serving the food within the time schedule allowed (Mahon 128–29). The style of service would be service à la russe, so widespread in restaurants today as to seem unremarkable. Each plate is prepared in the kitchen by the chef and then served to each individual guest at table. In the mid-19th century, this style of service replaced service à la française, in which guests typically entered the dining room after the first course had been laid on the table and selected food from the choice of dishes displayed around them (Kaufman 126).The guest list was compiled by government and embassy officials on both sides and was a roll call of Irish and British life. At the President’s table, 10 guests would be served by a team of 10 staff in Dorchester livery. The remaining tables would each seat 12 guests, served by 12 liveried staff. The staff practiced for several days prior to the banquet to make sure that service would proceed smoothly within the time frame allowed. The team of waiters, each carrying a plate, would emerge from the kitchen in single file. They would then take up positions around the table, each waiter standing to the left of the guest they would serve. On receipt of a discreet signal, each plate would be laid in front of each guest at precisely the same moment, after which the waiters would then about foot and return to the kitchen in single file (Mahon 130).Post-prandial entertainment featured distinctive styles of performance and instruments associated with Irish traditional music. These included reels, hornpipes, and slipjigs, voice and harp, sean-nόs (old style) singing, and performances by established Irish artists on the fiddle, bouzouki, flute, and uilleann pipes (Office of Public Works).Culinary Diplomacy: Ireland on a PlateLewis was given the following brief: the menu had to be Irish, the main course must be beef, and the meal should represent the very best of Irish ingredients. There were no restrictions on menu design. There were no dietary requirements or specific requests from the Queen’s representatives, although Lewis was informed that shellfish is excluded de facto from Irish state banquets as a precautionary measure. The meal was to be four courses long and had to be served to 170 diners within exactly 1 hour and 10 minutes (Mahon 112). A small army of 16 chefs and 4 kitchen porters would prepare the food in the kitchen of Dublin Castle under tight security. The dishes would be served on state tableware by 40 waiters, 6 restaurant managers, a banqueting manager and a sommélier. Lewis would be at the helm of the operation as Executive Chef (Mahon 112–13).Lewis started by drawing up “a patchwork quilt” of the products he most wanted to use and built the menu around it. The choice of suppliers was based on experience but also on a supplier’s ability to deliver perfectly ripe goods in mid-May, a typically black spot in the Irish fruit and vegetable growing calendar as it sits between the end of one season and the beginning of another. Lewis consulted the Queen’s itinerary and the menus to be served so as to avoid repetitions. He had to discard his initial plan to feature lobster in the starter and rhubarb in the dessert—the former for the precautionary reasons mentioned above, and the latter because it featured on the Queen’s lunch menu on the day of the banquet (Mahon 112–13).Once the ingredients had been selected, the menu design focused on creating tastes, flavours and textures. Several draft menus were drawn up and myriad dishes were tasted and discussed in the kitchen of Lewis’s own restaurant. Various wines were paired and tasted with the different courses, the final choice being a Château Lynch-Bages 1998 red and a Château de Fieuzal 2005 white, both from French Bordeaux estates with an Irish connection (Kellaghan 3). Two months and two menu sittings later, the final menu was confirmed and signed off by state and embassy officials (Mahon 112–16).The StarterThe banquet’s starter featured organic Clare Island salmon cured in a sweet brine, laid on top of a salmon cream combining wild smoked salmon from the Burren and Cork’s Glenilen Farm crème fraîche, set over a lemon balm jelly from the Tannery Cookery School Gardens, Waterford. Garnished with horseradish cream, wild watercress, and chive flowers from Wicklow, the dish was finished with rapeseed oil from Kilkenny and a little sea salt from West Cork (Mahon 114). Main CourseA main course of Irish beef featured as the pièce de résistance of the menu. A rib of beef from Wexford’s Slaney Valley was provided by Kettyle Irish Foods in Fermanagh and served with ox cheek and tongue from Rathcoole, County Dublin. From along the eastern coastline came the ingredients for the traditional Irish dish of smoked champ: cabbage from Wicklow combined with potatoes and spring onions grown in Dublin. The new season’s broad beans and carrots were served with wild garlic leaf, which adorned the dish (Mahon 113). Cheese CourseThe cheese course was made up of Knockdrinna, a Tomme style goat’s milk cheese from Kilkenny; Milleens, a Munster style cow’s milk cheese produced in Cork; Cashel Blue, a cow’s milk blue cheese from Tipperary; and Glebe Brethan, a Comté style cheese from raw cow’s milk from Louth. Ditty’s Oatmeal Biscuits from Belfast accompanied the course.DessertLewis chose to feature Irish strawberries in the dessert. Pat Clarke guaranteed delivery of ripe strawberries on the day of the banquet. They married perfectly with cream and yoghurt from Glenilen Farm in Cork. The cream was set with Irish Carrageen moss, overlaid with strawberry jelly and sauce, and garnished with meringues made with Irish apple balsamic vinegar from Lusk in North Dublin, yoghurt mousse, and Irish soda bread tuiles made with wholemeal flour from the Mosse family mill in Kilkenny (Mahon 113).The following day, President McAleese telephoned Lewis, saying of the banquet “Ní hé go raibh sé go maith, ach go raibh sé míle uair níos fearr ná sin” (“It’s not that it was good but that it was a thousand times better”). The President observed that the menu was not only delicious but that it was “amazingly articulate in terms of the story that it told about Ireland and Irish food.” The Queen had particularly enjoyed the stuffed cabbage leaf of tongue, cheek and smoked colcannon (a traditional Irish dish of mashed potatoes with curly kale or green cabbage) and had noted the diverse selection of Irish ingredients from Irish artisans (Mahon 116). Irish CuisineWhen the topic of food is explored in Irish historiography, the focus tends to be on the consequences of the Great Famine (1845–49) which left the country “socially and emotionally scarred for well over a century” (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher 161). Some commentators consider the term “Irish cuisine” oxymoronic, according to Mac Con Iomaire and Maher (3). As Goldstein observes, Ireland has suffered twice—once from its food deprivation and second because these deprivations present an obstacle for the exploration of Irish foodways (xii). Writing about Italian, Irish, and Jewish migration to America, Diner states that the Irish did not have a food culture to speak of and that Irish writers “rarely included the details of food in describing daily life” (85). Mac Con Iomaire and Maher note that Diner’s methodology overlooks a centuries-long tradition of hospitality in Ireland such as that described by Simms (68) and shows an unfamiliarity with the wealth of food related sources in the Irish language, as highlighted by Mac Con Iomaire (“Exploring” 1–23).Recent scholarship on Ireland’s culinary past is unearthing a fascinating story of a much more nuanced culinary heritage than has been previously understood. This is clearly demonstrated in the research of Cullen, Cashman, Deleuze, Kellaghan, Kelly, Kennedy, Legg, Mac Con Iomaire, Mahon, O’Sullivan, Richman Kenneally, Sexton, and Stanley, Danaher, and Eogan.In 1996 Ireland was described by McKenna as having the most dynamic cuisine in any European country, a place where in the last decade “a vibrant almost unlikely style of cooking has emerged” (qtd. in Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 136). By 2014, there were nine restaurants in Dublin which had been awarded Michelin stars or Red Ms (Mac Con Iomaire “Jammet’s” 137). Ross Lewis, Chef Patron of Chapter One Restaurant, who would be chosen to create the menu for the state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II, has maintained a Michelin star since 2008 (Mac Con Iomaire, “Jammet’s” 138). Most recently the current strength of Irish gastronomy is globally apparent in Mark Moriarty’s award as San Pellegrino Young Chef 2015 (McQuillan). As Deleuze succinctly states: “Ireland has gone mad about food” (143).This article is part of a research project into Irish diplomatic dining, and the author is part of a research cluster into Ireland’s culinary heritage within the Dublin Institute of Technology. The aim of the research is to add to the growing body of scholarship on Irish gastronomic history and, ultimately, to contribute to the discourse on the existence of a national cuisine. If, as Zubaida says, “a nation’s cuisine is its court’s cuisine,” then it is time for Ireland to “research the feasts as well as the famines” (Mac Con Iomaire and Cashman 97).ConclusionThe Irish state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II in May 2011 was a highly orchestrated and formalised process. From the menu, material culture, entertainment, and level of consultation in the creative content, it is evident that the banquet was carefully curated to represent Ireland’s diplomatic, cultural, and culinary identity.The effects of the visit appear to have been felt in the years which have followed. Hennessy wrote in the Irish Times newspaper that Queen Elizabeth is privately said to regard her visit to Ireland as the most significant of the trips she has made during her 60-year reign. British Prime Minister David Cameron is noted to mention the visit before every Irish audience he encounters, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague has spoken in particular of the impact the state banquet in Dublin Castle made upon him. Hennessy points out that one of the most significant indicators of the peaceful relationship which exists between the two countries nowadays was the subsequent state visit by Irish President Michael D. Higgins to Britain in 2013. This was the first state visit to the United Kingdom by a President of Ireland and would have been unimaginable 25 years ago. The fact that the President and his wife stayed at Windsor Castle and that the attendant state banquet was held there instead of Buckingham Palace were both deemed to be marks of special favour and directly attributed to the success of Her Majesty’s 2011 visit to Ireland.As the research demonstrates, eating together unites rather than separates, gathers rather than divides, diffuses political tensions, and confirms alliances. It might be said then that the 2011 state banquet hosted by President Mary McAleese in honour of Queen Elizabeth II, curated by Ross Lewis, gives particular meaning to the axiom “to eat together is to eat in peace” (Taliano des Garets 160).AcknowledgementsSupervisors: Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire (Dublin Institute of Technology) and Dr Michael Kennedy (Royal Irish Academy)Fáilte IrelandPhotos of the banquet dishes supplied and permission to reproduce them for this article kindly granted by Ross Lewis, Chef Patron, Chapter One Restaurant ‹http://www.chapteronerestaurant.com/›.Illustration ‘Ireland on a Plate’ © Jesse Campbell BrownRemerciementsThe author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.ReferencesAlbala, Ken. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. 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IntroductionThe 2009 American film Trash Humpers, directed by Harmony Korine, was released at a time when the hipster had become a ubiquitous concept, entering into the common vernacular of numerous cultures throughout the world, and gaining significant press, social media and academic attention (see Žižek; Arsel and Thompson; Greif et al.; Stahl; Ouellette; Reeve; Schiermer; Maly and Varis). Trash Humpers emerged soon after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis triggered Occupy movements in numerous cities, aided by social media platforms, reported on by blogs such as Gawker, and stylized by multi-national youth-subculture brands such as Vice, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and a plethora of localised variants.Korine’s film, which is made to resemble found VHS footage of old-aged vandals, epitomises the ironic, retro stylizations and “counterculture-meets-kitsch” aesthetics so familiar to hipster culture. As a creative stereotype from 1940s and ‘50s jazz and beatnik subcultures, the hipster re-emerged in the twenty-first century as a negative embodiment of alternative culture in the age of the Internet. As well as plumbing the recent past for things not yet incorporated into contemporary marketing mechanisms, the hipster also signifies the blurring of irony and authenticity. Such “outsiderness as insiderness” postures can be regarded as a continuation of the marginality-from-the-centre logic of cool capitalism that emerged after World War Two. Particularly between 2007 and 2015, the post-postmodern concept of the hipster was a resonant cultural trope in Western and non-Western cultures alike, coinciding with the normalisation of the new digital terrain and the establishment of mobile social media as an integral aspect of many people’s daily lives. While Korine’s 79-minute feature could be thought of as following in the schlocky footsteps of the likes of Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2006), it is decidedly more arthouse, and more attuned to the influence of contemporary alternative media brands and independent film history alike – as if the love child of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Vice Video, the latter having been labelled as “devil-may-care hipsterism” (Carr). Upon release, Trash Humpers was described by Gene McHugh as “a mildly hip take on Jackass”; by Mike D’Angelo as “an empty hipster pose”; and by Aaron Hillis as either “the work of an insincere hipster or an eccentric provocateur”. Lacking any semblance of a conventional plot, Trash Humpers essentially revolves around four elderly-looking protagonists – three men and a woman – who document themselves with a low-quality video camera as they go about behaving badly in the suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee, where Korine still lives. They cackle eerily to themselves as they try to stave off boredom, masturbating frantically on rubbish bins, defecating and drinking alcohol in public, fellating foliage, smashing televisions, playing ten-pin bowling, lighting firecrackers and telling gay “hate” jokes to camera with no punchlines. In one purposefully undramatic scene half-way through the film, the humpers are shown in the aftermath of an attack on a man wearing a French maid’s outfit; he lies dead in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor with a hammer at his feet. The humpers are consummate “bad” performers in every sense of the term, and they are joined by a range of other, apparently lower-class, misfits with whom they stage tap dance routines and repetitively sing nursery-rhyme-styled raps such as: “make it, make it, don’t break it; make it, make it, don’t fake it; make it, make it, don’t take it”, which acts as a surrogate theme song for the film. Korine sometimes depicts his main characters on crutches or in a wheelchair, and a baby doll is never too far away from the action, as a silent and Surrealist witness to their weird, sinister and sometimes very funny exploits. The film cuts from scene to scene as if edited on a video recorder, utilising in-house VHS titling sequences, audio glitches and video static to create the sense that one is engaging voyeuristically with a found video document rather than a scripted movie. Mainstream AlternativesAs a viewer of Trash Humpers, one has to try hard to suspend disbelief if one is to see the humpers as genuine geriatric peeping Toms rather than as hipsters in old-man masks trying to be rebellious. However, as Korine’s earlier films such as Gummo (1997) attest, he clearly delights in blurring the line between failure and transcendence, or, in this case, between pretentious art-school bravado and authentic redneck ennui. As noted in a review by Jeannette Catsoulis, writing for the New York Times: “Much of this is just so much juvenile posturing, but every so often the screen freezes into something approximating beauty: a blurry, spaced-out, yellow-green landscape, as alien as an ancient photograph”. Korine has made a career out of generating this wavering uncertainty in his work, polarising audiences with a mix of critical, cinema-verité styles and cynical exploitations. His work has consistently revelled in ethical ambiguities, creating environments where teenagers take Ritalin for kicks, kill cats, wage war with their families and engage in acts of sexual deviancy – all of which are depicted with a photographer’s eye for the uncanny.The elusive and contradictory aspects of Korine’s work – at once ugly and beautiful, abstract and commercial, pessimistic and nostalgic – are evident not just in films such as Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy (1999) and Mister Lonely (2007) but also in his screenplay for Kids (1995), his performance-like appearances on The Tonight Show with David Letterman (1993-2015) and in publications such as A Crackup at the Race Riots (1998) and Pass the Bitch Chicken (2001). As well as these outputs, Korine is also a painter who is represented by Gagosian Gallery – one of the world’s leading art galleries – and he has directed numerous music videos, documentaries and commercials throughout his career. More than just update of the traditional figure of the auteur, Korine, instead, resembles a contemporary media artist whose avant-garde and grotesque treatments of Americana permeate almost everything he does. Korine wrote the screenplay for Kids when he was just 19, and subsequently built his reputation on the paradoxical mainstreaming of alternative culture in the 1990s. This is exemplified by the establishment of music and film genres such “alternative” and “independent”; the popularity of the slacker ethos attributed to Generation X; the increased visibility of alternative press zines; the birth of grunge in fashion and music; and the coining of “cool hunting” – a bottom-up market research phenomenon that aimed to discover new trends in urban subcultures for the purpose of mass marketing. Key to “alternative culture”, and its related categories such as “indie” and “arthouse”, is the idea of evoking artistic authenticity while covertly maintaining a parasitic relationship with the mainstream. As Holly Kruse notes in her account of the indie music scenes of the 1990s, which gained tremendous popularity in the wake of grunge bands such as Nirvana: without dominant, mainstream musics against which to react, independent music cannot be independent. Its existence depends upon dominant music structures and practices against which to define itself. Indie music has therefore been continually engaged in an economic and ideological struggle in which its ‘outsider’ status is re-examined, re-defined, and re-articulated to sets of musical practices. (Kruse 149)Alternative culture follows a similar, highly contentious, logic, appearing as a nebulous, authentic and artistic “other” whose exponents risk being entirely defined by the mainstream markets they profess to oppose. Kids was directed by the artist cum indie-director Larry Clark, who discovered Korine riding his skateboard with a group of friends in New York’s Washington Square in the early 1990s, before commissioning him to write a script. The then subcultural community of skating – which gained prominence in the 1990s amidst the increased visibility of “alternative sports” – provides an important backdrop to the film, which documents a group of disaffected New York teenagers at a time of the Aids crisis in America. Korine has been active in promoting the DIY ethos, creativity and anti-authoritarian branding of skate culture since this time – an industry that, in its attempts to maintain a non-mainstream profile while also being highly branded, has become emblematic of the category of “alternative culture”. Korine has undertaken commercial projects with an array skate-wear brands, but he is particularly associated with Supreme, a so-called “guerrilla fashion” label originating in 1994 that credits Clark and other 1990s indie darlings, and Korine cohorts, Chloë Sevigny and Terry Richardson, as former models and collaborators (Williams). The company is well known for its designer skateboard decks, its collaborations with prominent contemporary visual artists, its hip-hop branding and “inscrutable” web videos. It is also well known for its limited runs of new clothing lines, which help to stoke demand through one-offs – blending street-wear accessibility with the restricted-market and anti-authoritarian sensibility of avant-garde art.Of course, “alternative culture” poses a notorious conundrum for analysis, involving highly subjective demarcations of “mainstream” from “subversive” culture, not to mention “genuine subversion” from mere “corporate alternatives”. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the roots of alternative culture lie in the Western tradition of the avant-garde and the “aesthetic gaze” that developed in the nineteenth century (Field 36). In analysing the modernist notion of advanced cultural practice – where art is presented as an alternative to bourgeois academic taste and to the common realm of cultural commodities – Bourdieu proposed a distinction between two types of “fields”, or logics of cultural production. Alternative culture follows what Bourdieu called “the field of restricted production”, which adheres to “art for art’s sake” ideals, where audiences are targeted as if like-minded peers (Field 50). In contrast, the “field of large-scale production” reflects the commercial imperatives of mainstream culture, in which goods are produced for the general public at large. The latter field of large-scale production tends to service pre-established markets, operating in response to public demand. Furthermore, whereas success in the field of restricted production is often indirect, and latent – involving artists who create niche markets without making any concessions to those markets – success in the field of large-scale production is typically more immediate and quantifiable (Field 39). Here we can see that central to the branding of “alternative culture” is the perceived refusal to conform to popular taste and the logic of capitalism more generally is. As Supreme founder James Jebbia stated about his brand in a rare interview: “The less known the better” (Williams). On this, Bourdieu states that, in the field of restricted production, the fundamental principles of all ordinary economies are inversed to create a “loser wins” scenario (Field 39). Profit and cultural esteem become detrimental attributes in this context, potentially tainting the integrity and marginalisation on which alternative products depend. As one ironic hipster t-shirt puts it: “Nothing is any good if other people like it” (Diesel Sweeties).Trash HipstersIn abandoning linear narrative for rough assemblages of vignettes – or “moments” – recorded with an unsteady handheld camera, Trash Humpers positions itself in ironic opposition to mainstream filmmaking, refusing the narrative arcs and unwritten rules of Hollywood film, save for its opening and closing credits. Given Korine’s much publicized appreciation of cinema pioneers, we can understand Trash Humpers as paying homage to independent and DIY film history, including Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973), Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Trash (1970), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), all of which jubilantly embraced the “bad” aesthetic of home movies. Posed as fantasized substitutions for mainstream movie-making, such works were also underwritten by the legitimacy of camp as a form of counter-culture critique, blurring parody and documentary to give voice to an array of non-mainstream and counter-cultural identities. The employment of camp in postmodern culture became known not merely as an aesthetic subversion of cultural mores but also as “a gesture of self-legitimation” (Derrida 290), its “failed seriousness” regarded as a critical response to the specific historical problem of being a “culturally over-saturated” subject (Sontag 288).The significant difference between Korine’s film and those of his 1970s-era forbears is precisely the attention he pays to the formal aspects of his medium, revelling in analogue editing glitches to the point of fetishism, in some cases lasting as long as the scenes themselves. Consciously working out-of-step with the media of his day, Trash Humpers in imbued with nostalgia from its very beginning. Whereas Smith, Eggleston, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters blurred fantasy and documentary in ways that raised the social and political identities of their subjects, Korine seems much more interested in “trash” as an aesthetic trope. In following this interest, he rightfully pays homage to the tropes of queer cinema, however, he conveniently leaves behind their underlying commentaries about (hetero-) normative culture. A sequence where the trash humpers visit a whorehouse and amuse themselves by smoking cigars and slapping the ample bottoms of prostitutes in G-strings confirms the heterosexual tenor of the film, which is reiterated throughout by numerous deadpan gay jokes and slurs.Trash Humpers can be understood precisely in terms of Korine’s desire to maintain the aesthetic imperatives of alternative culture, where formal experimentation and the subverting of mainstream genres can provide a certain amount of freedom from explicated meaning, and, in particular, from socio-political commentary. Bourdieu rightly points out how the pleasures of the aesthetic gaze often manifest themselves curiously as form of “deferred pleasure” (353) or “pleasure without enjoyment” (495), which corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic dispositions posed in the negative – as in the avant-garde artists who mined primitive and ugly cultural stereotypes – typically use as reference points “facile” or “vulgar” (393) working-class tropes that refer negatively to sensuous pleasure as their major criterion of judgment. For Bourdieu, the pleasures provided by the aesthetic gaze in such instances are not sensual pleasures so much as the pleasures of social distinction – signifying the author’s distance from taste as a form of gratification. Here, it is easy to see how the orgiastic central characters in Trash Humpers might be employed by Korine for a similar end-result. As noted by Jeremiah Kipp in a review of the film: “You don't ‘like’ a movie like Trash Humpers, but I’m very happy such films exist”. Propelled by aesthetic, rather than by social, questions of value, those that “get” the obscure works of alternative culture have a tendency to legitimize them on the basis of the high-degree of formal analysis skills they require. For Bourdieu, this obscures the fact that one’s aesthetic “‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education” – a privileged mode of looking, estranged from those unfamiliar with the internal logic of decoding presupposed by the very notion of “aesthetic enjoyment” (2).The rhetorical priority of alternative culture is, in Bourdieu’s terms, the “autonomous” perfection of the form rather than the “heteronomous” attempt to monopolise on it (Field 40). However, such distinctions are, in actuality, more nuanced than Bourdieu sometimes assumed. This is especially true in the context of global digital culture, which makes explicit how the same cultural signs can have vastly different meanings and motivations across different social contexts. This has arguably resulted in the destabilisation of prescriptive analyses of cultural taste, and has contributed to recent “post-critical” advances, in which academics such as Bruno Latour and Rita Felski advocate for cultural analyses and practices that promote relationality and attachment rather than suspicious (critical) dispositions towards marginal and popular subjects alike. Latour’s call for a move away from the “sledge hammer” of critique applies as much to cultural practice as it does to written analysis. Rather than maintaining hierarchical oppositions between authentic versus inauthentic taste, Latour understands culture – and the material world more generally – as having agency alongside, and with, that of the social world.Hipsters with No AlternativeIf, as Karl Spracklen suggests, alternativism is thought of “as a political project of resistance to capitalism, with communicative oppositionality as its defining feature” (254), it is clear that there has been a progressive waning in relevance of the category of “alternative culture” in the age of the Internet, which coincides with the triumph of so-called “neoliberal individualism” (258). To this end, Korine has lost some of his artistic credibility over the course of the 2000s. If viewed negatively, icons of 1990s alternative culture such as Korine can be seen as merely exploiting Dada-like techniques of mimetic exacerbation and symbolic détournement for the purpose of alternative, “arty” branding rather than pertaining to a counter-hegemonic cultural movement (Foster 31). It is within this context of heightened scepticism surrounding alternative culture that the hipster stereotype emerged in cultures throughout the world, as if a contested symbol of the aesthetic gaze in an era of neoliberal identity politics. Whatever the psychological motivations underpinning one’s use of the term, to call someone a hipster is typically to point out that their distinctive alternative or “arty” status appears overstated; their creative decisions considered as if a type of bathos. For detractors of alternative cultural producers such as Korine, he is trying too hard to be different, using the stylised codes of “alternative” to conceal what is essentially his cultural and political immaturity. The hipster – who is rarely ever self-identified – re-emerged in the 2000s to operate as a scapegoat for inauthentic markers of alternative culture, associated with men and women who appear to embrace Realpolitik, sincerity and authentic expressions of identity while remaining tethered to irony, autonomous aesthetics and self-design. Perhaps the real irony of the hipster is the pervasiveness of irony in contemporary culture. R. J Magill Jnr. has argued that “a certain cultural bitterness legitimated through trenchant disbelief” (xi) has come to define the dominant mode of political engagement in many societies since the early 2000s, in response to mass digital information, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the climate of suspicion produced by information about terrorism threats. He analyses the prominence of political irony in American TV shows including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Simpsons, South Park, The Chappelle Show and The Colbert Report but he also notes its pervasiveness as a twenty-first-century worldview – a distancing that “paradoxically and secretly preserves the ideals of sincerity, honesty and authenticity by momentarily belying its own appearance” (x). Crucially, then, the utterance “hipster” has come to signify instances when irony and aesthetic distance are perceived to have been taken too far, generating the most disdain from those for whom irony, aesthetic discernment and cultural connoisseurship still provide much-needed moments of disconnection from capitalist cultures drowning in commercial hyperbole and grave news hype. Korine himself has acknowledged that Spring Breakers (2013) – his follow-up feature film to Trash Humpers – was created in response to the notion that “alternative culture”, once a legitimate challenge to mainstream taste, had lost its oppositional power with the decentralization of digital culture. He states that he made Spring Breakers at a moment “when there’s no such thing as high or low, it’s all been exploded. There is no underground or above-ground, there’s nothing that’s alternative. We’re at a point of post-everything, so it’s all about finding the spirit inside, and the logic, and making your own connections” (Hawker). In this context, we can understand Trash Humpers as the last of the Korine films to be branded with the authenticity of alternative culture. In Spring Breakers Korine moved from the gritty low-fi sensibility of his previous films and adopted a more digital, light-filled and pastel-coloured palette. Focussing more conventionally on plot than ever before, Spring Breakers follows four college girls who hold up a restaurant in order to fund their spring break vacation. Critic Michael Chaiken noted that the film marks a shift in Korine’s career, from the alternative stylings of the pre-Internet generation to “the cultural heirs [of] the doomed protagonists of Kids: nineties babies, who grew up with the Internet, whose sensibilities have been shaped by the sweeping technological changes that have taken place in the interval between the Clinton and Obama eras” (33).By the end of the 2000s, an entire generation came of age having not experienced a time when the obscure films, music or art of the past took more effort to track down. Having been a key participant in the branding of alternative culture, Korine is in a good position to recall a different, pre-YouTube time – when cultural discernment was still caught up in the authenticity of artistic identity, and when one’s cultural tastes could still operate with a certain amount of freedom from sociological scrutiny. Such ideas seem a long way away from today’s cultural environments, which have been shaped not only by digital media’s promotion of cultural interconnection and mass information, but also by social media’s emphasis on mobilization and ethical awareness. ConclusionI should reiterate here that is not Korine’s lack of seriousness, or irony, alone that marks Trash Humpers as a response to the scepticism surrounding alternative culture symbolised by the figure of the hipster. It is, rather, that Korine’s mock-documentary about juvenile geriatrics works too hard to obscure its implicit social commentary, appearing driven to condemn contemporary capitalism’s exploitations of youthfulness only to divert such “uncool” critical commentaries through unsubtle formal distractions, visual poetics and “bad boy” avant-garde signifiers of authenticity. Before being bludgeoned to death, the unnamed man in the French maid’s outfit recites a poem on a bridge amidst a barrage of fire crackers let off by a nearby humper in a wheelchair. Although easily overlooked, it could, in fact, be a pivotal scene in the film. Spoken with mock high-art pretentions, the final lines of the poem are: So what? Why, I ask, why? Why castigate these creatures whose angelic features are bumping and grinding on trash? Are they not spawned by our greed? Are they not our true seed? Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash? We’ve created this lot, of the ooze and the rot, deliberately and unabashed. Whose orgiastic elation and one mission in creation is to savagely fornicate TRASH!Here, the character’s warning of capitalist overabundance is drowned out by the (aesthetic) shocks of the fire crackers, just as the stereotypical hipster’s ethical ideals are drowned out by their aesthetic excess. The scene also functions as a metaphor for the humpers themselves, whose elderly masks – embodiments of nostalgia – temporarily suspend their real socio-political identities for the sake of role-play. It is in this sense that Trash Humpers is too enamoured with its own artifices – including its anonymous “boys club” mentality – to suggest anything other than the aesthetic distance that has come to mark the failings of the “alternative culture” category. In such instances, alternative taste appears as a rhetorical posture, with Korine asking us to gawk knowingly at the hedonistic and destructive pleasures pursued by the humpers while factoring in, and accepting, our likely disapproval.ReferencesArsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5 (2011): 791-806.Bourdieu, Pierre. 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