Loomnie

… is the title of a new book by Lucy Norris of the Department of Anthropology, University College, London.

The blurb:

In today’s globally connected marketplace, a wedding sari in rural north India may become a woman’s blouse or cushion cover in a Western boutique. Lucy Norris’s anthropological study of the recycling of clothes in Delhi follows garments as they are gifted, worn, handed on, discarded, recycled, and sold once more. Gifts of clothing are used to make and break relationships within middle-class households, but a growing surplus of unwanted clothing now contributes to a global glut of textile waste. When old clothing is, for instance, bartered for new kitchen utensils, it enters a vast waste commodity system in which it may be resold to the poor or remade into new textiles and exported. Norris traces these local and transnational flows through homes and markets as she tells the stories of the people who work in the largely hidden world of fabric recycling.

Click for more information on the book.

Image via Wikipedia

By FT’s Gillian Tett:

… in just a few years, sushi has colonised urban centres with startling speed. The first wave of sushi restaurants cropped up in California in the 1970s, partly to service the estimated one million Americans of Japanese descent. But now they are ubiquitous, serving Caucasians too: teenagers take sushi to school; prisons have introduced it; in California, it is served at trucker stops. Meanwhile the National Sushi Association reports that there are now more than 5,000 sushi bars in American supermarkets, with the number continuing to rise fast.

….

The cultural messages embedded in this shift are fascinating. If you are feeling optimistic, you might like to see the sushi invasion as a sign of globalisation – and America’s ability to act as a cultural melting pot. One of the most popular sushi dishes these days is the “California” sushi roll, which blends traditional rice with non-Japanese items such as avocado. In New York you can find “SushiSamba”, which mixes Latin American cuisine with that raw fish. But perhaps the most intriguing issue of all is the ethnicity of sushi restaurant staff. These days sushi restaurants often struggle to get “real” Japanese chefs, since there are not enough to meet the boom. So Chinese, Vietnamese or Filipino staff are used instead. The assumption, it seems, is that Asian faces are required to make the sushi restaurant look “real”; but many customers cannot really tell Chinese and Japanese apart. “Globalisation doesn’t necessarily homogenise cultural differences nor erase the salience of cultural labels. On the contrary, it grows the franchise,” observes Bestor. “The brand equity of sushi as Japanese cultural property adds to the cachet of the country and cuisine.” Even if the face is actually Chinese.

Read in full.

The Chinese market in fake European classical art is growing. Steadily. Something they bring to it? Industrial efficiency.

The village of Dafen in southern China has become the centre of a big industry, with about 8,000 artists responsible for creating 60 per cent of the world’s oil paintings.

A well-researched piece in Intelligent Life Magazine. Concludes with:

Sport has infected other fields with its values. Everything from hairdressing to accountancy now has its own awards ceremony, making mere workers into winners and losers. The recent British election was dominated by televised debates between the main party leaders, which turned a four-week campaign into a three-set match. Heavily previewed and then exhaustively dissected, the debates were sport without the drama, the athleticism, the crowd reaction or even the scoreboard. In the messy aftermath, the place to find out what was happening was not the lead stories, which were often bland and clueless, but the minute-by-minute updates, supplied by deskbound reporters—a trick imported from sport.

A winner-takes-all culture, which would have been abhorrent a generation ago, has spread outwards from banking, with its eight-figure bonuses. It is harder to protest against that when we swallow the extreme economics of sport. Cristiano Ronaldo is paid an estimated £11.3m a year by Real Madrid, or £217,000 a week. And that’s before he slips on his Y-fronts. Tiger Woods was still valued at $82m as a brand byForbes in February, even after 14 mistresses’ worth of dirty laundry.

As a whodunnit, this is “Murder on the Orient Express”. Every suspect had a motive: they all dunnit. And we have let them. Sport, more than most things, is what we make of it. It plays on a screen not just in the corner of the room but in our heads. Its significance largely consists of what we project on to it. We may be watching in much the same numbers, but we are doing so with greater intensity, and inside a wider penumbra of collective consciousness. We all dunnit.

Check it out here.

Bars of soap, lipstick and pitta bread are out; hair straighteners, garlic bread and Blu-ray disc players are in. The latest shake-up of the shopping “basket” used to measure UK inflation shines a light on Britain’s changing spending habits.

Check the article here.

Anybody knows of any contemporary anthropological studies of changes in consumption/spending habits?

The clothes are being produced in a “green” factory in Sri Lanka – the first in the world to be awarded a gold rating for environmental responsiblity by LEED, the international green building certification system.

And they are:

made from end of line Tesco stock which would otherwise end up in landfill….

Full article.

Confusion over the names of two similar-sounding African countries may have helped boosted oil prices to near $80 a barrel this week as traders rushed to buy oil after reports of a military coup.

A Reuters reporter received a flustered phone call from a hedge fund partner who had heard animated discussion in the market about an incident in Nigeria, only to realise that traders had muddled up Africa’s biggest oil producer with its neighbour Niger.

“Markets took off at around the same time a Reuters story came out about gunfire erupting in the Niger capital in an apparent coup bid, mistaken by many as being Nigeria,” said Tom Bentz, analyst at BNP Paribas Commodities.

Reuters.