Lived experience in a neighbourhood wet market culture and social memories of a disappearing space 2

Chapter 1. Framing the lived experiences and memories of the marketplace 1.1. Orienting the view: Presenting Bedok Market This thesis is an ethnography of a neighbourhood wet market in Singapore – Bedok Market – in which I hope to relate some sense of the varied peoples, activities, and logics that characterize this space. I deploy a meaning-centred framework (Wherry, 2012) to shed light on the micro-level culture of Bedok Market: the various socialities, and performance ingredients that make up what I call the drama of buying and selling. In this manner, I endeavour to capture the lived qualities of everyday life for two groups – hawkers and customers. Many neighbourhood marketplaces have vanished from the Singapore landscape in the recent years. A torrent of memories has welled up in light of this disappearance. To gain a feel of the stories that have circulated, I extract the memories of four categories of people – hawkers, customers, the National Heritage Board (NHB) staff and their collaborators, and heritage bloggers.1 To some degree, the tales of some groups conjure up the multifaceted dynamics of the marketplace. Others do not. Thus, I marry my ethnography with a narrative slant that draws from and builds upon the micro-level culture of the marketplace. 1.2. Crafting a meaning-centred approach to Bedok Market My thesis lies at the intersection of economic and cultural sociology; I tap on concepts from cultural sociology such as sociality, relational work, dramaturgy or performance, nostalgia, and heritage, to understand economic phenomena and social memories. In particular, I align myself with Wherry‟s (2012) meaning-centred stance to marketplaces – a framework that fits well with culturally inflected studies in economic sociology. Hence, I situate my ethnography of the micro-level culture of 1 „Heritage bloggers‟ refer to people who „share their passion for Singapore‟s past and present‟ by blogging about issues that relate to Singapore‟s past and „heritage‟ (NHB, 2012a). 1 Bedok Market within the sociology of culture realm in the field of economic sociology, and within studies in social memory. A meaning-centred approach operates along several logics. It comprehends marketplaces as „cultural intentions‟, meaning that „people…share loose understandings about how they should survive…[and] exchange, and what is appropriate for exchange‟ (ibid.:3). Marketplaces are „cultural intentions that are inculcated and enacted, and intentions that their audiences must absorb‟ (ibid.). Contrary to what neoclassical economists believe, marketplaces are not technical, efficient responses to a natural environment driven by principles of scarcity, demand, and supply (ibid.). A cultural understanding of marketplace logics and more broadly, economic action, facilitates an exploration of marketplaces that looks at „what people actually do‟ in them – the meanings or cultural intentions that actors affix to their behaviours. These meanings are inseparable from people‟s actions, relationships, negotiations, and struggles (ibid.:121). Therefore, a meaning-centred approach concerns itself with „the meanings of economic action....[and] money, dramaturgical performances within market encounters, and categories that order economic behaviour‟ (ibid.:126). Because I don this lens, I am interested in meaningful socialities and relational work (Chapter 3), performances (Chapter 4), and narratives (Chapter 5) in and of Bedok Market. In addition, a meaning-centred stance views economic actors as pragmatic, emotional, and habitual creatures (ibid.:130). Unlike what neoclassical economists hold, rationality and utility are but two of the many cultural orientations that individuals exhibit (ibid.). Actors in Bedok Market have multiple goals behind their (economic) actions. Some are material and economically oriented; others are symbolic 2 and ideational. Actors may disavow some goals to fulfil others (ibid.:131). To achieve their many goals, individuals employ meaningful strategies that are substantive, temporally ordered, and meaningfully instrumental (ibid.); goals are accomplished in ways that make sense to people. Furthermore, a meaning-centred approach sees the marketplace as a social space and a dramaturgical stage on which actors adopt roles, perform, and interact with audiences. I probe into these conceptions of the space in Chapter 3 and 4 respectively. Since I engage a meaning-centred framework to explore the micro-level culture of Bedok Market, a definition of „culture‟ and „marketplace‟ is imperative. By „micro-level culture‟, I refer to the lived, subjective and multifarious qualities, logics or rhythms that compose the milieu of Bedok Market. Marketplace socialities and the theatre of buying and selling are two aspects of these realities. These ethnographic characteristics are socially constituted. A sense of „social cognition‟ (DiMaggio, 1990:113) is embedded in marketplace culture. There exists a shared sense of how the social world is ordered, even before individuals enter the space (Wherry, 2012:7). Moreover, actors experience this world through categories of what can be grouped together, and what must be separated. In the marketplace, culture demarcates boundaries which are often taken-for-granted (ibid.:8). More vitally, when I speak about the „micro-level culture of Bedok Market‟, I invoke an interpretative lens through which actors perceive their social world and their place in it. Culture embodies a set of principles about how individuals should behave, and the meanings of these behaviours in a particular space (ibid.:9). People act explicitly or implicitly within a pre-established structure of cultural norms. They often use their agency to selectively draw from these norms to gain power in negotiating their own positions or 3 altering the norms. In this manner, cultural norms in the marketplace frame but do not dictate ways of acting. Neoclassical economists use the term „market‟ to refer abstractly to exchange that revolves around the laws of price, demand, and supply (Bestor, 2001:9227). „Markets‟ are „networks of economic processes and transactions…which occur without specific locations or spatial boundaries for the transactional universe‟ (ibid.). I do not view Bedok Market as a „market‟ in this sense. Rather, Bedok Market is a „marketplace‟ – a space that encapsulates „a localized set of social institutions, social actors, property rights, products, transactional relationships, trade practices, and cultural meanings framed by a wide variety of factors including, but not limited to, “purely economic” or “market” forces‟ (ibid.). „Marketplaces‟ are ethnographic sites or Specific locations and social frameworks characterized not only by economic exchanges in and among them, but also by their equally vital roles as arenas for cultural activity and political expression, nodes in flows of information, landmarks of historical and ritual significance, and centres of civic participation where diverse social, economic, ethnic, and cultural groups combine, collide, cooperate, collude, compete, and clash. (ibid.) In short, a meaning-centred angle underscores that marketplaces are embedded in ongoing patterns of social organization and cultural meaning (Polanyi et al., 1957; Granovetter, 1985), since economic behaviour is interwoven with a myriad of social and cultural behaviours, institutions, and beliefs (Bestor, 2001:9227). There are many marketplaces that fit Bestor‟s (2001) definition. Tangires (2008) and Spitzer et al. (1995) utilize the term „public market‟ to encompass the numerous marketplaces possible: open-air markets, street markets, market sheds, wholesale markets and so on. In Singapore, wet markets are „public markets‟ in three ways. They are spaces where diverse peoples buy and sell products under the purview 4 of a common authority – the National Environment Agency (NEA)2 or private enterprises. There are public goals or purposes to marketplace activities – the provision of affordable retailing opportunities to small businesses, and shopping facilities in the neighbourhood precinct. Wet markets are located in public spaces in the community, and are supposed to serve as places where people mingle (Spitzer et al., 1995:2-3). The term „wet market‟ stems from the wet floors in the space. These are caused by melting ice that is used to keep foods fresh, and hawkers who wash their stalls to rid them of the blood, waste, and dirt that come with slaughtering and cleaning live or fresh animals and foods. In Singapore, marketplaces are segmented into a wet section where fresh foods – pork, chicken, beef, (roast) duck, seafood, and live animals – are retailed, and a dry section of spices, rice, dried noodles and seafood, eggs, fruits, and clothes. Marketplaces are thought to be noisy and smelly. They are open everyday except Mondays, from the wee hours of the morning to noon. 1.3. Why an ethnography of a neighbourhood marketplace? Venkatesh et al. (2006:252) bemoan that the terms „market‟, „consumption‟, and „culture‟ are „everywhere but nowhere in our literature‟ on marketplaces, where this literature runs the gamut from economics, business and marketing, political science, sociology to anthropology. Geiger et al. (2012:134-136) underline that market(place)s are amenable to cross-disciplinary and cross-area investigation. They make a commendable effort to consolidate the various approaches, and craft a crossdisciplinary vocabulary that enables discussion without flattening the differences 2 The National Environment Agency (NEA) is „the leading public organization responsible for improving and sustaining a clean and green environment in Singapore‟ (http://app2.nea.gov.sg/corporate-functions/about-nea/overview). NEA develops environmental initiatives and programmes through its partnership with the public and private sectors (ibid.). NEA has several key programmes, and the management of hawker centres and wet markets constitutes one of these programmes (ibid.). 5 across academic traditions. Their conceptual map evinces many theoretical perspectives on market(place)s. Three of these perspectives – neoclassical economics, the substantivist school of thought, and social networks theory – have dominated the field of economic sociology. I will here assess the features, strengths and weaknesses of these paradigms, and communicate the importance of a meaning-centred framework. Neoclassical economists erect a dichotomy between the market and civic life; economic life and action are antagonistic to social life (Cook, 2008:1). In fact, culture and the economy are taken to be macro entities that operate as separate externalities (ibid.:2). Economic life is captured in Bestor‟s (2001) aforementioned definition of the „market‟; the market delinks buyers, sellers and products from one another, and extracts exchange processes from a sense of place (Cook, 2008:2). Therefore, neoclassical economists endorse an ideal model of the market that is divorced from material and social constraints; they claim to be „culture-free‟. They celebrate a powerful figure of the rational economic man who is isolated and anonymous – epitomic of homo economicus and methodological individualism (Shepherd, 2008) – rational and capitalist. In the neoclassical economic perspective, the market is a price mechanism for price formation involving utilitarian, atomistic buyers and sellers with stable preferences and perfect information, and tends towards equilibrium (Geiger et al., 2012:137). Finally, the model reeks of economic imperialism or colonialism; neoclassical economists purport to be able to explain all social relations and matters via the work of an all-powerful market system. Their model of „The Market‟ is not only abstract, but normative and hegemonic. 6 Recent developments in the field reveal that neoclassical economists have embraced new ideas and debates. The concepts of „social capital‟, „social trust‟ as a foundation for cooperation among firms, and „cultural economy‟, have become key themes in the study of economic life. Nonetheless, criticisms of neoclassical economics abound. Frank (2000) warns that the market arises as a sort of „supraintelligence‟ or „deity‟ that systematically structures economic and social life according to „an unbending…[and] unerring calculus of value‟ (cited in Cook, 2008:1). The division between the economy and culture leaves no room wherein culture, meaning, sentiment, and everyday practice bear upon social life (Cook, 2008:2). Furthermore, Shepherd (2008:13) highlights that neoclassical economics is a model occupied with aggregates and not individuals, and thus projects how people should behave, not what they actually do (ibid.). Consequently, the „real‟ is simply assumed to conform to the „normative‟ (ibid.). Market exchange is detached from social, cultural, and historical contexts, and is assumed to operate uniformly everywhere. The removal of place and history from specific contexts deprives neoclassical economists of any ability to speak of social realities in the lived here and now (ibid.:14-15). Neoclassical economists also forget that market exchange is a social tie of a certain kind. Exchange that transpires between impersonal partners is a social relationship because „the neutralization of actors‟ identities is the properly social condition for market exchange‟ (La Pradelle, 2006:6). Certainly, methodological individualism is a culturally produced way of being (Shepherd, 2008:17). The most trenchant critique of neoclassical economics springs from the substantivist tradition in economic sociology. The substantive meaning of economic has come to be associated with the works of Karl Polanyi and his followers (George 7 Dalton and Marshall Sahlins, for example), and is a creation of Polanyi himself (Polanyi et al., 1957). It designates a perspective that Polanyi formulated in The great transformation: The political and economic origin of our times (1944), and Trade and market in the early empires: Economies in history and theory (1957). In these seminal texts, Polanyi challenges the formal meaning of economic that runs on the logic of rational decision-making and choice in the allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends (Polanyi et al., 1957:243). He advocates a substantive understanding of economic that interrogates the material acts of making of a living, and the ways through which humans adapt to the social and natural environment (ibid.). Polanyi proceeds to investigate the place of the substantive economy in different kinds of societies. How is the economy „instituted‟ or integrated into wider society and stabilized (Prattis, 1987:16)? What are the processes that bind the social and economic in various societies (Wilk, 1996:7)? Polanyi et al. (1957:148) assert that economic action and institutions are embedded and enmeshed in institutions, both economic and noneconomic. In this sense, substantivists lean towards social economics (Wilk, 1996:8). They are interested in economic institutions, social groups that produce, exchange and consume goods, and they assume that such groups abide by the rules of these institutions (ibid.). In addition, Polanyi takes a historical and comparative approach to the analysis of „the economy as an instituted process‟ (Lie, 1991:221). In his comparative analysis, Polanyi (1977:35) develops a typology of exchange relations or „forms of integration‟ – patterns of integration that bring out the institutionalized movements through which elements of the economic process (material resources and labour, transportation, storage, and the distribution of goods) are connected. 8 There are three kinds of exchange relations. Reciprocal exchanges occur because the values and norms of a social group or society prescribe that individuals have reciprocal obligations to one another by virtue of their statuses. Thus, families, clans, tribes, friends or communities give and receive goods in traditionally patterned manners (Barber, 1995:396). Redistributive exchanges are propelled by norms that require members of a collective to contribute taxes, goods or services to a central authority. This agency either allocates these contributions to some common enterprise of the collective, or returns them in different proportions to the original donors (ibid.:398). Market exchanges are the very transactions that neoclassical economists and formalists study. They exist where norms dictate that economic actors behave like homo economius (ibid.). Polanyi (1944:46) states that reciprocity and redistribution are inextricably embedded in social relations, and are present in pre-market and substantive economies. On the contrary, market exchange and societies are disembedded from social relations (Polanyi et al., 1957). Renowned social network theorist, Mark Granovetter, builds on Polanyi‟s (1944; 1957) concept of „embeddedness‟. His highly influential piece, Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddnedness (1985), critiques the „undersocialized‟ actor of neoclassical economics and the „oversocialized‟ actor of classical structural sociology (ibid.:482-483). Granovetter (1985) argues that these approaches see actions and decisions as executed by atomized individuals who are disembedded from social contexts (ibid.:484), glossing over the „historical and structural embeddedness of relations‟ (ibid.:485). Swedberg and Granovetter (2001) throw light on the limitations of apprehending economic phenomena through methodological individualism: individuals are never solitary but are frequently in contact with other individuals and groups (ibid.:11). Born into a pre-ordered social 9 world, a complex social structure has always been in existence, and has evolved through history (ibid.). Most significantly, individual motives cannot account adequately for social facts and structures; these can only be explained through wider social forces (ibid.). In the 1980s, in response to Granovetter‟s (1985) critique, a cultural approach in economic sociology gained strength with the new economic sociology of Richard Swedberg, Mark Granovetter, Neil Smelser, Harrison White, and Viviana Zelizer, broadening the academic debate about the economy to incorporate a social perspective, and account for the interactions of real people (Swedberg and Granovetter, 2001:1). Network theorists propose that structural economic sociology is grounded in three interrelated principles: 1) economic action is a form of social action; 2) economic action is socially situated or embedded; and 3) economic institutions are social constructions (Swedberg and Granovetter, 2001:8). Economic action is social behaviour that is steered by a desire for utility (ibid.), and meaning structures – the viewpoints and definitions that actors have of a situation – are central in understanding economic action as a category of social action. This preposition of economic sociology considers the social context, structures, and institutions in which economic action transpires (ibid.:9-10). Economic life is not merely the product of individual self-interest, and economic systems are not simply the aggregation of self-interest into an optimal condition of collective rationality that maximizes individual advantages (Bestor, 2004:14). Alternatively, network theorists purport that economic action is embedded in ongoing networks, structures, and organizations of personal relationships, where networks comprise regular social contacts or connections among people or groups (ibid.:11). Moreover, Granovetter (1985:486-487) proposes that networks can produce 10 trust and prevent malfeasance in economic life. Social relationships can generate fraud and conflict as well (ibid.:488-489), where the extent of disorder depends on how the networks of relationships are structured (ibid.:489;497). The strength – or weakness – of personal ties influences economic phenomena, and network theorists differentiate between embedded and arm‟s-length or disembedded ties3 (Zelizer, 2012:148). The notion that economic institutions are socially constructed suggests that institutions which generate economic activity are not solely the outcome of economic processes (Bestor, 2004:14). Rather, individual actors and institutions create economic systems out of gradual accumulations of social knowledge and practice that, over time, appear natural and powerful in how they organize people‟s actions and attitudes (La Pradelle, 1995 cited in Bestor, 2004:14). Bestor‟s (2004) delightful book, Tsukiji: The fish market at the centre of the world, utilizes a cultural perspective to understand social and economic institutions, processes, and life in Tsukiji – the world‟s largest marketplace for seafood that is based in Japan. Bestor‟s (2004) work demonstrates Swedberg and Granovetter‟s (2001) three propositions splendidly. It is an ethnography of trade and economic institutions as they are embedded in and moulded by social and cultural currents in Japanese life (Bestor, 2004:xvi); the book explores how complex institutional structures are affixed to and influenced by specific cultural meanings (ibid.:xvii). Because Tsukiji exemplifies the institutional frameworks of Japanese economic behaviour and organization (ibid.:12), Bestor (2004:xviii) also delves into the social networks and structures that organize the marketplace. These include the structure of auctions in Tsukiji, and the roles of auction houses, auctioneers and traders; the dynamics of family firms; and the social structures and relations that drive traders‟ activities (ibid.). 3 Granovetter (1990; 1992) distinguishes between the immediate social connections that an actor has with others, and more distant associations. He uses the notion of „relational embeddedness‟ to refer to strong and embedded networks, and „structural embeddedness‟ to invoke weak ties. 11 Most crucially, Tsukiji acts as a broader case study of institutional structures and the social and cultural embeddedness of economic life (ibid.:12). This is in line with Bestor‟s (2004:12) desire to engage in an anthropological analysis of institutions; the documentation of Tsukiji is also an examination of the operations of institutions that shape complex, urban societies. To execute such an analysis, Bestor (2004) borrows from Swedberg and Granovetter‟s (2001) third preposition. He starts with the premise that organizational patterns, institutional arrangements, and the cultural principles that such patterns reproduce, set up frameworks for marketplace activity (Bestor, 2004:12). The marketplace is cast both as a particular set of bounded interactions among actors, and as economic process per se (ibid.:15). In short, the economic life of Tsukiji is embedded in an institutional structure which is in turn, influenced by historical and cultural meanings that marketplace participants hold (ibid.:16). However, social network research has come under fire in recent years. According to critics, a theory that distinguishes degrees of (dis)embeddedness reproduces the neoclassical economics dichotomy of a „social‟ and an „asocial‟, representing an economic sphere that runs solely on economic logic (Block, 2012:139; Zelizer, 2012:148; Bandelj, 2012:191). Krippner (2001:800) accuses embeddedness theorists of „residual economism‟, abandoning hard core market transactions, and thus seeing the marketplace as existing apart from society, even as they labour to deconstruct this boundary (Zelizer, 2012:148; Bandelj, 2012:192). Because embeddedness invokes a social container within which economic processes – not fully thought of as being socially constituted – pan out, social relationships influence the economy from the outside (Krippner and Alvarez, 2007:232). Embeddedness research veers towards meso-level organizational phenomena and an „anti-categorical 12 imperative‟ (Emirbayer and Goodwin, 1994:1414), since it focuses on the structure of relationships – the strength of ties, degree of centrality and autonomy of the actors‟ network positions, or density of the actors‟ networks. By stressing meso-level phenomena and the structure of ties, embeddedness theorists slight, therefore, the contents of these relationships. What exactly composes the economic activity described as „embedded‟ in social bonds and structures (Zelizer, 2012:147)? Can relationality only be comprehended as a „system of social relations congealed into networks‟ (Bandelj, 2012:177)? Zelizer, through her concept of „relational work‟ (2005), attempts to apprehend relationality in economic life as a process rather than a structure, and thus valuing the attributes and motives that induce social action at the micro-level.4 Zelizer (2005) develops the notion of „relational work‟ as an alternative to the „hostile worlds‟ perspective, which asserts that economic activity and intimate ties belong to distinct arenas (ibid.:20), and have rigid moral boundaries (ibid.:22). Zelizer (2005) problematizes this perspective by arguing that a real separation between the economy and culture does not exist. The two arenas are „connected worlds‟ or involve „connected lives‟, since intimate and economic realms commingle and coexist. „Relational work‟ is about working across „different boundaries that distinguish categories of relations and designate certain sorts of economic transactions as appropriate for that relation, bar other transactions as inappropriate, and adopt certain media for reckoning and facilitating economic transactions within that relation‟ (ibid.:35). During relational work, individuals form viable matches among a particular set of distinctive social ties, economic transactions (e.g. compensation, loans, bribes, theft, gifts), exchange media (e.g. concrete objects, time, favours), and negotiated 4 The notion of relational work was created by Charles Tilly and Viviana Zelizer, and is most extensively elaborated in Zelizer‟s (2005) The purchase of intimacy, and a special issue of Politics & Society (Block, 2012). 13 meanings (participants‟ negotiated or contested understandings and moral evaluations) (Zelizer, 2012:151). Relational work theorists take meaningful, negotiated, and dynamic interpersonal transactions as the starting point for social processes, focussing on the content of social ties and foregrounding the messiness, ambiguity, and contradictions of relational work (ibid.:149). Cultural content is located in economic transactions themselves; „culture‟ is not treated as an external force or constraint that works on exchanges from the outside (Zelizer, 2005:44). Relational work is not only about meaning-making, but is conjoined with practice; it has a behavioural or symbolic cultural dimension (Bandelj, 2012:182). Hence, relational work or relationality in economic life is a process between actors that is yet to be accomplished; it is relational work rather than systems of social ties structured into networks. In this way, the relational work concept resuscitates people‟s agency, strategies, and self-interest, as actors incessantly struggle and negotiate the matching of relations, transactions, media, and meanings. I draw on the notion of relational work to ponder over the relationships in Bedok Market, and to bring out the contributions that an ethnography can bestow on economic sociology. I reject neoclassical economic assumptions of the marketplace and its actors. Economic and social-cultural life do not belong to „hostile worlds‟, but are intrinsically intertwined. I also reject the aforementioned assumptions of embeddedness theorists. Rather, a meaning-centred take on Bedok Market views economic relationships as being socially constituted, and inquires into the contents and idiosyncrasies of these bonds. I explore the particularities of socialities in Bedok Market in Chapter 3, elucidating the micro-level process through which relationships are forged and sustained. My ethnography also conjoins meaning-making with 14 practice and behaviour. In Chapter 3 and 4, I tease out what people really do in the marketplace, and what these actions mean to them. In sum, I muse over the microlevel culture of Bedok Market – how experiences and practices in and of Bedok Market generate sociality and drama. Throughout the thesis, I proffer descriptions that demonstrate how individuals are pragmatic actors who have a keen sense of agency and strategy; they constantly work out, enact, and (re)shape marketplace culture and memories. Multiple logics of these components flourish; a spectrum of socialities, performances, and stories result from the meaning-making and behavioural processes that actors undertake. In Chapter 5, I take a narrative angle to the memories of the vanishing marketplace. To be concise, I juxtapose the stories related by the hawkers and customers and those articulated by NHB personnel and heritage bloggers. This comparison supplies methods of producing and assessing knowledge about marketplaces that shun top-down and armchair data analysis, policy formulation and promulgation. In other words, it problematizes the master narrative about marketplaces that descends from the above. Furthermore, I stake a claim on the importance of the continuity of marketplaces. Marketplaces harbour immense social value, and their disappearance is compelling to my informants and society in general. Therefore, I point to the need for comparative research in order to better identify measures that enable marketplaces to become more resilient, enduring, and socially meaningful. 1.4. On sociality, performance, and social memory 1.4.1. Sociality Watson and Studdert (2006:3) lament that the sparse literature on marketplaces privileges the economic dimension of these spaces and rarely explores the role of 15 marketplaces as sites of sociality, despite the fact that since antiquity, marketplaces have been lauded to be focal points for local communities and hubs of connection, interconnections, and social interaction. Nevertheless, some recent work has recognized the social relevance of marketplaces. Sherry (1990a) investigates buyer and seller behaviour, marketplace ambience, the social embeddedness and experience of consumption in a flea market in Midwest America, while Stillerman (2006a; 2006b) ruminates how the street markets of Santiago convey the place of grocery shopping in fostering and maintaining relations among vendors and customers. Lui (2008) engages in an ethnographic comparison of the meanings attached to shopping behaviours in wet and supermarkets in Hong Kong, and shows how these meanings incorporate the social relationships that are present among various categories of people – buyers and sellers, family members, friends and neighbours, employers and employees. In wet markets, trust and closeness sprout and mature among buyers and sellers from the daily conversations, and sharing of knowledge about foods (ibid.:6-9). In supermarkets, a sense of distance and professionalism characterizes the relationship between supermarket patrons and employees (ibid.:7). In Singapore, Chia (2010/2011:5) has researched the ways that wet markets, as everyday spaces of consumption, nurture a sense of neighbourhood community, querying the link between everyday consumption practices in wet markets and the establishment of neighbourhood communities. She draws on consumption studies in geography to explore „how socialities and spatialities of consumption…[are] deeply intertwined by looking at everyday spaces of consumption and consumption practices‟ in wet markets (ibid.:11). Hence, Chia (2010/2011:16) dons a spatial and geographical lens to sketch out the ways through which wet markets build neighbourhood 16 communities via place-making; she pushes for a positive relationship between mundane sites of consumption and community building. Watson and Studdert (2006), in an extensive study, consider the social role of eight marketplaces in the United Kingdom. They discover some degree of social interaction, although there are variations in the strength of social ties, level of social inclusion and exclusion, and use of the spaces by different groups (ibid.:vii). They conclude that marketplaces require four features to function well as social sites: features which attract visitors, opportunities to linger, good access to the marketplaces, and an active and engaged community of traders (ibid.:viii). Watson (2009) further develops the 2006 study, digging deeper into the multiple types of socialities present in marketplaces. People can „rub along‟ (ibid.:1581); they enter limited encounters where they acknowledge one another through a passing glance, see and are seen, and share embodied spaces (ibid.:1581). These cursory experiences hinder the withdrawal into the self or private space (ibid.). The care of marginalized and excluded individuals, such as the elderly and disabled, is performed in marketplaces too; marketplaces produce „inclusive sociality‟ (ibid.:15841585). Marketplace „theatre and performance‟ denote the ways traders use banter, playful speech, and pitching to portray themselves as amusing performers, and lure customers in (ibid.:1584-1585). Marketplaces are also sites of cross cultural relationships and associations that mediate difference (ibid.:1585-1589). Diverse categories of people come into contact in marketplaces; marketplaces are spaces of commingling and meeting of strangers, and of mediating ethnic, class, and gender differences among heterogeneous groups (ibid.). In this thesis, I expand this research on marketplace socialities by investigating how the rhythms of Bedok Market affect the customer-customer, hawker-customer, 17 and hawker-hawker relationships there. Like Watson (2009), I contend that the marketplace is a site of multiple socialities; a range of ties thrive, and I delineate the meanings and behaviours that animate it. I deviate from Chia (2010/2011) because I am not interested in a spatial and geographical perspective on the relationship between consumption practices and neighbourhood socialities, or in the notion of place-making. Furthermore, Lui (2008) and Chia (2010/2011) are overwhelmingly positive and uncritical when they explicate how the qualities of the marketplace influence the kinds of relationships found there. The bonds among several groups of people in the marketplace – buyers, sellers, friends, neighbours, and employees – are portrayed as being affirmative and unproblematic. The reverse is true for the ties forged in the supermarket. In contrast, I turn a discerning eye to the range of socialities in Bedok Market. I tease out the politics and contradictions that go into the creation, negotiation, and annulment of ties. I allow for the possibility that bonds are not always cordial or harmonious, and that they may not build (neighbourhood) communities. Moreover, I employ Zelizer‟s (2005; 2012) relational work concept to make sense of how ambiguous relationships are relationally worked out, marked by boundaries, and matched with relevant economic transactions, exchange media, and negotiated meanings. In this sense, these relationships are not merely forms of sociality, but interweave economics and sociability. 1.4.2. Performance In Chapter 4, I seek to add to the cultural and economic sociology literature by comprehending transactions in Bedok Market through Goffman‟s dramaturgical terminology. Some research on buying and selling transactions in marketplaces apprehend these exchanges through the performative paradigm of Goffman and other 18 theorists who have expounded on his ideas. In Shepherd‟s (2008) ethnography of Eastern Market in the United States, he deploys a dramaturgical pentad to understand the performative action that happens there. Using Burke‟s (1945) terminology, The scene (the Sunday flea market) is the site for acts (of not just selling and buying but…strolling, looking, chatting, browsing, setting up goods, assigning space, negotiating and gossiping) carried out by various agents (vendors, customers, market staff, merchants, farmers and observers). The agency (how acts are done) of these agents varies, as does the purpose (the why of these actions). (Shepherd, 2008:16; emphasis his) Discussing the many reasons why different agents participate in the drama of „this particular market‟ (ibid.; emphasis his), and the manners in which they do so – „who does what, how they do this, and why they do this‟ – unearths the complexity of human action and the place of ambiguity in the performance of everyday life (ibid.). Framing marketplaces as social processes, scenes of performance, play, and economic exchange (Kapchan, 1993:308-309 cited in Shepherd, 2008:15) also delineates how economic exchange is embedded in cultural practice. Cook (2008) and his contributors also capitalize on a dramaturgical framework in their inquiries into a variety of marketplaces. They engage „the materiality and sociality of marketplaces – i.e. of public exchanges spatially situated‟ (ibid.:2). They adopt the experiences and practices of marketplaces as their leap off point, because „something irreducible occurs in the public, face-to-face encounters of buyers and sellers, of observers and participants, in the terrestrial market‟ (ibid.). According to Cook (2008), the performance of value in economic life is one such „irreducible‟ entity. It is identified via individuals who occupy specific positions and sport identities vis-à-vis others. In marketplaces, „to encounter value is to encounter and interact with things and…others – to smell and feel the goods…observe those others milling about buying, looking, selling, dickering, joking – that is, to be 19 seen in public‟ (ibid.:7). In Goffmanian (1959; 1967; 1979) terms, individuals enter ritual practices or take on postures of typified identities when they interact face-toface. These representations are inseparable from exchange values and relations (Cook, 2008:7). In light of the age-old association between marketplaces and theatre (Agnew, 1986), it is pertinent to flesh out how exchanges are co-productions that rope in sellers, buyers, and the stage – all integral to the meaning and interpretation of economic performances (Cook, 2008:7). 1.4.3. Social memory In Chapter 5, I examine and contrast the stories that four groups relate vis-à-vis the disappearing marketplace. In doing so, I build upon work on the social memories of and nostalgia for vanishing/vanished spaces. For instance, Watson and Wells (2005) analyse the hollowing out of a London marketplace through the notion of nostalgia. Contemplating the nostalgia in people‟s narratives of an old, white, working class marketplace, the authors state that „a nostalgia for the halcyon days of the market when people came from far and wide to shop, and when there was a strong sense of community‟ has arisen (ibid.:17). Nonetheless, this is a romanticized rendition of the past, which masks the social division of the time, and pins the blame for the dissatisfaction towards the present on a new population of asylum seekers (ibid.). Davis (1979) would categorize the aforementioned form of nostalgia – the search for remembrances of past persons and places to give meaning to present and future ones (ibid.:vii) – as „simple nostalgia‟ (ibid.:16). Simple nostalgia positively evokes a lived past in relation to some negative feeling towards the present (ibid.:18). Harbouring affections for the past, individuals feel a sense of loss now that their personal past is annihilated. Although they yearn to return to the past, they acknowledge that this is impossible. In simple nostalgia, a picture of „The Beautiful 20 Past and Unattractive Present‟ does not deny the inconveniences of the past, but opts to play them down (ibid.:18). In Chapter 5, I probe into the notion of nostalgia among four groups of individuals. I also raise Davis‟ (1979) notion of „private nostalgia‟ – symbolic images from the past that stem from people‟s biography (ibid.:123) – where this is contextualized in „collective nostalgia‟ – situations where symbolic objects have a public, shared, and familiar character, such that they trigger waves of nostalgia in larger populations (ibid.:122). 1.5. Exploring the culture and social memories of the marketplace In Chapter 1, I have set up the conceptual framework of my thesis. I embark on a meaning-centred study of the micro-level culture of Bedok Market, and memories of the declining marketplace. I have emphasized the significance of an ethnography of a neighbourhood marketplace for the cultural and economic sociology, and social memory literature, and reviewed some concepts that I will use in the proceeding chapters. In Chapter 2, I lay out my methodological framework, one that entails multimethod and multi-sited research, and ruminations about my work with an interpreter. I also narrate the history of marketplaces in Singapore, and walk the reader through Bedok and my fieldsite. The story of Bedok Market commences in Chapter 3. I ponder over the types of socialities that the marketplace precipitates – customer-customer, hawker-customer, and hawker-hawker relationships – and the dynamics and nuances of each tie. I concur with Watson (2009:1579) that the „social‟ is a myriad of lived encounters and overlaps. In Bedok Market, a range of socialities proliferates because the „social‟ is conceived in „many different ways across a continuum of limited engagement…to “thick” engagement…with many possibilities in between‟ (ibid.:1581). 21 In Chapter 4, buying and selling interactions between hawkers and customers are understood in Goffman‟s (1959) performative terms. I analyse four dramaturgical ingredients that constitute the „front stage‟ (ibid.) of this theatre: the front stage set up; what hawkers call „the ability to talk‟; the differentiation of customers; and the negotiation of price. There are several ways of enacting these components; a range of dramaturgical techniques is exhibited. When this spectrum is kept to, transactions are devoid of tension. However, degrees of inclusion, exclusion, and asymmetry can drive transactions, and these exchanges then become rife with conflict. Thus, Chapter 3 and 4 picture Bedok Market as both an inclusive and exclusive playing field for hawkers and customers. The marketplace invites the expression of agency and creativity in negotiating sociality and buying and selling exchanges. It also provides a sense of liminality in navigating power relations that draw from cultural norms. In this sense, I posit that social organizations and meanings are not merely salient in Bedok Market, but are also created and realized in this space. In Chapter 5, I adopt a narrative stance to the tales that four categories of people verbalize vis-à-vis the disappearing marketplace. I postulate that multiple and heterogeneous narratives emerge, illustrating that the four groups (dis)engage marketplace culture, and notions of nostalgia and heritage to varying extents. These narratives also spell out the different positions and investments from which various groups of actors appropriate the marketplace. 22 Chapter 2. Methodological issues and a saunter through Bedok Market 2.1. Erecting a multi-method framework Bestor (2001) holds that a wide array of marketplaces has been documented ethnographically, and a trawl through the literature testifies to this. Maisel (1974) and Sherry (1990a; 1990b) pave the way for a rigorous naturalistic investigation of flea markets, and Belk et al.‟s (1988) interrogation of Red Mesa Swap Meet positions itself as a pilot study that spawned subsequent projects which delve into second order marketing systems. MacGrath et al. (1993) capture the dynamics of buying and selling interactions, and the role of retailers and accompanying institutions in a farmers‟ market. Causey (2003) and Wherry (2006) add to the burgeoning literature with their ethnographies of buying and selling encounters between artisans and tourists in tourist marketplaces. The marketplaces which Shepherd (2008) and La Pradelle (2006) enter resist being reduced to a singular form – La Pradelle notes that Carpentras is a wholesale-truffle-street market. Depicting these as theatrical spaces, they employ dramaturgical and phenomenological angles to elicit the ways through which the drama – the scene, acts, agents, agency, and purpose (Burke, 1945) – of these marketplaces take shape. The aforementioned studies recruit a multi-method approach that uses qualitative methods – participant observation, interviews, photographs, and videos – to construct „thick descriptions‟ (Geertz, 1973) of the action that choreographs marketplaces. All, save for MacGrath et al. (1993) and Sherry (1990a; 1990b), confine their ethnographies to one marketplace; these other ethnographers conduct on- and off-site research, and venture into a number of spaces. Borrowing from the above authors, I adopted a multi-method framework that utilized these methods: 1) various types of participant observation; 2) „conversations 23 with a purpose‟ (Burgess, 1982); 3) semi-structured interviews with four groups (hawkers, customers, a member of the National Heritage Board (NHB) and a teacher who led a National Education Learning Journey5 to a marketplace, and heritage bloggers); and 4) written and pictorial materials from blogs, the local press, and NHB that were published from 2009 to 2013. In line with Bestor‟s (2004) method of touring Tsukiji Fish Market with different parties, I went on tours of Bedok Market, other wet and supermarkets, accompanied at times by an interpreter or what Edwards (1998) calls a „key informant‟, and reflected on the role of an interpreter as a co-constructer of data. In other words, my approach found a home among multi-sited studies. Transiting several spaces was imperative because, as Chapter 4 will bear out, the drama of buying and selling extends into these sites, and they are often the places where the knowledge of foods becomes embodied, is acquired and exercised. 2.2. Participant observation, tours, and ruminations on the role of an interpreter In January 2012, I conducted exploratory research, once a week, in Bedok Market to garner a sense of the buying and selling interactions that transpired between the hawkers and customers, identified potential key informants upon gauging the personalities of certain hawkers and the location of their stalls (stalls located next to a walkway were more spacious and amenable to observation), and built rapport with the hawkers and customers. If one reflects on my „intellectual autobiography‟ (Temple, 1997),6 one will comprehend why the cacophony of dialects, the rapid flow of interactions, and the dizzying variety of foods were a rude assault on my senses and 5 According to the Ministry of Education, Learning Journeys are „all trips out of schools which teachers and students embark on together to extend and enrich the educational experience. Besides helping to make real and concrete what has been learnt in schools, Learning Journeys will broaden the mental horizons of students and contribute to their total development.‟ Learning Journeys need to fulfil four criteria. They should instill pride in Singapore‟s achievements; help their participants understand the constraints, challenges and opportunities that Singapore faces; build confidence in Singapore‟s future; and highlight the point that Singapore is our home (http://www.ne.edu.sg/index.htm). 6 I lay out my „intellectual autobiography‟ (Temple, 1997) in relation to my research and the marketplace later in this section. 24 anthropological imagination. As an outsider to the marketplace, how was I to make sense of this „chaos‟? To alleviate this, I got my aunt, Jennifer, to bring me on tours of Bedok Market. She did, for a short period of time – from December 2011 to January 2012. Jennifer patronizes both wet and supermarkets, has a comprehensive stock of knowledge about foods, and could double up as an interpreter. Quickly, I was socialized into the „body cues‟ (Figuie and Bricas, 2010:179) or the „direct qualification procedures…which stimulate the sensory capacities of the subject to evaluate the physical characteristics of the product‟ when purchasing food. Phrased in another manner, my interpreter taught me how to „see, touch and smell fish, chicken and vegetables‟ in order to assess their freshness. During the tours, I sketched a mental map of Bedok Market in terms of the physical layout of the stalls and foods sold, the hawkers‟ personalities, and the flows of people and activity throughout the day. A map of the stalls is affixed to Appendix 2. I laboured to create a space and role for myself in which I could listen to conversations between the hawkers and customers. However, not only was it difficult to observe the hawkers without buying from them, but lingering at their stalls after purchasing invited curious stares from them and their neighbours. The hawkers monitored my actions closely, and I would learn repeatedly that the visibility of exchanges in the marketplace – a public and open space – meant that participants were attuned to one another‟s actions. Once, Jennifer was teaching me how to „see fish‟ at Lim‟s stall, and this aroused Lim‟s curiosity: „Girl, what are you doing? Learning how to see fish? Why?‟7 Jennifer revealed that I was a Masters student who was studying the wet market „for 7 Pseudonyms were used at the earliest point of the research – the transcription stage – and are still used throughout this thesis. 25 my project‟. Lim replied teasingly, „Your project? Come work for me during the weekends. I‟ll teach you how to see and sell fish.‟ We burst out in laughter, but in the next few days, I seriously considered his offer and decided to take it up. When I commenced „work‟ at Lim‟s, he decided that I should not be his assistant – „You‟re too educated to sell fish!‟ – but „stand in one corner and watch me do business‟. When neighbouring hawkers and customers asked why I was there, he informed them I was „learning how to do business and how to talk‟ – the tricks of the trade. He introduced me to his regulars, fellow hawkers and friends who sometimes chatted with him at his stall. Quite swiftly, Lim cast the role I would play – an observer and apprentice. Thus, an extensive period of observation began. I hung around his stall from February to September 2012, twice or thrice a week, from 4am to 12pm. I watched the buying and selling interactions and conversations between him, Ping (Lim‟s assistant) and their customers, and among the hawkers, and how they set up and closed their stall. I too discovered that I could occupy the role of a friend, regular or stroller – someone who walks through the marketplace, talking to and observing hawkers, but not always shopping. Jotted fieldnotes were recorded at the stalls or the adjacent hawker centre, and written up fully at home. Exchanges largely assumed an eclectic of languages – Hokkien, Teochew, Mandarin, Malay, and sputtering English. I entirely understood the interactions that occurred in Mandarin and English, but not those in the other mother tongues. Hence, whenever it was possible, I requested that the hawkers explain what just took place. My mother, Florence, joined me as an interpreter from June onwards, because Jennifer could no longer accompany me on my field trips. Soon, a few fishmongers wondered why I was at Lim‟s, and inquired about my mixed ethnic background. They presumed, based on my tanned skin, that I was Malay 26 but could not reconcile that with my ability to speak Mandarin.8 This presented me a point of entry to brief them about my research, share my biography, and obtain information about theirs. I was fortunate not to have to employ the snowballing method to recruit informants, as some hawkers were very eager to introduce themselves! Then, I developed my mental map of the marketplace into a chart of economic alliances and other socialities among the hawkers. During the period of participation observation, many customers and hawkers enquired about the relationship I shared with my key informants (Lim and Ping; Hakim, and his wife, Nina; Mei, her sister-in-law, Lian, and assistant, Wei; Lee; Hui, and her assistant, Tan; and Liao). I received numerous titles in jest.9 These communicated some sense of the parties that constituted the marketplace; what the hawkers made of my research; and the manners in which the relationships between the hawkers, customers, and I were forged. Besides observing how my key informants operated their businesses, I realized that I needed to grasp some of the hawkers‟ selling strategies to attain a richer 8 In Singapore, the state has categorized its citizenry into four ethnic groups – Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians or Others (CMIO). The people from each ethnic group are thought to speak a particular mother language. The Chinese speak Mandarin; the Malays speak Malay; and the Indians speak Tamil. Also, the people from each ethnic group are thought to have a particular skin tone. The Chinese are supposed to be fair; the Malays are supposed to be tanned; and the Indians are supposed to be dark. I have a mixed ethnic background, and am categorized as a Eurasian. However, I speak Mandarin quite fluently, and am tanned. This is why the hawkers initially thought I was Malay, but could not reconcile that with my ability to speak Mandarin. 9 During my observations, many hawkers and customers wondered, in a bemused fashion, if I was the daughter of my key informants; a secretary, because I was always seated at my key informants‟ stalls with my notebook and pencil; a tax collector who was secretly recording everything in her notebook so that she could give the information to the government, and this would translate into a jump in my key informants‟ personal income tax; a government official or health inspector who was there to check on the hawkers; a Straits Times reporter; a professor who „only knows how to study but cannot cook‟, inferred from my inability to differentiate vegetables (I could not differentiate small bitter gourds from avocadoes) when Hakim tested me on the names of his vegetables; an illicit girlfriend or lover; a secret agent sent by the hawkers‟ wives to spy on them; and a „poly[technic] student doing [a] project‟ – what they gleaned from my introduction of myself as a Masters student who was writing a thesis. Most of the time, I was (fondly) known as „that little sister‟ or „that NUS [National University of Singapore] student [who is] studying the market‟. The hawkers often used my identity as a conversation starter, and the titles they put forward pointed to a deepening friendship between the researcher and themselves. I progressed from the formal role of a student to participating in their jokes and being given diverse informal identities. 27 understanding of buying and selling dynamics. Hui, a fishmonger, frequently came over to Lim‟s to ask me how much his prawns and fish cost, their names, and the methods of cooking them. I was stumped and utterly clueless. When I visited her at her stall, she trained me to inform her customers of the prices of her fish. After she weighed the fish and named the price, I would pack the food, collect money and thank the customers. By June 2012, most of the hawkers knew that I was doing research. They asked one another what I was doing in the marketplace and saw me there quite frequently, scribbling in my notebook, even in the wee hours of the morning. I desired to observe at stalls other than Lim‟s, but felt tentative – what if he did not like me doing that? As much as I longed to move around the marketplace uninhibitedly, did my loyalty lie with this gatekeeper? To tread around this obstacle, I told Lim that I would like to „learn vegetables and chicken‟ but was most keen on „learning and buying fish‟ from him. In June 2012, Hakim (a vegetable seller) and Mei (a chicken seller) let me observe at their stalls. In July, I stationed myself at Liao‟s, a fishmonger, and occasionally went to Ting‟s, a vegetable seller, and Aziz‟s, a chicken seller. Lim and Liao are business partners, and Mei and Aziz are friends. I elected to observe the business partners and friends of my key informants because of the abovementioned issues of the researcher‟s loyalty, and an awareness that I was constantly being surveyed. My key informants could view the happenings at other stalls because of the open layout of the place, and the fact that they often wandered around and exchanged news with one another. Even as I watched the hawkers, I was too observed. Sometimes, I fretted that any mistake in the field could jeopardize my relationship with a particular key informant. 28 To briskly cultivate a sound body of knowledge about foods, in July 2012, I sought the assistance of another aunt, Lynnette, to bring me on tours of other wet and supermarkets. During these leisurely trips, Lynnette – an experienced shopper – imparted her knowledge of foods to me at my own pace. She also addressed questions about how she, a wet and supermarket patron, participated in the theatre of buying and selling in the wet market. Supermarket tours, furthermore, facilitated a juxtaposition of the sensory environments of the wet and supermarket: differences in the physical layout; the kinds of products sold and presentation of these; and the manners in which participants navigated the two spaces were thrown into sharp relief. From these, I compiled a glossy of the foods that my key informants sell, and this is attached to Appendix 7. In Appendix 8, the reader should find photographs of some scenes in Bedok Market. Despite Temple‟s (1997; 2002) lament that there exists a paucity of studies that flesh out the place of the interpreter in cross-cultural research, a few academics have contemplated the ways through which interpreters can be made visible (see Edwards, 1998; Neufeld et al., 2002; Riessman, 2000). Temple (1997) urges researchers who engage interpreters to ponder over the latter‟s role as co-constructors of data in the „empirical unfolding‟ (McHoul, 1982 cited in Temple, 1997:609) of techniques – reproduced practices that depend on a standardization of rules. Acknowledging that both the researcher‟s and interpreter‟s orientations are inseparable from data generation, researchers are encouraged to debate concepts, issues and differences with their counterparts, and lay out the perspectives from which they create texts (ibid.). Data construction, in this sense, is rooted not only in „double subjectivities‟ (Temple and Edwards, 2002), but in particular ontological, epistemological and knowledge positions (Temple, 1997). 29 To render explicit my mother‟s – Florence – part as an interpreter and coconstructer, and conduct observations „with‟ rather than „through‟ her (Edwards, 1998), I considered our „intellectual auto/biographies‟ (Temple, 1997).10 Prior to my research, I was outsider to the marketplace in various ways. I was middle-class (a postgraduate who spoke only English and Mandarin, and not dialect); young (most hawkers and customers were middle-aged or older); and sorely deficient in the knowledge of foods (ways of „seeing, smelling and touching‟ foods eluded me) and the knowledge of how to navigate this milieu, because I seldom shopped there. Luckily, Florence straddled two worlds – mine and the marketplace. Her intellectual biography positioned her as middle-class (she was well-educated but could speak dialect and Malay); middle-aged; and having been a housewife for decades, she was blessed with encyclopedic knowledge about foods, and the know-how of moving around the marketplace. To paraphrase Overing (1987:76, cited in Temple, 1997:610),11 she was familiar with the „“alien” framework of thought‟ which was grounded in an „“alien” set of principles‟ in the marketplace. From June to September 2012, Florence and I observed at the stalls and jotted our own fieldnotes. Every 30 minutes, we adjoined to a quiet corner to discuss our findings. Together, we laid out our lines of enquiry, clarified our ideas and sketched out possible issues to attend to before we resumed our observations. Indeed, Florence 10 Clark (1994:xi) would agree that it is paramount to flesh out the researcher‟s autobiography: „[because] interpreting any book depends heavily on knowledge or assumptions about its condition of production and the author‟s background, [Clark, 1994] narrates something of the diverse persons and agendas that first set [her] feet on the path to Kumasi Central Market. Theoretical discussions of “situated knowledge”, pioneered by Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding, now give high priority to [the] specifics of the author‟s positionality and location as key aspects of…intellectual work. Patricia Hill Collins further encourages writers to “use their own concrete positions as situated knower” (1990:17) by validating concrete experience and connection as the basis for knowledge claims in Black feminist thought.‟ 11 Overing (1987:76 cited in Temple, 1997:610) asserts that when accounts are translated into different languages, „it is not the “word”…[that] we should be anxious [about]; we should be concerned, instead, about an “alien” framework of thought which is based upon an “alien” set of universal principles in the particular social world that the speakers live in‟. 30 aided with my research design and data generation; she was a „key informant‟ who directed me to matters she deemed to be important in the research process (Edwards, 1998). Bringing my mother to the marketplace also allowed hawkers to assign me an identity other than that of a researcher and friend. I was someone‟s daughter, and getting acquainted with my family over time, hopefully, developed our ties beyond my notion of transitory hawker-customer relationships.12 In February 2013, I gained a firsthand experience of selling fish in Bedok Market for a week. Hui hired me to pack and sell fish the week before Chinese New Year – a period in which business was brisk and Hui was shorthanded – while she and Tan descaled and sliced their stock. Compelling me to perform the tricks of the trade subsequently enabled me to better understand the hawkers‟ explanations behind these tricks, and the ways that a stall was manned. In this way, the modes of research that I deployed in this ethnography were forms of action research too. My informants were not simply polled about their preferences and aspirations, but were also observed and interviewed while they engaged in real world decision making that impacted their lives and material welfare. Thus, participant observation and tours of wet and supermarkets permitted me to link theory to daily practices as they unfolded in Bedok Market. 2.3. Interviews and popular literature on the marketplace Throughout the period of observation, I struck up „conversations with a purpose‟ (Burgess, 1982), posing the hawkers simple but focused questions. Since such chats proceeded exchanges and activities, they evoked responses that were contextual and sometimes, vivid in detail. Still, endeavours to schedule in-depth, semi-structured interviews were greeted coldly. Two hawkers demanded to know 12 Refer to Chapter 3 for my definition of „transitory relationships‟, and for the ways in which many hawker-customer ties take the form of transitory bonds. 31 what exactly about their trade I was interested in. My answer, „How you do business and make friends,‟ was either confronted with caution („Why do you want to study my business? Do you want to set up a stall here? What if you take away my business?‟) or carelessly dismissed („There‟s nothing to learn in the marketplace. Doing business is just like that. You just sell. There‟re no tricks‟). Others claimed that they had no time to spare, and instructed me to ask a few questions everyday, while they went about their businesses. I did that with four hawkers and conversed with Mei‟s daughter, since Mei was not forthcoming and her daughter could speak on her behalf, having assisted at the stall during the weekend for many years. Of these five hawkers, two were my key informants. In November 2012, I executed in-depth, semi-structured interviews with four customers who patronize Bedok Market. They were middle-class, and boasted of a sophisticated corpus of knowledge about foods. Three were regulars of some hawkers, while one was not. They represented a segment of customers who are seasoned actors in the drama of buying and selling, and are reflexive about the different marketplace socialities; they were embedded in marketplace culture. In contrast, one interviewee, was not a regular to the wet market, had a scant body of knowledge about foods, and limited insights into the dramaturgical techniques of transactions. She expressed horror at shopping in the marketplace. Her account communicated the exclusionary nature of exchanges if one lacked the know-how of navigating the marketplace. In recent years, two groups have been articulate in voicing their views on the marketplace, even if they are not inhabitants of this space. In late November and December 2012, I interviewed five heritage bloggers for their memories of the marketplace as a vanishing entity. The bloggers had written about their experiences of the space, and I contacted them for an interview after reading their blog entries. I 32 conversed face-to-face with four bloggers, and conducted an e-mail interview with another. I collated their blog entries about the marketplace too. I also spoke with an NHB staff (Evan) who spearheaded the travelling exhibitions of the marketplace – a component of NHB‟s Community Heritage Project – as well as a teacher who facilitated a Learning Journey to a marketplace, as part of NHB‟s scheme of roping schools into this project. I reviewed an ebook about the marketplace that NHB staff released – Community Heritage Series II: Wet markets (NHB, 2012e) – along with materials pertaining to the project, and some newspaper articles that dated from 2009 to 2013.13 In my interview with Evan and Community Heritage Series II: Wet markets, NHB staff framed the wet market and other everyday, „traditional‟ and disappearing spaces like the provision shop and void deck, as „social‟, „heartland‟ or „communal heritage‟. I will unpack these terms in Chapter 5. These materials, fieldnotes, and interview data were subject to open coding and thematic analysis (Mason, 2002) as I read them several times to narrow my codes to a few umbrella notions that bridged the more specific codes. I double-fitted cases and concepts (Ragin and Amoroso, 2010) too, transiting back and forth between a review of the academic literature, data generation and interpretation. 2.4. A history of hawking and wet markets in Singapore The evolution of wet markets in Singapore overlaps with the historical regulation of hawking, and I segment this trajectory into three phases: mid nineteenth century to 1931; 1948 to the 1960s; and the period after the 1960s. A substantial portion of the burgeoning immigrant population in mid nineteenth century Singapore were street or itinerant peddlers (Yeo, 1989). Dialect clans and secret societies exerted 13 Refer to section 2.4. for an explanation of why I restricted the review of newspaper articles on the wet market to the stipulated time frame. 33 control over these peddlers (ibid.). The colonial government strove to secure control over the peddlers, but this culminated in a series of riots between the police and peddlers – the 1888 Verandah Riots are a shining example (Yeoh, 1996).14 Peddlers were construed as obstructions to traffic, sanitation, health and the law, and the early twentieth century witnessed a deluge of measures that sought to register, license, and discipline itinerant peddlers. Lim (2006) notes that the estranged relationship between the authorities and street hawkers (as these peddlers came to be officially labelled by the colonial government) was tenacious. From 1948 to 1959, street hawking was constructed as a problem. The 1948 and 1950 Annual Report by the Town Cleansing and Hawkers Department (TCHD) held hawking to be the „biggest single retarding factor‟ in their „unremitting efforts‟ to keep Singapore clean (Municipality of Singapore, TCHD, 1948:24). Hawkers had „no respect for law or order…obstruct[ing] the streets with their paraphernalia and stock-in-trade…causing serious difficulties to street cleansing and obstruction to pedestrian and wheeled traffic…litter[ing] the streets with decomposed foodstuff and refuse‟ (Report of the Hawkers Inquiry Commission, 1950:Appendix A(ii)). Moreover, hawkers prevented government officials from carrying out their duties (Lim, 2006) and incurred „extra public expense…for the removal of refuse on the streets, back lanes and from roadside drains when the money could [have] be[en] applied to a much better social purpose‟ (Report of the Hawkers Inquiry Commission, 1950:Appendix A(ii)). In turn, the general population were 14 A verandah or „five-foot-way‟, is „an open arcade or light-roofed gallery extending along the front of shophouses and tenement dwellings as a continuous walkway‟ (Yeoh, 1996:245). Verandahs were subject to clashing understandings of public and private space. The colonial government rendered them as public space, but the hawkers formulated creative purposes for them, using them as storage and hawking areas, social and entertainment spaces, and dumping grounds (ibid.:247-248). The colonial government passed the Municipal Ordinance IX of 1887, which empowered the authorities to remove „obstructions‟ that hindered public access to the verandahs (ibid.:250). Hawkers resisted this Act, and the Verandah Riots broke out from 20 to 22 February 1888 (ibid.). 34 portrayed as victims who, as a result of the activities of hawkers, suffered from smell and noise pollution, ill health, and poor sanitation in the city (Lim, 2006). Eventually, the 1950 Report culminated in an administrative framework that instilled „a more comprehensive licensing system; stricter control over hawkers; the deployment of a force of Hawker Inspectors; and [the] provision of proper hawker shelters‟ (ibid.:6061). In the late 1960s, the People‟s Action Party (PAP) government laboured to depict the city as modernized and developed (ibid.). The Hawker Centres Development Unit was set up in 1971 to relocate licensed hawkers into hawker centres and wet markets that were equipped with facilities for food preparation, cooking, and drainage (ibid.). In short, the streets were cleared in order to eliminate the problems that hawking yielded – pollution, street congestion, and poor sanitation (ibid.). At present, Singapore has approximately 101 markets/hawker centres, and these fall under the ownership of the National Environment Agency (NEA) as well as private managements (Ang, 2009). (Wet markets began to be privatized in 1990.) Wet markets are dispersed throughout the island, and I divide them into two categories according to their locations. First, marketplaces are located in „ethnic enclaves‟; they are „ethnic‟ marketplaces. Tekka Market is in Little India; Kreta Ayer Market is in Chinatown; and Geylang Serai Market is in Geylang. „Ethnic‟ marketplaces are framed as a component of the ethnic enclaves that they are found in, and are portrayed as tourist and heritage sites. Singapore Tourism Board (2012) deems Geylang Serai Market to be „a heritage marketplace‟ which „lies in the heart of the Singapore Malay community and has been recently remodeled to 35 embrace the rustic quality of the old Malay kampong15 houses‟. Sarna (2009), author of tourist guide book, Frommer’s Singapore day by day, implores tourists to explore Tekka Market as a part of the „Little India experience‟. Tour agencies such as Journeys organize tours of Tekka Market for tourists „who want a feel, if not taste, of the real Singapore‟ and „whole experience of being Singaporean‟ (Yong et al., 2009). City Discovery‟s „Good morning, ni hao Chinatown walking tour‟16 ushers tourists into Chinatown Complex, where they can „move their senses with the sights and sounds of a wet market and watch how locals hunt for the freshest bargain‟, as part of the „Chinatown adventure‟ (http://www.citydiscovery.com/singapore/tour.php?id=172). On another dimension, a 2012 Mediacorp production renders visual representation to the social networks that span between the hawkers and customers in Tekka Market. It traces the production, distribution and selling trajectories of foods, and underscores the different ethnicities and nationalities of the actors to position the marketplace as a cosmopolitan and transnational space. Marketplaces are also snuggly tucked away in residential estates; they form part of the neighbourhood precincts that the Housing Development Board (HDB) has built in major housing estates or new towns. There are two kinds of neighbourhood marketplaces in the town centres – standalone markets, and hawker centres-cummarkets. The first offers only fresh produce. Hawker centres-cum-markets comprise two sections – a hawker centre where cooked foods are sold, and a wet market section where market produce is found. Neighbourhood marketplaces are cast in a dissimilar fashion from „ethnic‟ marketplaces. As part of the neighbourhood precinct, neighbourhood marketplaces, 15 Kampong is the Malay word for „village‟. To translate, „Good morning, ni hao Chinatown walking tour‟ is „Good morning, how are you[?] Chinatown walking tour‟ in English. 16 36 void decks, and common corridors are designated to be everyday „social and functional spaces‟ which effectuate „neighbourly and community interactions‟ and provide amenities (Wong et al., 1985 [1997]). In short, neighbourhood marketplaces are residential marketplaces that are prosaic spaces of everyday life. Neighbourhood marketplaces continue to be subject to interventions from the government and private companies. In the past four years, a number of marketplaces have been closed, and there has been much disquiet over a perceived „disappearance‟ of the marketplaces. This is fuelled by four forces. First, the government has played an active role in (re)constructing wet markets: NEA has (re)opened certain wet markets and closed others. Periodically, it subjects selected marketplaces to upgrading and relocation. Increases in rent and the possible raising of food prices that ensue, too, have been associated with such top-down, structural actions. Second, the commercial food industry has witnessed a deluge of supermarkets and hypermarkets – potential competitors of the wet markets (Lim, 2011; Huang, 2012; Quek, 2011; 2012). Third, younger generations of Singaporeans are reluctant to continue their hawking family business; many older hawkers realize that their family businesses could cease to exist upon their retirement. Perhaps the most pressing force undergirding the vanishing of the marketplaces is the privatization of wet markets, which is epitomized by the Sheng Siong-HDB saga. In 2009, Sheng Siong, a major corporation that runs the Sheng Siong supermarket, took ownership of six wet markets, and planned to convert them into supermarkets. Although this scheme did not come to fruition, a public furore was unleashed, and often, this was fought out in the media. Hawkers and members of the public debated over what it meant for marketplaces to be assailed by a sudden and abrupt death. They were split along three camps: those who wanted to keep the wet 37 market and enumerated the disadvantages of the supermarket; those who preferred the supermarket to the wet market; and those who desired to let the wet market die out „naturally‟ over time. This incident too sparked off a deliberation over the gradual demise of the marketplace, and a journalist commented that the hawking trade was a „sunset industry‟ (Teo, 2012). In April 2013, similar concerns about a possible disappearance of the hawker centre emerged (Ee, 2013). It was these debates, concerns, and the unrest about the loss of the wet market that set me on my thesis journey. I desired to understand these issues better, as well as the everyday experiences of Singaporeans who still use the wet market. 2.5. A saunter through Bedok and the marketplace The region of Bedok encompasses Bedok, Siglap, Chai Chee, and Changi. The urbanization of Bedok began in 1967 (Vaithilingam, 1987:45). Prior to this, Bedok was covered with hills, secondary forests, and sea (ibid.:44). People resided in kampongs, and many worked on coconut plantations to make a living. Along the coast in Siglap, lived Malay fishermen who were descendants of the early settlers who came from the Indonesian islands (ibid.). Many Chinese farmers lived further inland, and reared chicken and pigs (ibid.). Chai Chee, Siglap, and Changi inhabitants had their own village and marketplace – spaces where people met and traded – but Bedok residents did not; Bedok lacked a central meeting point (ibid.). Bedok, Chai Chee, and Siglap entered an accelerated phase of development in 1967. Their landscapes were drastically modified as Bedok New Town17 took form. 17 All public housing estates are built-in planned new towns that follow a prototype model (Tan et al., 1985 cited in Chua, 1997:433). Spaces in a new town are planned spaces that are guided by this prototype and a geometrical order (Chua, 1997:433). In other words, these spaces abide by a functional hierarchy which matches the hierarchical distribution of activity nodes (ibid.). The activity hierarchy comprises a town centre, a neighbourhood centre, and a precinct (ibid.). The town centre is approximately the geographical centre of a new town; the neighbourhood centre is approximately the centre of a neighbourhood site; and the precinct is the centre of HDB blocks that encompass the precinct (Chua and Edwards, 1992:6). The level of goods and facilities in a new town is distributed 38 The hills were leveled and the sea was reclaimed (ibid.:45). Roads were constructed, and New Upper Changi Road cut through the steep terrain of Bedok (ibid.). The first high-rise HDB flats towered in the sky, and many kampong dwellers were re-housed in these buildings (ibid.). In anticipation of the 1976 General Election, the East Coast Group Representation Constituency (GRC)18 was formed, and the GRC boundaries of the Bedok division were drawn (ibid.:46). Bedok South Road marked the southern end of the constituency, and Bedok North Street 2 marked the northern end (ibid.). In 1973, Bedok Town Centre was developed and became the fifth new town in Singapore (Loh, 2009). Amenities such as wet and supermarkets, fast food joints, and the Mass Rapid Transportation (MRT) system sprang up. Bedok Town Centre underwent a second facelift in 1979. To serve a population of about 48 000, new cinemas, an indoor recreation system, and supermarkets were built. In addition, the Town Centre housed a marketplace with 170 fresh produce stalls, and an adjacent hawker centre with 72 cooked food stalls. This hawker centre-cum-wet market was known as Bedok Market. In 2012, Members of Parliament for East Coast GRC announced HDB‟s „Remarking Our Heartland‟ plans for the East Coast area (Ramesh, 2012). As the „Gateway to the East Coast‟ (ibid.), Bedok is to undergo major revamping in the next four years, and be transformed into a vibrant and rejuvenated hub (ibid.). The government conceives of the new Bedok as a well-designed town that will furnish its according to this functional hierarchy, with the highest order at the town centre (ibid.). Hawker centres and wet markets are usually situated in the neighbourhood centre (Chua, 1997:434). 18 Electoral divisions or constituencies are areas within Singapore that are demarcated by the Prime Minister for the purpose of parliamentary and presidential elections. There are two types of electoral divisions: Single Member Constituencies (SMCs) and Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs). The GRC is a larger constituency in terms of population size and physical area. A group of Members of Parliament (MPs) represents the interests of residents in the electoral division. At least one MP in a group representing a GRC must belong to a minority race (Malay, Indian, or Others). The GRC system is supposed to ensure that minority racial communities are represented in parliament. During an election, the registered electors of a GRC vote for a group of individuals to be their MPs (http://www.eld.gov.sg/elections_type_electoral.html). 39 residents with comprehensive facilities, greater convenience, and an enhanced living experience (ibid.). Bedok Town Centre will receive a new hawker centre, multi-storey car park as well as a new bus interchange, town plaza, and heritage corner. The new town will also be utilized for mixed development (ibid.). A large shopping centre – Bedok Mall – boasting of 35 000 square metres of commercial space, and a condominium with 475 private apartments, will be constructed (ibid.). Along Bedok North Street 1, an integrated community and sports centre will be erected, and this will contain a swimming complex, sports hall, tennis centre, and a community club (ibid.). To pen this ethnography, I sought a neighbourhood marketplace in Bedok Town Centre that did not display the characteristics of „ethnic‟ marketplaces. I was intrigued by an exploration of the subjective realities of marketplace inhabitants in a ubiquitous space, especially in terms of the socialities and drama of interactions that occurred there. A probe into the micro-level culture of a neighbourhood marketplace is timely as such spaces are currently (perceived to be) vanishing, and a flurry of narratives about this disappearance has surfaced. As a hawker centre-cum-wet market, Bedok Market embodies the above processes stunningly. Built in 1979, Bedok Market was upgraded in 2008, and most stalls operate from 4am to 1pm everyday, except on Mondays (NEA, 2012). As a neighbourhood wet market, Bedok Market is small in size, limited in scope, and involves local community relations. It is not a huge ethnic or commercial marketplace. Lodged in my neighbourhood, I started to shop in Bedok Market and three supermarkets nearby in 2011. Having resided in Bedok for 27 years, I frequent the new town daily, and am acquainted with residents-cum-customers who have 40 witnessed the town change over time. On top of having experienced some of these alterations myself, I am familiar with other marketplaces in Bedok. Varying in size, marketplaces such as Tekka Market are comprised of a hefty 248 stalls while smaller ones like Blk 267 Serangoon Avenue 3 Market have merely 20. Bedok Market has 114 stalls which deal in an assortment of goods: sundry; fresh, frozen and cooked foods; dried foods such as spices, condiments and eggs, noodles, and fruits. I elected to study hawkers who sold perishable foods – fresh chicken, fish, and vegetables19 – because these are staples for most people, and customers would have to go repeatedly to Bedok Market to obtain them; there were numerous opportunities to interrogate the range of relationships and the theatre of transactions that unfold. In Chapter 3, I lay out the dynamics of these socialities. 19 In Bedok Market, there are five stalls selling chicken, 14 stalls hawking fish, and seven stalls specializing in vegetables. 41 Chapter 3. Exploring socialities in Bedok Market 3.1. Framing Bedok Market as a social space I begin the story of the micro-level culture of Bedok Market by looking at the social relationships in this space. I explore customer-customer, hawker-customer, and hawker-hawker socialities, and the characteristics of each. In line with Watson (2009:1579), I understand the „social‟ to be a „multiplicity of lived encounters and connections‟ in the marketplace. I propose that the rhythms of Bedok Market give rise to a range of socialities in this space. Customers enter fleeting relationships with one another. Those who are friends act like strangers in the marketplace, and overturn conventional norms of friendship. Customers who do not know one another outside Bedok Market make random and unrenewable contacts with a body of heterogeneous others. In these fleeting ties, unknown buyers practise „civil inattention‟ (Goffman, 1963) or form sporadic and random, but utilitarian, alliances against unfamiliar hawkers. Their loyalty lies with fellow unknown customers who may seek the common aim of obtaining a good buy. Buying and selling encounters between hawkers and customers portray Zelizer‟s (2005; 2012) concept of „relational work‟ poignantly. Such instances are meaningful, dynamic, and negotiated processes through which the two parties define the type of relationship that they share, and specify the relevant economic transactions, media of exchange, and negotiated meanings (ibid.) which match the relationship at hand. In this sense, relational work between hawkers and customers goes beyond the creation of a marketplace sociality. It is relational work – interactional endeavours to create, negotiate, and block relationships that (may not) accumulate in economic or business objectives (Bandelj, 2012:178). 42 I advance that, in Bedok Market, hawkers and customers participate in a process of relational work to engender transitory ties – bonds that are ephemeral and economically motivated, uphold a feeling of anonymity, and produce gratuitous sociability via conversations. Hawkers erect boundaries to demarcate these impersonal ties from more intimate ones, and delimit the buying and selling encounter to a business transaction. Customers sometimes overstep the line; in relational work, there are asymmetries in the personal information disclosed, and the power to probe into each other‟s lives. Still, passing moments of deeper intimacy can emerge in transitory bonds, and I delve into some cases. Among themselves, hawkers partake in three kinds of socialities. Familial relationships, and other structural factors that are particular to the marketplace, push hawkers into the trade. Economic partnerships keep businesses running, and are also forged, negotiated, and terminated through a process of relational work. Hawkers enter „anchored personal relationships‟ (Morrill and Snow, 2005) too. These bonds are long-lasting, and involve the exchange of some information about one another‟s lives and families. Nonetheless, anchored personal relationships are confined to Bedok Market, and only a restricted amount of private information is released. Some anchored personal relationships are intimate and pleasant, but others are not. I conclude Chapter 3 by exploring the dynamics among hawkers who are alienated from one another, where alienated ties are marked by distance and a simmering undercurrent of hostility. 3.2. Customer-customer socialities: Fleeting relationships Lui (2008:12) detects a communal aspect to grocery shopping; marketplaces are socializing spaces for customers who are also friends. In Hong Kong, mothers who have sent their children to school and elderly members who have completed their 43 morning exercise, gather in small groups to patronize Cheung Fat Market. A network of friendships surface among these groups amidst the daily routine of shopping, where individuals trade information about prices, recipes, household chores and children, and help one another select the best foods. Such shoppers are personally known to one another outside the marketplace – they are usually friends or neighbours – and shopping invigorates their relationships. Contrary to Lui‟s (2008) finding, in Bedok Market, customers who know one another do not replicate or strengthen their ties through shopping ventures. Rather, friends morph into strangers and forge fleeting relationships. Sally, Jessica, and Madeline shop alone, claiming that marketing is an activity that needs to be executed briskly and without hassle. They subscribe to a common understanding that housewives do not go to Bedok Market to socialize but to conduct their household duties: In the market, you‟ve a mission – do your marketing! Your children are at home waiting, so you‟ve no time! The same goes for neighbours who have grandchildren. We‟ll stop for a cup of tea with them in their homes. Chat more then, but not now. (Sally) My customer-interviewees seldom run into their friends in Bedok Market. If they do, some interactions with these familiars involve no spoken exchanges; friends simply smile politely or wave but do not engage one another further. Other interactions involve an exchange of greetings or quick conversations about everyday happenings: When I see the neighbours, I say hello, exchange a few words and go. “How are you? What are you buying?” If there‟s time, ask about the children and daily life. [Interactions are] quite short because we‟ve not arranged for a time to meet and chat. (Jessica) 44 Hence, conventions of friendship are not fulfilled in Bedok Market but resume outside it. Ties among familiars are instead, akin to fleeting relationships. During chance meetings, friends are treated like strangers and may not converse with one another. Meetings are unscheduled and brief, and have little enduring significance; they are transient or momentary encounters that are free of commitment. Fleeting relationships among familiars are reminiscent of the „generalized friendship‟ (La Pradelle, 2006) among familiars in Carpentras Market. Relations in Carpentras Market occasion a „homogeneous field of interacquaintances in which the distinction between one‟s own kin…and others becomes blurred‟ (ibid.:207). Close friends and relatives are regarded lightly, while strangers transform into familiars. An otherwise distant or formal tie is embraced in a state of „warm affability‟ without a genuine transformation, and a personal relationship is recast as an institutional or professional one (ibid.) – this is the essence of generalized friendship. Moreover, there is no obligation to reproduce private ties (ibid.:202). After familiars display the necessary and minimal acts of affection, they leave one another there and move along (ibid.:203). The absence of conversation and concern for others is inconsequential, because friends are not in Bedok Market to chat but perform chores. Furthermore, interactions are unplanned. Because the exchanges may not have occurred and nothing compels familiars to participate in them, friends do not interact in accordance with conventions, and imbue encounters with a tone of overt, superficial conviviality (ibid.:202). In these ways, personal relationships are reshaped as distant ties. In Bedok Market, my customer-interviewees also meet others they do not personally know. These encounters comprise brief contacts with unrelated persons of whom my customer-interviewees have no foreknowledge, and whom my customer- 45 interviewees may not see again. Fleeting ties among unknown buyers include highly random and singular contacts with a number of heterogeneous others. La Pradelle (2006:24) notes that individuals visit Carpentras Market in order to „meet lots of people‟; the point is to greet the greatest possible number of people, known or unknown to a person (ibid.:205). In an instant, individuals can establish apparently intimate relationships with strangers (ibid.:203); unknown buyers are treated as familiars, as generalized friendships are formed in Carpentras Market. Verbal exchanges foster such „close‟ associations in a performative manner (ibid.). Without hesitating, people begin conversations with unknown customers or people who they recall having noticed one day at a stall (ibid.). In a public – and ostentatious – display of friendship, unknown buyers are acquainted almost immediately, dispense with preliminaries – as if they already knew one another – or resume the thread of a conversation that was disrupted the week before (ibid.:204). However, the dynamics of generalized friendship among a number of diverse unknown customers do not play out among strangers who cross paths in Bedok Market. Rather than enacting the qualities of La Pradelle‟s (2006) concept of generalized friendship, my customer-interviewees ignore unknown buyers because „I don‟t know them, so why should I talk to them? Don‟t be a busybody‟ (Charlotte). „They do their own things and I do mine. What they do is none of my business‟ (Madeline). Otherwise, my customer-interviewees exercise „civil inattention‟ (Goffman, 1963). They endow unknown customers with sufficient visual attention to communicate their awareness of the others‟ presence, while simultaneously withdrawing their attention to convey that their counterparts do not represent an object of peculiar curiosity (ibid.:83-84). Watson (2009) reflects these dynamics succinctly in her notion of „rubbing along‟. Social subjects „rub along‟ or have „limited 46 encounter[s]…where [there is] recognition of different others through a glance or gaze, seeing and being seen, sharing embodied spaces…in talk or silence‟ (ibid.:1581). If unknown buyers interact with one another in Bedok Market, it is to offer practical but provisional forms of help. Customers put across specifically targeted and limited requests for mundane assistance („Do you know how much the fish costs at the next stall?‟) which are met with statements of practical help („Don‟t pick the fish on the tray. The stock below is fresher.‟). In these question-response type of encounters, unknown customers band together against the hawkers in a sporadic and random fashion. They exchange knowledge about food in passing with nearly any other customer, for the utilitarian goal of making the best purchase. Such bands form quickly and spontaneously, but also disperse as swiftly. Unknown buyers „gang up‟ against hawkers who they do not patronize frequently or know well; these unknowns are not regular customers of the hawkers. The loyalty of such customers lies with one another – fellow unknown buyers who seek to cut favourable deals – rather than with hawkers who they barely know. This may be because the buyers do not trust unfamiliar hawkers, and opt to work, temporarily, with unknown customers who may be motivated by the similar interest of cutting a good deal. Regular customers of a hawker, on the other hand, rarely „gang up‟ with unknown buyers and other regulars against the hawker. Regulars are faithful to their hawkers, rather than unfamiliar customers and other regulars. They are often located in what I call transitory hawker-customer relationships, and I detail the nuances of such ties now. 47 3.3. Hawker-customer relationships: Transitory relationships In Bedok Market, the process of relational work starts with the definition of ambiguous social ties for economic purposes; relational work is not merely a kind of sociality, but pertains to activities that have economic or business objectives (Bandelj, 2012:178). As hawkers and customers transact with each other, they endeavour to specify the type of relationship that they share. When hawkers sell their wares, they reveal that remembering their customers‟ food preferences and marketing practices are essential in „doing business‟, and in establishing relationships with their customers. Hakim remarks that „when you‟re selling, remember who your customers are and what they like‟. Hawkers commit to memory their regulars‟ appearance and shopping habits: Lian tells me about a time a maid forgot to collect her chicken. “A maid ordered a chicken but didn‟t collect it…I know the female boss shops at Sheng Siong or FairPrice for vegetables, so I made a round in FairPrice. I didn‟t see her. I saw her in Sheng Siong. I asked why she didn‟t collect her chicken. She said, „I bought chicken? My maid must have bought it but forgot to collect it.‟ I said, „Never mind. I brought the chicken around to look for you.‟” (Fieldnotes, 2 June 2012) Hawkers also remember their regulars‟ (dis)likes and bits of information about their family: A lady comes to Lim‟s stall. He immediately hands her two transparent plastic bags to put her hands into. I remember her from an interaction in April. Lim had explained that she does not like to touch the fish with her bare hands; she says it is smelly and dirty. The lady picks two golden trevallies gingerly, and asks for 1kg of prawns. Lim asks if she wants parang. He says that parang is good for frying, and that her sister-in-law always buys parang from him. She looks hesitant, glancing at it but does not say anything. Lim waits. She consents. While Lim is cutting the parang, he informs her that her sister-in-law was here. Lim tells her that her sister-in-law is dolled up and having breakfast at the hawker centre, so he guesses that her sister-in-law may be going for her dance class. (Fieldnotes, 30 June 2012) 48 The above suggests that when customers engage in the domestic act of shopping in public, they unveil a little of themselves. They expose their purchases to the hawkers and fellow customers, and the hawkers also dole out scraps of personal information about the customers and hawkers themselves. To the extent that common knowledge and recognizable indicators of the self are revealed, private and public selves interpenetrate in hawker-customer relationships. Nevertheless, in such ties, a sense of anonymity persists. Only nuggets of customers‟ private lives are broadcast, and such sharing is pegged at a minimal level. Thus, during transactions, hawkers and customers act as friends without being familiar with each other‟s biography. As customers continue to create and define the hawker-customer tie through relational work, they also adhere to this touch of anonymity when interacting with the hawkers. The latter remain nameless and faceless. My customer-interviewees fared poorly when I asked them to describe their hawkers‟ appearance, name and personality. They only managed fragments of information about their hawkers – „I buy from that singlet uncle‟ (Charlotte); „I go to the man opposite the hawker centre. Ya, there are so many stalls opposite but I don‟t know how to describe him. He‟s just young‟ (Madeline); „I go to the fishmonger in the second row. Or is it the first? Very nice man, friendly, tall, good looking‟ (Sally). Instead, the hawkers‟ foods, stall presentation, and prices stick with customers. This resonates with Jessica, who prefers to „look-see‟ instead of patronize a particular stall regularly, and pays little attention to the hawkers‟ identity: I don‟t really remember who the hawkers are because I move around the market. I‟m attracted by the display – is the fish big, very meaty, plentiful, fresh? Ask the price roughly, go to another stall. Like the fish at one stall is so small and few. That stall looks dark and dirty. I don‟t stop. Next door, the stall has more fish and variety. Fresh but very expensive! Whether the hawkercustomer relationship matters when buying food? Not much. If you feel you got a good deal, you don‟t need to get along or know who the fellow is. Just buy and go. (Jessica) 49 In these senses, I propose that, through the process of relational work, hawkers and customers form and negotiate transitory relationships. These ties are momentary and short-lived. They are also anonymous, rather impersonal, calculated or economically oriented. Hawkers remember and announce bits of information about their customers in order to carry out the economic transactions of buying and selling, and to encourage repeat patronage. Likewise, customers are strategic in establishing hawker-customer bonds; they deploy a stock of knowledge about food to assess the hawkers‟ wares, before deciding whether to patronize them. Transitory ties are also infused with positive emotions and generate sociability. Madeline enjoys the „entertaining antics‟ that Lim pitches at his stall, infusing a burst of pleasure into transactions: Your fishmonger [Lim] has a sweet mouth. He‟s polite. He knows how to entertain you; he wishes you good morning and hello! Then he says, “Oh, I got the grouper for you,” because he knows I want it. He knows how to talk, joke and sell; he‟s very clever and good at the business. He laughs, smiles, makes you laugh. Very fun listening to him talk! He‟s like a radio deejay! (Madeline) During my observations, I noticed that many interactions are invigorated by jokes – another means of breeding sociability and fun, and of maintaining transitory bonds through relational work. Lim frequently teases the maids with romantic overtones – „Are you single? Going to marry Ping tomorrow right?‟; „You want ice or ai (love in Mandarin)? Cannot anyhow say you want ai or people will be mistaken and chase you!‟20 Hakim issues generic names to the maids and female customers – 20 Ice rhymes with the Mandarin word „ai‟, so Lim teases the maids by substituting their request for ice with a desire for „ai‟ or love. 50 „Today you‟re Maria. Tomorrow, you‟re Mona Lisa. When you‟re young, you‟re Ah Hua. When you‟re old, you‟re Ah Ma. Right, Maria?‟21 Interactions swirl around a range of conversational topics – a technique of forging and sustaining transitory relationships – and inject (pseudo)intimacy into hawker-customer bonds. Participants speak about the weather; compliment or tease one another; inquire into one another‟s health, family and everyday life; comment on the happenings in Bedok Market; ask about neighbouring hawkers, and so on: Hakim turns to attend to a lady. She is wearing a floral sundress, has bunned her hair, and is made up. Hakim and his wife, Nina, look admiringly at her. Nina says, “Miss, you‟re so pretty! Like [an] SIA girl!”22 The lady blushes. She tells Hakim, “You also got a pretty wife!” (Fieldnotes, 26 May 2012) An Indian lady comes to Nina‟s. Nina remarks that she has not come to her stall for a long time. The lady agrees, and says that all her children have grown up, “My boy has graduated from ITE.23 My second child‟s married and planning for a child.” Nina says that two of her three sons are married, and Khairul is getting married next year. (Fieldnotes, 2 August 2012) The myriad of subject matters – in Bedok Market, everyone converses about everything and nothing – directs us to the gratuitousness of conversations. Devoid of a concrete object, talk is not engaged in for the sake of its content. Talk seeks no end but purely the pleasure of conversing and conviviality. Conversations may also be a strategy of relational work; they sustain transitory hawker-customer relationships by diffusing potential tensions between buyers and sellers. Thus, gratuitous talk can be interpreted as a strategic and intentional performance of relational work, at least, on the hawkers‟ part. The preceding extracts underline the brevity of hawker-customer interactions too. Conversations and gratuitous sociability commence at the start of an interaction 21 „Hua‟ is flower in Mandarin, and „Ah Hua‟ can be a name for a young woman, who is likened to a blossoming flower. „Ah Ma‟ is Grandma in Mandarin. 22 SIA stands for Singapore Airlines. An SIA girl is an air stewardess who works for the Singapore Airlines. 23 ITE refers to Institute of Technical Education, and is a form of post-secondary school education. 51 and cease when it ends. (An exchange usually lasts for five minutes or less.) Transitory hawker-customer bonds are ephemeral or short-lived relationships of sociability with a high number of actors „known‟ to varying and limited degrees. Talk and conviviality dissipate when customers exit Bedok Market; transitory ties are confined to a public setting. Finally, gratuitous marketplace talk militates against the linguistic conventions of a conversation. They have no beginning or end, and participants often pick up the thread of a conversation that was interrupted during previous transactions. Exchanges are characterized by a freedom of tone. (New) participants dispense with preliminaries, as if they already know one another. They transit effortlessly from one subject to another, abandon conversations midway, and goad others to listen to their exchanges and chip in: A Malay man comes to Hakim‟s stall, and they talk about politics in Indonesia. Hakim drops a few phrases in Bahasa Indonesia. The topic immediately switches to Hakim‟s linguistic abilities. Man, in surprise: You can speak Bahasa Indonesia? Hakim: English, Tamil, Hokkien, Mandarin, Tagalog also! Many languages. Man: Greet me in Mandarin? Hakim [in Mandarin]: Ni hao ma? Jin tian de cai hen xin xian. [How are you? Today‟s vegetables are very fresh.] An Indian lady overhears and asks Hakim to speak Tamil. Hakim [in Tamil]: Va akkam! [Hello!] Another lady chips in: How about Hokkien? Hakim [in Hokkien]: Hoh boh! Le ai si mi? [How are you? What do you want?] As other customers test Hakim‟s linguistic abilities, the Malay man leaves. Hakim changes the topic. He asks the Malay man, who moves to leave, how his trip to Australia was, knowing that the man had just returned. The man abandons the conversation, saying that he will chat next time. (Fieldnotes, 6 July 2012) 52 It is interesting to consider how some hawkers mark boundaries around hawker-customer bonds. Paradoxically, some insist „it is unnecessary to talk in the market‟. Aziz does not converse much because „customers want their chickens fast. If you talk, the fellow behind is unhappy because she has to wait for you to finish‟. He quips that „in the market, you want to do business, not make friends. You want their money, not talk‟. More significantly, both the hawkers and customers have some potential to infiltrate each other‟s private worlds; transitory relationships have the ability to become intrusive. To arrest possible transgressions, hawkers erect fences around the hawker-customer tie. Truly, the relational work done between hawkers and customers weaves in boundary-making, especially if the relationship begins to resemble other bonds that have deleterious consequences for the parties involved (Zelizer, 2012:152). To the extent that transitory and impersonal hawker-customer ties are confused with personal relationships, and are weighty in their consequences, hawkers and customers take pains to specify what their relationship is and is not (ibid.). Relational work is not solely about the fostering, sustenance, and negotiation of bonds, but the differentiation and blocking of ties as well (Zelizer, 2005:35). The concept magnifies the labour that people invest in defining and disciplining relationships (ibid.:34). Hui refrains from overly personal exchanges with her customers, because a line that separates the private and public selves is essential in „doing business‟. Bandelj (2012:182) mentions the symbolic cultural dimension of relational work: meaning-making processes are conjoined with practices or behaviours that affirm these meanings. In this way, Hui engages in „cultural boundary work‟ (Zelizer, 2012:182) to define the hawker-customer bond as transitory, and hawker-customer 53 buying and selling interactions as business transactions. Foods, money, and (personal) information about the self make up the exchange media of these transactions: I‟ve no need to know about customers‟ personal lives, their children…What‟s the advantage of knowing such things? Customers will think you‟re a busybody. A hawker saw my customer and a young man. She asked me, “Is this her husband or younger brother?” “How will I know?” “She‟s been buying from you for so long and you never bothered asking?” This is a personal matter, so why should I ask? She‟ll not like it. If you ask today, people will not buy from you tomorrow because you‟re a busybody. I told this hawker not to ask customers such things. Sometimes the lady will say, “I‟ll ask my husband to get the fish from you.” Then you‟ll know that man‟s her husband. (Hui) However, customers sometimes cross the boundary that protects the hawkers‟ private self. In hawker-customer relationships, there exist asymmetries in the personal knowledge about each other, and the power to look into each other‟s lives. These inequalities allude to power differences between two groups in the erection and maintenance of boundaries. Relational work is not always reciprocal. Nor does the power aspect of relational work necessarily generate positive outcomes or harmonious bonds; relational work can give birth to stark information asymmetries and strained ties (Bandelj, 2012:189). Such information inequalities also influence the ways through which conversations transpire, and reinforce the idea of the marketplace as a site that structures relationships and talk: Sometimes customers ask, “Miss, are you married? Do you have children?” “Yes. I‟ve three adult children.” If customers want to be busybodies, let them. The problem is they can ask us but we cannot ask them. One customer asked, “Is Tan your husband?” “No.” “Hui, you‟re very humorous. Tan‟s your husband but you don‟t want to admit it.” She ran to the yong tau foo hawker to check. She returned, “Hui, you‟re right. Tan‟s not your husband.” I said he isn‟t. She even wanted to know this! (Hui) The above brings out the conscientious efforts that hawkers undertake to delimit transitory bonds, and the ability of customers to upset such attempts. Nevertheless, moments of deeper intimacy that reveal private knowledge about the 54 actors can emerge, albeit under certain conditions. They must not be consciously elicited but volunteered spontaneously in a situation that requires an explanation for a person‟s behaviour: Halfway through my interview with Lee at his stall, a lady comes. I stop, half annoyed at the constant interruptions. She looks at Lee‟s fish, and he fills a big plastic bag. She offers him S$50 but he refuses. I‟m surprised; I‟ve never seen Lee refuse money. After she leaves, I ask him why. Lee says he‟s very familiar with her. She had a younger brother who passed away. She told Lee her brother had slipped in the bathroom…After sending him to Changi Hospital, the doctor said he had no hope. Lee knows she will need money for the funeral, and cannot bear to charge her for the fish. I am touched by Lee‟s kindness, but also intrigued by what sparked this extended storytelling – an „interruption‟ that required an explanation for Lee‟s behaviour. (Fieldnotes, 31 October 2012) Also, private information is unearthed when Jessica ran into a hawker she used to patronize regularly but has not seen for a few years now. Interactions mimic confidences when amicable transitory relationships are renewed after a period of absence, where such encounters occur through sheer chance: The mother used to sell roast duck everyday, then the son took over. He was drawing a four figure income24 and left his job! The wife only helps during the weekend. She‟s working in Maybank! I haven‟t bought from them in some time. One Saturday I was buying pork and chicken and ran into her. At first she couldn‟t recognize me. I asked her if she was still selling – no. She told me she was sick and bedridden the last few years. But she didn‟t want to give up the stall. So her son took over, and she doesn‟t come anymore. (Jessica) As evidenced, personal information takes the form of self-contained and complete narratives. Unlike conversations that usually transpire among hawkers and customers, personal stories follow the linguistic standards of talk. They have a beginning and an end. They are finished in one sitting and discontinued in subsequent interactions. They are not marked by a liberal tone; participants are focused on a single subject matter (why Jessica‟s hawkers stopped hawking) or the circumstances 24 By „four-figure income‟, I believe that Jessica means that her hawker‟s son was drawing at least a few thousand dollars every month in his previous job. He left his job to take over his mother‟s stall. 55 at hand (why Lee gave fish to his customer free-of-charge). Eavesdropping is frowned upon; conversations are conducted somewhat out of earshot and others are not encouraged to chip in. Although stories disclose some knowledge about the narrator‟s personal life, such information is fragmentary. The listener cannot construct a linear or full life trajectory of the narrator, however she may desire to: Sometimes I don‟t see the roast pork man. I asked him, “I thought you‟re not selling anymore. I saw an old uncle.” “That‟s my father. I went on a business trip.” “What business trip?” “I‟ve been selling Tupperware for several years. Want to expand the business.” I was interested in why then he‟s selling pork, but he stopped talking. Nowadays we don‟t talk much. He‟ll ask what I want, then I‟ll leave. I never found out why he‟s hawking when he has his own business. (Sally) When hawkers do not share personal information, some customers observe hawker-hawker exchanges and make cursory inferences about the hawkers‟ background and family. Charlotte „know[s] the pork uncle runs a family business. I didn‟t ask, but their faces all look alike. Must all come from the same family‟. 3.4. Hawker-hawker socialities 3.4.1. Familial relationships Familial ties are central in elucidating why many hawkers enter the trade. They make up what Morales (2009) calls „structural factors‟ – external circumstances beyond one‟s control such as neighbourhood characteristics, interpersonal relationships among family members, and truncated labour market opportunities – that propel vendors to hawk. In Bedok Market, becoming a hawker is a response to several structural conditions that are particular to the marketplace. Hawking is usually a family business that has been inherited through the generations: Lee started selling fish with his father in Joo Chiat Market when he was nine. This continued until he was about 13 or 14. He completed secondary school, and served National Service as a cook. He returned to Joo Chiat Market. He 56 says that fishmongering is a family business; it started with his grandfather in China, who migrated to Singapore in the 1910s. It was passed down to his parents and him. Three generations have sold fish but the trade is going to stop with Lee. (Fieldnotes, 31 October 2012) In the 1960s, Aziz‟s father was a hawker selling beef. When Aziz was in primary school, he helped during the weekend…When his father was old, he told his children, “One of you take over the business.” Either Aziz‟s younger brother or Aziz was expected to take over. Aziz did, in 1984 or 1985. After this, he took an administrative job, and remained there for 12 years before reentering the trade. He helped at a friend‟s chicken stall. He decided to sell chicken on his own, and rented a stall in Bedok Market. (Fieldnotes, 19 October 2012) The preceding snapshots resonate with Morales‟ (1993:82) insight – the option to hawk is grafted into the structure of opportunities found in a certain household. Such opportunities include childhood socialization into the trade in the marketplace itself. At a tender age, many hawkers learned the ropes by selling foods in various marketplaces alongside their parents. Interpersonal relationships among family members are also fundamental in pulling (younger) hawkers into the trade, as Aziz‟s biography illuminates. Yet, hawking is not only tied to familial socialities, but to a moral structure of family obligation, hardship, and filial piety. These values are integral in alleviating the past and present difficulties of the trade. Lee chose to help his mother because the latter was having an arduous time coping with impolite customers, fatigue from the manual labour invested in setting up the stall, and an ill-tempered husband-cum-boss. Hence, the familial structure of marketplace employment assuages the unpleasant character of buying and selling: Selling fish was really not easy. I was able to endure hardship but my siblings weren‟t. My mother had a difficult time selling fish with my father, having to deal with his bad temper, rude customers, the tiredness of setting up the stall everyday…After National Service, my friend and I got cook positions. But I saw how hard it was for my mother, and decided to help so she didn‟t have to suffer so much. (Lee) 57 Upper limits to the entry into and advancement in formal employment encourage hawking (Morales, 2009). These include a weak command of the English language, and the lack of work experience in the formal sector: I can‟t read or write English. I don‟t know how to navigate office politics. You see the same people all day, people you may not like but can‟t avoid because you work with them…I was a housewife without work experience. There‟re no prospects in a lowly office job because I can‟t work how the system wants; I won‟t survive! (Hui) The marketplace, on the other hand, absorbs individuals who fare poorly in school, and prizes the cultivation of an alternative, non-academic skill set. As Chapter 4 will show, what hawkers term as „the ability to talk‟ is a paramount skill that helps hawkers perform buying and selling transactions. For Lim, a gift of the gab was crucial in helping him establish his business, and in making it thrive: I didn‟t like to study; I played basketball during lessons and the discipline master would catch me. I stopped school at 17, sold fish instead of insurance, though for both you need to know how to talk. I couldn‟t sell insurance or houses because I didn‟t know how to read and write. I only knew how to talk, and selling fish allowed me to do that without knowing how to write. (Lim) Ill equipped to take on formal employment, some hawkers acutely feel the loss of benefits accrued to office workers. Savings in one‟s Central Provident Fund (CPF) account is one such privilege. Hawkers – self-employed individuals – do not receive much CPF:25 When I was young, I needed to save money if not I‟ll have problems. So I worked in an office. Boring, took the boss‟s crap and too much work, but at least there was CPF to buy a house and money for my children. Now I‟m 54, selling chicken, weak and tired. I don‟t have enough CPF because doing your 25 Central Provident Fund (CPF) is a compulsory savings scheme that those in formal and waged employment have. Every month, waged workers who are below 50 years of age, contribute 20 percent of their gross income to their CPF account. Every month, employers also contribute a sum that is equivalent to 16 percent of their employees‟ income (http://mycpf.cpf.gov.sg/Members/Gen-Info/ConRates). Self-employed individuals, such as hawkers, are not obliged to deposit money into their CPF accounts. Neither do they have employers who can contribute. If a self-employed person deposits money into his CPF account, the government will also add a small sum. This amount, however, is far lower than what employers contribute to their waged employees. 58 own business means no CPF. Now I only have enough CPF for the housing mortgage. Maybe I‟ll stop selling chicken next time, but I‟ll not have S$700 for the mortgage and my CPF may run out. That‟s the good thing about an office job – CPF. (Aziz) Even if hawking does not render the hawkers much CPF, hawking and the marketplace represent a livelihood and economic survival. This explains why hawkers continue in this line: I ask Aziz why he is still in the marketplace; has he not thought of retiring? “How to retire…I still have lots of bills to pay for. An alternative plan to paying for the mortgage is to sell the house. Buy a smaller house using cash. Then pay for the house completely and just find money to eat. In Singapore, the working class just cannot afford to retire. You get up, you‟re already thinking you need money to pay your bills.” (Fieldnotes, 19 October 2012) 3.4.2. Business networks If familial ties usher hawkers into the trade, economic partnerships that hawkers form among themselves keep businesses going. Stillerman and Sundt (2007:181) pore over the business strategies that street and flea market vendors in Santiago employ, underscoring that vendors use kin- and non-kin network ties with peers, suppliers, customers, and political authorities in complex ways. Vendors deploy these bonds to sieve out important information, obtain labour and supplies, reduce risk, and compete in gruelling legal and economic situations (ibid.:196). Such ties constitute „networks of personal relationships‟ (Granovetter, 1985) that are grounded in „enforceable trust‟ and „bounded solidarity‟ among trade partners (Portes, 1994; Light, 2004). These networks are multifaceted; business ties are overlain with friendships, and the two are mutually enforcing. Stillerman and Sundt‟s (2007) insights resound with the kinds of business partnerships that hawkers in Bedok Market engineer through a process of relational work. Fish is a highly differentiated food, and alliances help fishmongers to counter 59 the uncertainties of their trade. Some fishmongers trade together everyday, and have been doing so for an extensive period of time – this defines one type of network. Lim and Liao work together. Lim procures some fish from Jurong Fishery for Liao, and sells him stock throughout the day: Every morning, Lim buys stock from the fishery, and buys a share for Liao. He also observes what Liao lacks and sells him stock throughout the day. At the end of each day, Lim issues Liao a receipt. Liao gets some stock from Lim because Liao does not have a lorry and cannot drive to Jurong Fishery; Liao‟s fish is delivered, and he does not get much quality, quantity, and variety. Besides, Liao‟s sales move more rapidly than Lim‟s. Lim sells his excess to Liao, who sells it off. Lim sells to Liao about S$1 or S$2 more per kilogram than the prices in the fishery. Thus, Liao earns some money, and so does Lim. (Fieldnotes, 31 May 2012) Hui places two boxes of snakehead at Lim‟s daily, so that Lim can sell them. They recommend customers to each other: Everyday, we put two boxes of snakehead at Lim‟s because sometimes his customers want snakehead. So he doesn‟t have to shout for me when there‟re many customers, and can just sell it. Standby. If people buy it, he‟ll sell. If no one buys, I‟ll take it back. Lim recommends his customers to our stall. Salmon is different from his fish. Some of my customers want to buy threadfin and I recommend them to him; they trust me. This is good – recommending here and there. (Hui) Hui gained the contact of her first supplier from a fellow fishmonger. Each time she changes her supplier, she consults fellow fishmongers for help: When I started out, I had no good deal. Where was I going to get snakehead, salmon and codfish? I could not drive, and I needed to go to Jurong or get a wholesaler. I asked a friend working in Bedok Market if he knew a good supplier. He introduced one. From that day onwards, I sold in the market. I changed suppliers a few times because the salmon meat was black and smelled. I used someone in Bedok Lane. My fish was very nice and fresh. Each time I changed the supplier, I asked fellow fishmongers for the contact. (Hui) That hawkers are grafted into business partnerships means that hawker-hawker exchanges are economic transactions. In the relational process of working out and 60 performing these bonds, hawkers exchange money, goods or fish – these are the media of exchange in economic transactions. In addition, the business partnerships that Lim has with Liao and Hui blur into friendships that date back many years. Because Hui started selling fish many years after Lim, she picks up her knowledge about available fish26 from him. Such information comprises a third exchange media in their economic alliance-cumfriendship. The relationship that Lim and Hui share facilitates the transfer of such knowledge: I work with Lim because he‟s the friend of my ex-boss. We‟ve been friends for over 10 years, since I moved from Pasir Ris to Bedok. Before I started selling, I shopped in Bedok Market and got to know Lim and Liao. Now when I‟m selling, I learn from Lim how to see fish and their names. There‟re different kinds of batang – to tan, batang and bay ka. These are brothers and have different bodies. To tan is more expensive, flatter and wider than batang. Batang is more circular. When Lim got his fish from the supplier, the supplier told him that, and I learned. (Hui) Some fishmongers do not trade daily. They enter economic alliances that are temporary and activated according to conditions in the fisheries. The supply and prices of fish fluctuate. The availability, quality, and quantity of fish are dependent on the season, weather, and fishermen‟s daily catch. Fishmongers require such information when contemplating whether to acquire stock from the fisheries or fellow hawkers. The business partnership that Lee has with another stall (comprising a boss and his three assistants) enables Lee to attain supplies from fellow hawkers when cost prices soar: Sometimes, a particular fish may be sold very expensively in Jurong – say about S$13 per kilogram, then it increases to S$15 or S$16. I won‟t buy it there but from fellow hawkers in the market, at lower prices. Sometimes hawkers have more leftover stock than I do or find suppliers in the fishery 26 In Chapter 4, I will elaborate on the knowledge that hawkers and customers have about fish and other fresh foods; the sources from which they obtain this knowledge; the means through which they share knowledge; and the ways through which this knowledge becomes „embodied‟. 61 whose prices are lower. I ask them to sell me their leftovers or new fish at a lower price than Jurong, to make up for the stock I didn‟t get. (Lee) Lee is not firm friends with those he works with, but draws on his network only during poor market conditions. His relationship with his business partners is somewhat loosely based, professional, and ephemeral: I ask Lee how he chooses who to get extra stock from. He greets, talks and makes friends because „people have to know who you are‟. Those he does not talk to or greet will not sell to him because they may not even have enough stock for themselves, or are unfamiliar with him and do not wish to sell to him. This is a business transaction. Lee gets stock from the three men in the third row. Lee isn‟t very familiar with them but he knows their boss, who told them that Lee can take any fish he likes. Their boss is a supplier himself. Sometimes, the boss does not sell fish in the wholesale market, but directly at the marketplace. So, Lee waits for the boss or goes to his assistants. (Fieldnotes, 31 October 2012) Some fishmongers sell stock to hawkers who sell cooked foods in the hawker centre adjacent to Bedok Market. For some years now, Hui has been selling snakehead to Goh every two days. The two have been friends for a long time. Recently, they annulled their alliance-cum-friendship because of some unhappiness over Goh‟s late payments and poor attitude towards Hui. The following extract illustrates how partnerships-cum-friendships may be uncongenial and laced with conflict. The process of relational work does not only involve the establishment, maintenance, and negotiation of bonds that are both personal and strategic, but the termination of such ties as well: Goh had been taking my fish for months. He‟s supposed to pay me monthly but I let his debt grow because his business hasn‟t been good. Though we‟re old friends, I need to do business and collect money right? We agreed on Tuesday. Tuesday came, but he refused to pay! I was pissed. Another day, I casually mentioned payment. He ran to his stall. He returned with a black face and asked how much he owed – S$300. He threw a bunch of S$50 notes at me! I didn‟t want to argue, so I took them and said thanks. He said, “I hate it the most when people collect money before they issue a receipt! I don‟t want your fish tomorrow!” I could have scolded him but didn‟t. Making a scene in the market is very unsightly. (Hui) 62 Like the fishmongers, vegetable sellers run headlong into similar contingencies. Still, enduring partnerships are not nursed because most have transport to the three vegetable wholesale markets in Singapore. Besides, vegetable sellers cater to dissimilar clienteles. Hakim sells Malay spices and caters largely to Malays while Ting attends to the Chinese and their needs. Moreover, Hakim and Ting patronize different wholesale markets; Hakim goes to Ubi Market and Ting goes to Toa Payoh Market. Because vegetable sellers hawk varied goods and pander to different customers, alliances – that are relationally worked out – seldom result. Chicken sellers do not build networks at all; they do not work with one another to obtain and retail stock. They do not face the same uncertainties as fishmongers and vegetable sellers because chicken is not a highly differentiated food; there are only black chickens, white chickens, and kampong chickens. Live chickens are imported from Johor Bahru and slaughtered in Singapore, and the supply is quite constant. Moreover, chicken sellers retail distinct brands; Mei sells „Xing Ma‟ chicken27 and Aziz sells halal28 chicken. 3.4.3. Anchored personal relationships Apart from the familial ties and business partnerships that hawkers are situated in, hawkers are also friends who share „anchored personal relationships‟ (Morrill and Snow, 2005) with one another. Such relationships are long-lasting. This rings true for older hawkers who act as mentors and parental figures to their younger counterparts, and have witnessed them transit through different life phases: 27 Mei explains that there are different brands of non-halal chicken that the Chinese eat. She orders stock from a company named „Xing Ma‟. Her chickens arrive with a tag around their necks that bears the company‟s brand. 28 Halal is the Arabic word for „permitted‟ or „lawful‟. Halal foods are foods that Muslims can consume, under the Islamic dietary guidelines. 63 Lim was a young boy when his mother brought him around Bedok Market. He didn‟t know how to see fish or talk. When he saw his friend coming, he hid behind the chopping board! I asked him, “Boy, aren‟t you going to sell?” “No! I don‟t want my friend to know I‟m a fishmonger!” Slowly, his father and I taught him how to see fish and talk. I‟ve seen him learn, grow up, get married, have his girl and look at him now! He‟s 52, and his daughter is grown up! (Ping) Elderly hawkers also treasure the bonds they share with their peers. Decades of friendships between Ping and Lee have accustomed them to each another‟s personality and family background: I sold fish in Joo Chiat Market and Ping came later. We‟ve known each other for more than 20 years, so we‟re very familiar with each other. Now we‟re growing old together in Bedok Market. Ping‟s divorced and without children, so I look out for him, tell him to curb his temper. He knows I have four children – two are working, two are studying. (Lee) Anchored personal relationships are maintained through recurring interactions and interdependencies that develop among hawkers over time. These continual exchanges take the form of the daily acts of hawking in the same stall or marketplace, and of sharing (cooked) foods. Every other day, Tan whips up sumptuous dishes with his portable stove and distributes them to fellow hawkers. Conversations revolve around the exchange of information about one another‟s everyday life and character. Talk also includes jokes which adopt many forms. For instance, jokes can be selfdepreciating: “Let me tell you a story,” Lim says. “Ping was competing with two fishmongers to see who can cut the fastest. He got third. There were three people in the competition.” Lim‟s eyes twinkle mischievously. I laugh, “He got third in a competition with three? Isn‟t that last?” Lim says, “No, phrase it nicely. Cannot say there were only three people competing. Say he got third.” I laugh again. Lim‟s voice takes on a softer, more affectionate tone, “Ping‟s old. He didn‟t want to cut his hand. He was really fast when he was young.” (Fieldnotes, 7 April 2012) Lim comes over to Chew‟s stall and says hello. Lim asks if I have learned how to cut pork from Chew. I say no, because Chew‟s knife is very sharp but also very scary. Lim tells me not to look at his knife but his „ability to talk‟. I reply 64 that Lim is better than Chew at talking. Lim replies that he has to talk so hard to get customers to buy, but Chew just has to say one or two words and Lim is so frightened that he runs away. We laugh. Lim returns later and tells me he has to greet Chew „big brother‟ four times everyday, “Isn‟t he like a scary big boss?” Chew imitates Lim and greets him twice, “Big brother, have you entered your car? Big brother, please walk slowly. Oops! Big brother fell!” We laugh. (Fieldnotes, 9 September 2012) Often, jokes have a sexualized character: Tan tells Hui, in Mandarin, that he wants to buy chicken („ji‟), and asks for his bag („bao‟). Hui looks him at sharply, “You‟re going to eat ji? Which ji? Ji that is naked without shoes or ji that is naked with shoes in Geylang? If you‟re going to eat and hug (bao) the ji with shoes, don‟t get caught by your wife; that ji is dirty!” A naked ji without shoes refers to a fresh chicken. A naked ji with shoes in Geylang refers to a prostitute. In Mandarin, chicken and prostitute have the same pronunciation. Bag and hug also have the same pronunciation, so Hui plays on these words in a sexualized manner. (Fieldnotes, 31 May 2012) Mostly, jokes lack a subject matter because hawkers view one another „as friends who can talk about anything and everything‟ (Hui), as long as the jokes are articulated in a humorous and playful tone: Poon and I talk about anything. We‟re very easygoing and communicate very easily. We tease each other or tell the other off. We won‟t get angry but laugh it off. If I tell you something and you mind it a lot, I need to be careful. There‟s a distance; how can we become friends? When you‟re talking to others, don‟t be vengeful and remember the wrongs others did. Otherwise we can‟t be friends. (Hui) Thus, conversations are imbued with laughter and some degree of warmth, intimacy and rapport that imitate familial ties. Nonetheless, a sense of distance is woven into anchored personal relationships. Although hawkers know about one another‟s family, they have never met the family. During my observations, many hawkers repeatedly asked my key informants if I am the daughter that my informants have been talking endlessly about. Recurring exchanges of information that happen among hawkers over the years are anchored to a particular setting – Bedok Market. 65 Anchored personal relationships are bounded to a public space and do not spill over into the household or private lives (Morrill and Snow, 2005:18). Moreover, information shared about the family constitutes banalities that speak of the hawkers‟ private worlds, but are limited to common knowledge of the self and personal networks. A minimal amount of personal information is revealed, rather than deep revelations of family members and events. In Bedok Market, conversations serve the aim of socializing among a group of individuals, and involve the individual rather than the family. In fact, extensive probing into a fellow hawker‟s private life and family is objected to and sanctioned: I had a friend who used to work with me. I knew her family for 21 years…She divorced her husband…I found out from her friend and husband…I called her to show concern, “Ay, you got a divorce?” “Don‟t talk rubbish! Nothing happened!” From then until now, I never mentioned it. Since you don‟t want me to know, don‟t take me as your friend, never mind…She sold fish for me because she wasn‟t getting alimony. She said, “Hui, I want to bring some salmon home for my husband.” How can she talk about a husband who‟s no longer there? I just let her take the fish…Another day, her old friend asked me about her, “She doesn‟t want to work anymore? She had a good life but got divorced.” I said, “Don‟t tell her I know. She‟s afraid I‟ll know.” “But why is she afraid that you, an old friend and boss, would know?” So even friends you‟ve known for over 20 years, we don‟t ask them awkward questions. There‟re certain things we don‟t need to know. (Hui) As evidenced, anchored personal relationships are not always pleasant or intimate, but may be distant or demarcated by boundaries that protect the private self. Furthermore, some hawkers are alienated from one another. The feeling of hostility that brews among alienated hawkers is also rooted to the public space of Bedok Market. Hui and Tan once extended their concern to Mei, who rejected it. Since then, Hui and Tan have been ignoring Mei: We don‟t talk to Mei. She‟s crazy. Her leg was hit by a bicycle, so she came in a wheelchair. I said out of concern and goodwill, “You‟ve a younger sister and worker. Your leg is so swollen, you use a sarong to cover it, then chop chicken at 4am. Don‟t work so hard. Let them work; you don‟t come to the market.” She put on a black face, ignoring me. Later, her elder sister said, “Mei‟s very 66 petty. Next time don‟t say these things.” Tan ran into her outside the toilet and said, “Ask your worker to help.” She said, “Like you? You fetch Hui up and down in your car! Do I have to follow you?” Tan was so angry. (Hui) Therefore, alienated hawker-hawker ties are enshrouded in hostility, silence, and deliberate avoidance. These emotions and strategies are influenced by the qualities of Bedok Market. Hawkers remain quiet and simply shun their alienated counterparts because „it‟s very ugly to make a scene in the market when people are friends, and everyone is watching‟ (Hui). A sense that one is being watched by others and in turn, watches one‟s own conduct operates because Bedok Market is a public and open space. In addition, cordial and antagonistic ties coexist in the marketplace. Alienated hawkers do not directly send and receive information about one another, but use mutual friends to transmit information. Amicable anchored personal relationships help to transfer information across alienated ties. Although Hui‟s relationship with Mei is governed by a concerted effort of avoidance, information about Mei reaches Hui through Poon, who is friends with both women. Blemishes in Mei‟s character and work ethic continue to be noticed by Hui, but are not publicly articulated: Poon talks to Mei. When Poon talks to Wei [Mei‟s assistant], Mei gets suspicious or jealous. Mei‟s afraid that Poon will badmouth her in front of Wei, so Wei will not work for her. If your worker argues briefly with you, will she stop working? How have you been treating your worker? If you‟re good to your worker, no need to be afraid of people being able to instigate your worker into running away…But Mei‟s afraid. Sometimes Wei buys fish from me. Mei tells Poon, “Lately Wei has been getting along very well with Hui and Tan…Don‟t know what story Hui will tell her.” I‟ve not told Wei about this incident. If I did, how will Wei look at Mei? I told Poon, “Rest assured I won‟t talk.” (Hui) Likewise, information about Hui‟s competitor, Liang, reaches Hui via her customers and Poon. The nature of Bedok Market as a public space allows this transfer. Certainly, the characteristics of this public site – the informality of shopping, 67 the open structure of Bedok Market, the proximity of the stalls to one another, the absence of restraint on entering and exiting the marketplace – enable many to openly observe others‟ behaviours and listen to their talk. In other words, Bedok Market endows its constituents with a high level of access and visibility, and easy access to behaviours and discussions among strangers. These license Hui to monitor Liang via Poon. Hui thinks poorly of Liang based on the information which she receives: Like me, Liang sells snakehead but she mostly sells it to Jumboo restaurant. Poon‟s stall is next to hers, so Poon can see what‟s happening. Poon says my stall has lots of customers but Liang has no one…I sell my codfish for S$50 per kilogram but she, S$60. Our cost price is the same but look at her ethics. Some customers complain her food is expensive and buy from me. A customer‟s husband bought from her and came to me to compare prices. She scolded her husband, “All your fault that we bought from her! Silverfish costs S$2.50 more!” When customers compare and complain, I know others‟ prices. (Hui) In Chapter 3, I have conveyed the qualities of Bedok Market that inspire a variety of socialities to blossom in the site. I have also indicated that these ties are a form of „relational work‟. They illustrate how economic relationships and transactions are fully incorporated into the various kinds of „work‟ that is done in regards to the range of ties in the marketplace. In Chapter 4, I attend to another constituent of marketplace culture – the drama of buying and selling. 68 Chapter 4. Dramatizing transactions in Bedok Market 4.1. Casting the drama of marketplace transactions I forge ahead with the story of the micro-level culture of Bedok Market by examining buying and selling interactions between hawkers and customers. Approaching economic exchanges from Goffman‟s (1959) dramaturgical framework, I survey the performance ingredients that make up the „front stage‟ (ibid.) of what I term as the theatre of buying and selling. Specifically, I explore the front stage set up; what hawkers call „the ability to talk‟; the differentiation of customers; and the negotiation of price. I underscore the range of these ingredients. There are several versions of the front stage, manners of speaking, distinguishing consumers, and handling price issues. Two kinds of drama become apparent – a middle class theatre, and a working class one. I attribute the first to many hawkers‟ adoption of a businessman persona and their encounters with wealthier customers, and the second to a fishmonger‟s framing of transactions as a bargain hunt that recruits poorer customers. Then, I interrogate the „back stages‟ (ibid.) where actors prepare for front stage performances. When the spectrum of techniques is adhered to, exchanges flow relatively smoothly and are free of tension. However, there are moments when actors do not enact these ingredients, and conflict results. Moreover, one interviewee is deficient in marketplace dramaturgical know-how, and is cheated by seasoned hawkers. Thus, there are degrees of inclusion, exclusion, and asymmetry in transactions. These examples imply that exchanges can be trying, and contrast with the relatively unruffled interactions that characterize the middle class and working class dramas that I delineate in the beginning of Chapter 4. 69 Lastly, I propose that Zelizer‟s (2005; 2012) concept of „relational work‟ can be extended to understand the meaningful buying and selling interactions that are enacted in Bedok Market. Marketplace dramas are a kind of relational work. During such performances, hawkers and customers define the hawker-customer tie, and position buying and selling exchanges as economic transactions. Foods, money, and food knowledge comprise the exchange media, as hawkers and customers negotiate the four performance ingredients during transactions. The idea that marketplace performances are relationally worked out, underscores Zelizer‟s (2005; 2012) insight into the intertwining of economics and social life. 4.2. Exploring four performance ingredients 4.2.1. Erecting the front stage In The presentation of self in everyday life, Goffman‟s (1959) theatrical model assumes that, for a myriad of interests, individuals labour at „impression management‟ – the control of impressions that others receive of them. The effortless flow of social life hinges on participants‟ acceptance that others put forth regarding their identities and meanings of their actions. In Bedok Market, hawkers („actors‟) engage customers („the audience‟) in performances. Successful performances commence with the establishment of a „front‟ – the physical setting, equipment and props (ibid.) – that lure customers in. Stalls are brightly lit by hanging lamps, and equipped to display the hawkers‟ wares. Fishmongers have spacious, exposed metal trays; vegetable sellers have baskets and crates of assorted sizes; and chicken sellers use transparent refrigerators that double up as display containers. This equipment is clean and dry. The immediate surroundings are spic-and-span; hawkers sweep the litter during short breaks between transactions. Props – foods – are exhibited neatly and sorted according to their various types, body 70 parts, sizes, and weights. There is also much stock on display; metal trays, baskets and refrigerators must be filled to the brim. In short, the hawkers strive to paint a scene of abundance, neatness and hygiene, and freshness. From 4am onwards, customers who enter Bedok Market find the hawkers preoccupied with a hive of activity. Hawkers are cutting, sorting, arranging, weighing, replenishing stock, cleaning, taking stock and setting prices, preparing orders and deliveries, and selling to the first customers of the day. Accessing the marketplace is likened to walking into the middle of a performance, where actors are engaged in a whirlwind of activity that persists throughout the morning. To consumers, the orderly and plentiful appearance of food translates into ideas of „availability‟ and „variety‟, which have several meanings: The yong tau foo is very nice! The hawker makes his own paste. He uses parang and yellow tail fusilier, stuffs chilli and paste into the fishball, then beats it! It tastes very different from the supermarket‟s! And so many types to choose from! (Madeline) Hakim has so many vegetables – lettuce, cabbage, spinach and kangkong. His chillies are from everywhere. Big, long red chillies are from Johor, Ipoh. Small, packet chillies are from kampongs. Others are from Vietnam. (Sally) There‟re so many fishmongers in Bedok Market! Good to look-see before deciding what to buy. If I want sea bass, several hawkers sell it, so I walk around to see and smell their fish. Many hawkers sell the same food, so I choose the freshest. (Charlotte) To Madeline, the array of foods not only connotes variety, but its speciality; her hawker‟s yong tau foo is available exclusively in Bedok Market. The „diversity within particular kinds of foods‟ (Lui, 2008) is driven home by Sally, who not only enumerates the types of greens and chillies sold, but their origins. Charlotte‟s understanding of variety pertains to the number of hawkers retailing similar foods, beckoning comparisons of price and freshness across stalls. Ultimately, availability 71 and variety entail the element of choice amidst a range of different foods and hawkers, and similar foods. In addition, the organized and copious picture of foods signifies the freshness of the items on sale. Freshness is especially crucial to customers because it is a guarantee of food quality in terms of taste and consistency. When buyers assess the hawkers‟ wares, they deploy a range of tests that implicate their entire body. When selecting chicken, for example, customers look at the colour of the chicken. The meat of fresh chicken has a shade of pink. If the chicken has transparent-looking or grey skin, or tints of green at its joints, it is not fresh. Customers avoid chicken parts that have many red bruises or blood stains – these mean that the meat has been handled roughly. Buyers handle the chicken to gauge its weight, and to check if it is „bloated‟ – a signal that the chicken may have been injected with water, to trick customers into believing that it is heavier than it actually is. When customers press against the skin of the chicken, the skin should spring back; the chicken is „elastic‟. If the skin sinks, is slimy or feels hard, the chicken is not fresh. Buyers smell the chicken – fresh chicken has no smell. In the aforementioned ways, the front stage and customers‟ reception of it point to four dimensions of what I call „embodied food knowledge‟.29 I have alluded to this concept previously in Chapter 2 and 3, but introduce its components now. Hawkers conjure up a front stage which appeals to a sensory food knowledge that customers flex during food selection. This denotes the sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste of foods or, in Figuie and Bricas‟ (2010:179) words, „body cues‟ – „direct qualification procedures‟ which „stimulate the sensory capabilities of the subject to 29 In Chapter 4 and 5, I will refer to certain dimensions of embodied food knowledge. When I do so, I will name the component(s) of embodied food knowledge that I am speaking about. Otherwise, when I use the term „embodied food knowledge‟, I mean the four dimensions of embodied food knowledge in general. 72 evaluate the physical [and intrinsic] characteristics of the product‟. Also, embodied food knowledge incorporates a knowledge of food production and processing, and the localization and identity of food (ibid.), evident in Sally‟s skill in pinpointing the sources of Hakim‟s chillies. Embodied food knowledge too encompasses an encyclopaedic knowledge of a range of foods sold in the marketplace, seen in Sally‟s ease in naming Hakim‟s many vegetables. Finally, a knowledge of food preparation and consumption is a form of embodied food knowledge. The atmosphere of the place of sale as perceived by the senses – the lit, dry, and clean stalls – conditions a sensory experience of the landscape. In other words, „situational cues‟ or cognitive and „indirect qualification procedures link the subject and object through the intermediary of a third party[,] enabling the quality of the product to be evaluated‟ (Figuie and Bricas, 2010:179). I use the term „situational cues‟ interchangeably with the „sensory landscape‟ of the space. The drama of transactions opens as hawkers pose as actors who are absorbed in a bustle of activity. Hawkers and customers are aware that both parties share a common stock of embodied food knowledge and situational cues. To attract buyers, hawkers take into account the kinds of embodied food knowledge and situational cues that they reckon are important to the customers, and set up a front stage that is saturated in these knowledge. In turn, customers appraise the front stage using their own corpus of know-how. In this way, the hawkers‟ erection of the front stage and the customers‟ interpretations of it, help the two groups stitch together an account of what is retailed, and the types of knowledge that are invested in the activity of buying and selling. These constructions, and the meanings assigned to them, also set the scene for verbal transactions to transpire. 73 4.2.2. ‘The ability to talk’ Goffman (1959) writes that a „front‟ does not merely connote a physical setting, but also a „personal front‟ of „appearances‟ and „manners‟ – „posture[s], demeanour[s], facial expression[s], speech patterns…which announce the interaction role [which an actor]…portray[s]‟ (Burns, 1992:117). Hawkers use what they call „the ability to talk‟ to „dramatically realize‟ (Manning, 1992:41-42) or convey the role of a businessman: When other fishmongers and customers ask why I am observing at his stall, Lim explains that I am „learning how to talk, sell fish and do business‟. He compares selling fish to selling property, “Selling fish is the same as selling property. Both must know how to talk.” (Fieldnotes, 11 March 2012) „The ability to talk‟ manifests itself prominently during transactions, and some customers notice hawkers enacting its components. I elicit the features of this technique and the ways that customers respond to them, to demonstrate how customers negotiate „the ability to talk‟. Hawkers don an affable and courteous persona during transactions. For Lim and Ping, eloquence, when it marks the opening of an exchange, manifests in a polite and cheerful greeting that reveals their relationship with the customer. Regulars are affectionately called „Sister‟, „Brother‟, „Uncle‟ or „Aunty‟. Newer or less familiar customers are greeted „Sir‟, „Madam‟ or „Boss‟. Lim and Ping tell their customers whether the fish they usually buy is available or make a recommendation. Then, they proceed to dish out taglines that promote their fish, positioning themselves as salesmen despite Lim‟s disclaimers: When Lim promotes his sea bream, he says, “My sea bream is number one!” When a customer asks him how to cook his fish or if it can be fried, he says, “I don‟t care how you cook because my fish is very fresh; it tastes nice with everything!” “Don‟t fry! Those who fry my fish are very stupid because my 74 fish is very fresh!”30 “You mustn‟t just believe what I say. There‟s no salesman here! If not fresh, next time don‟t buy. Go home, cook the fish, come back and tell me how it tastes. You must experience my fish!” (emphasis Lim‟s) (Fieldnotes, 7 April and 13 May 2012) Customers acknowledge that in „idealized performances‟ (Manning, 1994:4142) – performances that are cast in the best light and are compatible with business norms of politeness and service – hawkers should be pleasant and persuasive. However, consumers draw the line between businessmen who promote their foods and those who are „pushy‟. Jessica stopped patronizing Ting for this reason: The hawkers [at Ting‟s] are pushy. They stack their vegetables so high you can‟t reach it. You just tell them what you want, they take it down. No chance to see it properly. If you say it‟s too much, they say, “Take. Very cheap.” They grab as much as they can to sell to you. I stopped buying from them. (Jessica) Even as customers complain about aggressive hawkers, two hawkers lament about the „emotional labour‟ (Hochschild, 2003) of being courteous and bearing with customers. Hawkers manage their feelings to create a publicly observable display of facial expressions and appearances in the context of paid employment. During transactions, hawkers engage in emotional displays of politeness, and the sale of these exhibitions attach an exchange value to the hawkers‟ emotions (ibid.:7n). Such emotional labour is draining on the hawkers: You meet all sorts of customers. As a businessman, I try to be nice to them; win them over. If a customer‟s rude or nasty, tolerate. The customer‟s always right. No use telling him off; he‟ll shout at you. Sometimes if you‟re nice and polite, they‟ll return to buy. Sometimes the customers‟ personality is naturally not nice; they‟ll find fault with anything about you, be it your fish, cutting skills and speed or price…It‟s tiring, but bear it. (Lee) Hawkers and customers concur that talk is couched in a sharing of and tapping into a body of sensory food knowledge. A sense hierarchy in food selection and 30 Florence, my mother and interpreter, tells me that stale fish is frequently stir or deep fried (with spices or chilli) to cover the musky stench and taste of the fish. When a fish is fresh, on the other hand, it is usually steamed in order to bring out its freshness and tenderness. Stale fish is not usually steamed. 75 consumption that differs in the marketplace and kitchen is often mentioned. When choosing food, sight, touch and smell are the most cardinal gauges of freshness, and these propel conversations. Nevertheless, the taste of cooked food as it is devoured in the kitchen – „experience my fish‟ (Lim) – determines whether customers return. In the marketplace, sight, touch and smell override taste, but in the kitchen, the opposite holds. Through talk, the knowledge of food selection and consumption are also exchanged in the form of recipes. Lee shares the knowledge of food production with his customers too, to justify his prices: Lee says that he cannot sell a fish at S$8 one day, and S$8.50 another. His customers will run away. He explains to them, “Fish is more expensive because of the storm.” He says, “Those who watch news understand and are willing to pay more. Others say, „You‟re lying. Why are you trying to make 50 cents more?‟ If the customer doesn‟t believe me, can‟t be helped. All these are reported in the news…These are financial issues.” (Fieldnotes, 31 October 2012) Besides revealing several kinds of embodied food knowledge, „the ability to talk‟ means that hawkers appeal to a common corpus of sensory food knowledge, goading customers to exercise their own sensory food knowledge while injecting drama and fun into transactions: Lim tries to sell prawns to a customer. He tosses and catches them to imitate live, jumping prawns. The customer looks uncertain. Lim declares, “I‟m very honest! Go look at other people‟s prawns. They soak their prawns in water to make them heavy, so they can sell fewer. My prawns aren‟t soaked but are completely dry.” He dips a handful into a pail of water, then weighs it, “See, if there‟s water, they‟re 30 grams heavier. I won‟t lie to you. Don‟t buy from me first! Walk around, see if others soak their prawns, come back and tell me.” (Fieldnotes, 7 April 2012) The tactics that Lim and Ping deploy to share sensory food knowledge mould exchanges into spectacles or theatre (Watson, 2009; Gregson and Crewe, 1997a). Interactions are a stage on which hawkers become entertainers who amuse. Hawkers perform tricks or playful speech, banter, or tease their customer-audience, fully aware 76 of the contributions that this theatricality makes to their stalls‟ economic success. These performances and the uncertainties embedded in foods are held up as spectacles for the customer-audience‟s gaze. An atmosphere of delight and humour flourishes, as Bedok Market transforms into a space where hawkers play, gaze and laugh at themselves and others during work, and where conventions of formal retail exchanges are subverted; Madeline labels Lim as „a comedian whose behaviour you will never find in a quiet supermarket‟. The above suggests that marketplace drama has a reciprocal character. Because it entails interactional efforts between two parties, a reciprocal recognition or interpretation of others‟ actions and intentions is integral for the theatre to be accomplished. Still, reciprocity does not translate into equality among actors. Transactions thrive on power inequalities between two parties, where power resides in the amount of resources or information that one controls. Economists use the term „information asymmetries‟ to describe the fact that in market(place)s, one party frequently has more knowledge relevant to transactions. In Bedok Market, dramaturgical techniques of exchange can maintain or augment information asymmetries, or reduce them. The aforementioned sharing of and tapping into a shared stock of sensory food knowledge showcase the ways through which marketplace drama levels potential information asymmetries between hawkers and customers. Because information is tied to power, for consumers, access to sensory food knowledge empowers them to make good buys. For hawkers, this equalization of information and power disparities is a strategic move that reaps economic or business advantages. The democratization of sensory food knowledge helps hawkers cut deals and profit, gain the customers‟ trust, and cultivate long-term hawker-customer ties. Thus, the diminution of differential information and resource 77 endowments between the two parties has huge consequences for gains or losses in transactions; the alleviation of information asymmetries shapes transaction outcomes. As the snapshot below will show, „the ability to talk‟ also incorporates the hawkers‟ concealment of their food knowledge from buyers, where this masking exacerbates information asymmetries. Like in the disclosure of food knowledge, obscuration is connected to power differentials among actors, and for hawkers, to the economic value of information asymmetries. The disparity in information held by the two parties creates opportunities for (partial) deceit. Customers are disconnected from the food knowledge that is essential to getting good buys, and the social dynamics that cause them to enter transactions. They are restrained in their behaviours and the amount of power that they yield in the course of the exchange. Hence, the theatre of exchanges comes in less or more egalitarian varieties that are structured by the access to food knowledge. The quality of food knowledge that is hidden from customers matters too. Lim advises a customer to steam grey mullets. This is a possible way of consuming mullets, but not the most ideal. To make a sale, Lim tells partial truths about food preparation and consumption and covers key facts, although the quality of knowledge that Lim stores away is integral to the customer‟s consumption experience: Near closing time, eight mullets are unsold. A customer arrives and Lim immediately shoots, “Mullets are nice. I teach you how to cook! Put garlic and tomatoes, steam and cover.31 Learn to eat mullets; they‟re delicious.” The customer leaves, and Ping tells me privately, “Eating mullets is an acquired taste; not everyone knows how to cook or eat them. The meat is not sweet but strong and earthly because mullets feed in muddy waters. Steamed mullets taste terrible because the „dirty‟ taste comes out strongly. Mullets are better fried, smoked, grilled or baked with herbs because these remove the taste. But let Lim rid of the stock or we‟ll make a loss; mullets can‟t be kept for long.” (Fieldnotes, 4 August 2012) 31 Steaming a fish is the simplest and most common way of cooking a fish, and I suspect that this is why Lim tells his customer to steam the grey mullets. Other methods of cooking fish – frying, smoking, grilling, or baking – tend to be more tedious and time consuming. 78 Through talk, hawkers work to project an image of honesty; there is a sense of morality in marketplace theatre, apart from the manipulative strategies in „the ability to talk‟. An ethical persona manufactures trust in the hawker-customer relationship, and possibly culminates in the transitory bonds which I have discussed in Chapter 3. Therefore, hawkers market not only their wares but honourable personal fronts. Individual attributes are a selling point and sign of freshness, and they also encourage enduring relations. Figuie and Bricas (2010:187) astutely observe that customers in the open-air marketplaces of Hanoi develop an „attachment effect‟ to certain hawkers. Customers patronize their hawkers over a period of time or become „attached‟ to them as regulars (ibid.). In Bedok Market, buyers trust their sellers since the latter‟s personal qualities are a guarantee of food quality. Still, two customers play down the hawkers‟ emphasis on trust. Jessica discloses that hawkers can only cheat customers of miserly amounts. Since „being cheated of 50 cents is nothing‟, an immense amount of trust in hawkers is unnecessary „when I can afford to lose that bit of money‟. Madeline conveys skepticism at the hawkers‟ proclamation of honesty: Your fishmonger [Lim] likes to „ketok‟ [cheat] people! His customers always buy over S$50, S$100 at one shot. Nobody says it‟s expensive or bargains. But all fishmongers aren‟t honest. Everybody cheats – they earn so much more? He [Lim] sells me one piece of threadfin for S$31. Very expensive! He buys the entire fish for over S$50. He cuts it into so many pieces and sells each for S$31? „Ketok‟ so much from many people! And when hawkers slice and pack the fish, they charge! We say it‟s personalized service but hey, it‟s not free! (Madeline) Lastly, Madeline holds the hawkers‟ food knowledge in light regard, along with formal, codified knowledge such as cookbooks. She opts to create her own dishes. The hawkers‟ impartation of food knowledge is less important than variety, choice, 79 and price. Since Madeline has an independent and self-constructed body of food knowledge, foods are but a means through which she practises it. 4.2.3. Differentiating customers in the marketplace Based on my observations of marketplace exchanges, I believe that hawkers organize customers into six categories, and engage in different transactional behaviours with each. This differentiation of buyers and a negotiation of price (that I will discuss in Section 4.2.4.) form the undercurrent of exchanges; actors do not explicitly perform and refer to these two dramaturgical techniques in front of the customers, unlike „the ability to talk‟. Hawkers serve hawker centre stallholders and restaurant owners who source for cheap and regular supplies in Bedok Market. These transactions are usually longterm, lasting a few months or years. They are frequent and recurring, and involve large amounts of money. Such customers may enter business partnerships, a hawkerhawker relationship that I explained in Chapter 3. In other words, these customers are marked by their occupations, and are in the food industry. In addition, there are regular and non-regular customers; individuals are classified according to the frequency of which they patronize hawkers. Regulars visit a given hawker for an extended period of time and receive privileges. Hawkers charge regulars less, reserve their favourite foods or accept orders via the phone, and remember how they like their foods cut, cleaned and packed, along with bits of information about them and their family. Such benefits are withheld from non-regulars. Regulars often enter transitory relationships with the hawkers, and I have laid out the qualities of these ties in Chapter 3. Hawkers slot customers who fall into the next four categories by interpreting the former‟s personal front. Customers are sorted according to the amount of 80 embodied food knowledge that they possess and the ways in which they enact this. When teasing out a customer‟s mastery of the kinds of foods retailed in the marketplace, Aziz attends to her appearance (age and occupation) and manners (the ways through which she enquires about his chicken): I sell fresh and frozen chicken. Locals can differentiate the two, especially if they come to the market very often. Middle aged housewives can tell. Young, newly married, working women can‟t. See from the way they ask you. “What chicken do you have? What‟s the price,” the customer doesn‟t know her chicken. If she knows how to see, “Give me two fresh chicken. I want legs and feet. Don‟t give me frozen chicken that doesn‟t have those, and is less sweet.” So when ordering, don‟t ask what I have or the price. Just say what you want. (Aziz) The value of illuminating a buyer‟s state of embodied food knowledge lies in the decision of whether to cheat her. To flesh out this decision-making process, I turn to a fourth type of customer who may lack embodied food knowledge of local foodways. Hawkers spot the maids from their tanned skin, foreign nationality, and accented, non-native speech. They communicate with the maids in simple English or Malay. Armed with a shopping list and trolley, maids are sometimes accompanied by their madams, the latter‟s children or elderly parents. Their knowledge of the range of foods in the marketplace is limited, but they are generous with their madams‟ grocery money. Aziz refrains from deceiving them, foregrounding a sense of honesty: Aziz says, “When doing business, be honest. Don‟t cheat.” He removes a fresh and a frozen chicken. “Frozen chicken has no head and feet; fresh chicken has. Maids don‟t know. You give frozen chicken, she goes home, cooks it, not knowing it‟s frozen. Maids are from Indonesia, where live chickens are slaughtered in the markets, bloody and messy. Chickens here are packed and cleaned. Indonesian chickens so skinny, and maids cook chickens differently there. Easy to bluff maids, but be honest.” (Fieldnotes, 20 October 2012) The customer‟s ethnicity matters. Aziz and Hakim cater mainly to a Malay clientele, and note their distinct foodways: 81 Aziz says that Malay hawkers sell chicken differently from Chinese. Chinese customers want small pieces – breasts, thighs and gizzards – because they have small families. Malays have big families, so they buy three or four wholes at once. I ask Aziz why he sells in Bedok Market despite living in Sembawang. “Sembawang got very few Malays, so only sell five or six chickens a day. More Malays in Bedok, so more business.” (Fieldnotes, 26 August 2012) Differentiating customers according to their ethnicity necessitates the knowledge of the consumption patterns of the ethnic group. A sense of camaraderie or identification among ethnic similars circulates, as hawkers establish a niche, ethnic customer base. Hawkers also look to the customers‟ appearance and manners to differentiate them according to their nationality: I can speak Malay, English, Hokkien, Tamil and Tagalog. Different customers come, so I listen and try speaking different languages…For Myanmarese, see the face – looks a little Indonesian. Thais powder their face. Indian nationals look Indian but don‟t speak Tamil. Burmese are dark skinned. Indonesians look Malay but don‟t speak Bahasa Melayu. Malays and Filipinos are different. „Selamat‟ means „Hello‟ in Malay but „Thank you‟ in Tagalog…I explain how I sell to these foreigners, because they‟re new to me and Singapore. What if they think I‟m cheating them? (Hakim) Hakim explains „how I sell‟ to the „Other‟ to assure foreign customers of his honesty. In turn, he takes note of foreign customers to save himself from being cheated: Be careful when collecting money. Nowadays Singapore got many different people – Vietnamese, Filipinos, Malaysians. They give you their currencies, so sometimes money is fake! Look at the note; pull to see if it‟s tight and real. Coins also. Indonesian coins are shiny; look like Singapore one dollar coins. Don‟t put in the coin box; hold in your hand, observe the customer to see if he behaves funny. [At closing time, Hakim dusts his coins. He hands me a Malaysian five sen coin.] See, what is it? Someone bluffed me right? (Hakim) Most significantly, some fishmongers express interest in their customers‟ perceived class status, since this impinges on their consumption patterns of fish, a differentiated food. There are many kinds of fish that differ in quality and price. 82 Unlike pork and chicken, prices of fish are not consistent. Fish is one of the most costly fresh foods, more expensive than vegetables, pork, and chicken. Not all customers can afford fish or are willing to pay for it. Hawkers believe that a buyer‟s class position affects her willingness and ability to buy fish, the type of fish she buys, the quantity she buys, the extent to which she bargains, and the degree to which she is affected by price fluctuations. Young, English speaking customers are cast as wealthier, middle class consumers; they are highly educated, hold white collared occupations, and draw handsome incomes. They buy better quality fish and in large amounts. So do customers who arrive at 7am during the weekend. They rarely bargain or are adversely impacted by price increases. Lim charges them more than those who shop later in the morning, and prefers this earlier crowd: My prices are higher between 6am and 9am, and lower from 9.30am onwards because stock is fresher earlier in the morning. Leftovers are less fresh by 10am. Must sell these fast because sometimes they can‟t be kept, and I want to go home. So prices are lower…Morning customers ask for two pieces of this, three pieces of that, without looking at the fish or asking the price. Never bargain! 10am customers, you say S$17, they say S$15. S$16, they say S$14. Fed up! (Lim) The food parts that customers buy signal their class identity: See if the customers are rich or poor from the amount they buy. Some buy only S$2 or S$3 of chicken. They‟re poor compared to someone who buys in bulk nearly every week. Wings are the cheapest compared to breasts and wholes. One lady wanted to buy S$2 of wings. “1kg is S$5. Buy S$2.50 instead? I cannot sell it at S$2.” She must be in bad state to ask for S$2 of the cheapest part. (Aziz) The hawkers that customers visit also indicate customers‟ class background: Liao‟s fish is from Indonesia, and is delivered in bulk; he doesn‟t choose it at the fisheries. His fish is cheaper but less fresh. Many Malays buy from Liao. Fresh fish is too expensive for them. They fry Liao‟s fish with sambal32 to 32 Sambal is the Malay word for „chilli‟. 83 mask the staleness. Chinese steam their fish, so it must be fresh. My fish is from Malaysia, more fresh and expensive, so my customers aren‟t so poor. (Lee) Ultimately, for some fishmongers, the identification of customers‟ class status is essential in raking in a body of affluent regulars. Some hawkers devote more attention to middle class customers than their working class counterparts, to cover costs and profit: Must take note of the richer customers – what they like, how much they buy, what time they come. Sell more to them. Cannot sell to too many Malays. They come late in the morning when prices are lower. They bargain hard! I won‟t make much and sometimes cannot cover costs (Lim) However, meanings associated with customers‟ class background vary among hawkers. Betty, Mei‟s daughter, holds in light regard her buyers‟ class status because chicken is not a highly differentiated food; there are only white, kampong and black chickens. Mei has a fixed list of prices, and the quantity that her customers order changes across visits. Thus, Mei cannot profit from a set of rich customers who spend a consistent amount every week, or choose to forget her working class patrons. Hui dismisses customers‟ class identity or shades it with a hue of morality: Whether people have money or not, I don‟t bother. You mean if the customer‟s rich, you‟re going to increase price? If he‟s poor, you‟re going to lower price? My price is fixed…If you make S$5 more, can you use it to fatten yourself? I don‟t do this. But I usually give fish to the elderly or handicapped cheaper…Whether or not their children are rich or supporting them, that‟s their business. As long as I do my conscience justice. (Hui) I asked my customer-interviewees if they are aware of the ways in which hawkers differentiate consumers during transactions. What do they think of such sorting? Based on decades of shopping experience, Madeline believes that hawkers group customers according to the frequency of which they visit the hawkers, the buyers‟ grasp of embodied food knowledge, and the consumers‟ class position. 84 Madeline takes issue with hawkers who focus on the patrons‟ class status because she shops every Saturday, and dislikes it when hawkers „ketok‟ [cheat] the (richer) weekend crowd. Why does she continue to shop on Saturdays? She appreciates the greater variety of fish available then, and resigns to being „ketok-ed‟. Some of my customer-interviewees help to build on the understandings of regulars‟ shopping behaviours, apart from the hawkers‟ perceptions of their regulars‟ marketing habits. My customer-interviewees are what I call „wet market hoppers‟ – regulars of several hawkers selling the same food, and who also move in several marketplaces in Bedok. Charlotte purchases fish from „that fishmonger wearing singlet‟ or hops to Lee and other fishmongers when she is unsatisfied with the first fishmonger‟s stock. She travels to Chai Chee Market for pork, chicken and vegetables, and to Bedok South Market, where she alternates among a few fishmongers to buy prawns. Jessica buys chicken and fish at Bedok Market and Bedok South Market – „I buy everything at the place I happen to be in. Won‟t go especially to one market to get either food.‟ Such customers relish the opportunity to „look-see‟ and „walk-walk‟ in all four Bedok marketplaces.33 These customer-interviewees prize choice and variety – the freedom to browse and select food from a battery of hawkers within and across marketplaces, without being committed to a given hawker at all times, or his („limited‟) stock. They weigh the (dis)advantages of patronizing different hawkers and marketplaces before making purchasing decisions. Choice is vital too, for customers who „don‟t know what to cook, so I go market to see what there is first‟ (Jessica). Many hawkers may not be aware that their customers shop in several marketplaces at the same time. Hoppers do not 33 There are four wet markets in Bedok: Bedok Market, Bedok South Market, Bedok North Market, and Chai Chee Market. 85 enjoy the perks rendered to regulars who patronize a single hawker, which I have listed earlier. 4.2.4. Negotiating price The contemplation of three price issues underpins the drama of buying and selling. Hawkers juggle costs, demand and supply when pricing their food, summoning an intricate complex of economic knowledge. Not only do hawkers „need to know what the customers want‟ (Aziz), but they have to be alert to broader economic trends, such as changes in the Goods and Service Tax (GST) system: In the 1980s, there was no GST on food. Now wholesalers who buy from importers are charged GST. They include GST in wholesale prices. We pay the cost price of the chicken and GST but when we sell, the chicken comes in a package and GST is supposed to be included…We pay GST but don‟t earn it back. So my profit is very little – S$1 for 1kg of chicken. (Aziz) Fishmongers attend to the conditions in the fisheries. They also watch their cost and profit margins: After deducting the cost price, rent, electricity, water, money for ice, we think this selling price is reasonable and gives us a salary. Our salmon and codfish are imported, so cost can go up any time. Even if costs rise, I‟ll sell at the current price. I absorb the loss. Sometimes costs fall, and you don‟t cut the selling price either! That‟s how you pull back the price and cover cost. (Hui) Since many hawkers retail similar foods, they differentiate themselves in several manners. Most set comparable but flexible prices, have a troop of regulars, or practise a process of specialization that caters to customers of various class backgrounds: Lim and Ping‟s fish is predominantly from Malaysia, and Lim goes to Jurong Fishery daily to choose his stock. They have more middle class customers who are willing to pay for extremely fresh fish, and higher prices than other hawkers and the supermarket. Lee has a smaller number of middle class customers because his fish is cheaper but not as fresh. The working class flocks to Liao because his fish is very cheap but not fresh; it‟s very affordable, if one overlooks its staleness. (Fieldnotes, 30 June 2012) 86 Hawkers render what is termed as „personalized service‟ in popular imaginations of the marketplace; they chop, clean and pack foods skilfully and rapidly. „The ability to talk‟ constitutes part of this: What differentiates you from other hawkers is your manners and honesty. Greet them, ask them how they are. Remember what your customers like to eat. Cut and pack quickly and neatly. Thank them. That‟s how to differentiate yourself because there‟re many fishmongers who sell similar fish at similar prices. (Lee) Customers often engage hawkers in price bargaining, and the latter presents four responses. They stand firm, decrease prices on their terms, give in, or throw in another piece of food for free. Hawkers frequently remain firm. Mei‟s prices are fixed. Lim bars first-timers from bargaining. Automatic reductions are issued to regulars, and Aziz notes that regulars do not bargain. Indeed, Khuri (1968:703-704) elucidates that „the need for repeated consumption tends to reduce the bargaining time, or even eliminate bargaining altogether once a regular patronage has been established between merchant and customer‟. „Bargaining over any commodity takes place only once, after which the final price becomes customary to the bargaining partners concerned. In this sense, a customer saves time and bargaining if he establishes a life-long client relationship with those who serve him…not to be confused with friendship‟ (ibid.). Allusions to the hawker-customer relationship are strategically evoked to void customers‟ bargains: An elderly Malay lady asks Hakim to lower the price of potatoes from S$1.20 to S$1. “Cannot. S$1.20 already very cheap. Special price for you, my special friend.” Hakim winks at me. The price is really not „special‟; it was S$1.20 from the start of the day. (Fieldnotes, 1 June 2012) When hawkers lower prices on their conditions, they charge less for the final or cheapest food. Fishmongers depress their prices from 10am onwards, or when their 87 food is no longer fresh and they desire to sell it quickly. A buyer who bargains on an item is prompted to select another, and Hakim compensates for his loss by marking up the price of the second good. There are a few instances when hawkers surrender – when a middle price is agreed upon, when a depressed price still allows hawkers some profit, and when consumers vehemently insist on a lower price. Hawkers also add extra food to the customers‟ purchase, free-of-charge. They tend to do this with foods that are divisible into small, inexpensive amounts. Customers ask hawkers to „add a bit‟ more to their purchases, without increasing prices. So, hawkers give small gifts – a prawn, fish egg, skin and bones, a pinch of small fish such as silverfish or a loose vegetable. Hawkers prefer to „add a bit‟ than to bargain with customers over the price, because these add-on items do not cost much; fish skin and bones come with the entire fish, and are sometimes disposed. Buyers are ill-equipped in affixing prices to these parts if hawkers do not sell them; customers cannot gauge how much money they have saved. „Adding a bit‟, then, is a tacit form of price bargaining that hawkers yield against consumers, who usually do not know how much the free item costs. Brenner (1995; 1998) and Keane (2008) submit that, during bargaining, the final price is not solely a valuation of a good but mirrors something about the person of the bargainer, be it their moral fortitude – „Bargainers‟ character sucks!‟ (Aziz) – or their (economic) knowledge of the commodities and social skills in interaction. Therefore, bargaining is „a contest between specific kinds of socially acknowledged contestants in a specific kind of relationship, involving specific…values inhering both in the commodity and…actors‟ (Keane, 2008:35). Ultimately, hawkers‟ negotiation of price brings forth the economics of „the tricks of the trade‟, where these are paramount to their livelihood: 88 Business ideas, like how to balance costs and deal with bargaining, help me to survive the market. They make up my income, pay bills, keep my business going. (Mei) Most of the time, customers empathize when it comes to hawkers‟ dealings with price. They concur with the meanings that hawkers append to economic knowledge and price bargaining. Sally displays some knowledge of wider economic trends, and hawkers‟ cost and profit margins. She comments that hawkers, like everyone else, are assaulted by high inflation rates and rising costs. Charlotte understands the conditions of the fisheries; marketplace prices fluctuate according to the seasons, the amount of catch, and wholesale prices. Hence, my customerinterviewees refrain from price bargaining. Moreover, there is an implicit consensus that bargaining is not tolerated. Sally acknowledges that reductions are only given to regulars and those who purchase in bulk, and that hawkers „have to make money to live‟. Jessica concedes to „standard prices‟, although she used to bargain „for fun and the thrill‟. Madeline expects that prices will only be lowered marginally – „50 cents but not S$2‟. 4.2.5. A middle class drama of transactions I have delineated the drama of transactions that actors partake in. This theatre pans out through a reciprocal process between two parties. It commences with the erection of the front stage, and unfolds through talk. The classification of customers and negotiation of price undergird performances, influencing transactions quietly. Emotional resources, strategic manipulation and morality, information and power asymmetries, social differentiations and hierarchies, agency and creativity are scripted into the drama, as hawkers and customers negotiate four performance ingredients. These techniques are meaningful in their own terms, but are also instrumental to other ends such as winning customers. Thus, practices in Bedok Market carry social and 89 dramaturgical value that defies the notion of the marketplace as merely being a generator of material gain. I purport that a theatre that champions an appealing front stage, „the ability to talk‟, a cautious categorization of customers and consideration of price, is undertaken mostly with middle class buyers. It attracts my customer-interviewees who speak English, Mandarin and dialects, hold/held white collared jobs, and have at least an A level certificate. Some of my customer-interviewees live in private estates. In short, these four dramaturgical components come to life in a middle class theatre of buying and selling. However, Liao, a fishmonger, partakes in a drama of transactions that disregards the abovementioned performance ingredients. His exchanges resemble what I call a bargain hunt (Gregson and Crewe, 1997b)34 that overwhelmingly enlists working class actors. Now, I delve into the constituents of Liao‟s bargain hunt. 4.3. A working class theatre of transactions Liao resists the businessman role and its accompanying presentations, opting for interactions that are reminiscent of a bargain hunt. A wide berth separates Liao‟s front stage from his fellow hawkers‟. His display is alarmingly haphazard; his fish is not arranged according to its various types and sizes, but strewn all over the tray. Stock is not fresh (save for what Lim gives him), sparse, and of irregular sizes. Liao retails several species, but it is not uncommon to spot strays – a lone sicklefish or shark among a muddle of sea breams. Still, his food is incredulously cheap; an entire parang goes for S$24 at Lim‟s and Ping‟s, but merely S$10 at Liao‟s. Liao‟s prices are exceedingly low because he obtains low quality and assorted stock from his 34 Gregson and Crewe (1997b) inquire into the car boot sale in terms of the buying and selling performances or theatre, bargain hunting, and rituals of possession and exchange that happen in this space. I draw from the authors‟ understanding of the car boot sale as a bargain hunt to frame transactions at Liao‟s stall as a bargain hunt. 90 suppliers. This is cheaper than higher quality fish that is carefully chosen at the fisheries. Liao is sorely deficient in „the ability to talk‟. He does not attend to his customers‟ inquiries about his fish and questions their knowledge of food production and processing. Liao even scolds his customers with racist overtones: A lady and her maid buy fish. After Liao collects payment, he comments, in Hokkien, to his assistant-friend, “This maid‟s stupid. Naïve. She looks new!” Liao tells her to go to the side of his stall to get the fish, but she looks blank and lost, awaiting her madam‟s instructions. Liao gets irritated, “Come here and take the fish!” The maid reads his gestures, although she cannot understand Hokkien. Liao repeats, “Must be new. Very stupid and naïve.” His friend looks at her tanned skin, “Must be Indonesian. Looks like she‟s around 20.” (Fieldnotes, 6 September 2012) At times, Liao deceives his customers, albeit playfully: A lady looks at the squids and asks the price – S$8 per kg. “Why so expensive?” “Why do you want to reduce it? Actually it was S$10!” (Florence had been observing at Liao‟s the whole morning, and it never was S$10.) “What‟s more, it‟s pretty!” The lady says, “They‟re very small.” “The big ones are at the bottom.” (Florence thinks that Liao is lying.) The lady digs into the pile, concluding, “All the same!” Liao concedes, “The squids are rather small today.” She has no choice but buys the squids at S$8 per kg, and takes 1kg. (Fieldnotes, 31 August 2012) Liao‟s pricing system deviates from his counterparts‟. After a customer picks several kinds of fish, Liao weighs them together and charges a single price. I am always baffled; since different fish have dissimilar prices and weights, should their prices not be calculated separately? Of his work philosophy, Liao remarks that, „I don‟t have a system in selling. It‟s not accurate and I mix my fish. But no mixing fish and prawns.‟ Rather than striving to cut a good deal, „anything goes‟ (Liao). Degutting and slicing – personalized service – are unavailable or poorly executed: A lady asks Liao to cut a parang. He hammers it forcefully with a vertical motion. (In contrast, Lim slices fish swiftly, sharply, and gracefully.) All the 91 intestines, eggs and gills spill out. What a bloody mess; the insides are dangling from the head! Liao does not degut the fish, “Go home and remove it yourself.” The lady exclaims, “You cut terribly! If I had known, I wouldn‟t have asked you to cut!” Liao‟s assistant-friend agrees, “Yes, his cutting is terrible! He only knows how to sell. Sometimes he even tells the customer to bring the fish home and cut it herself!” (Fieldnotes, 29 August 2012) Despite Liao‟s detours from the businessman image, his stall is perpetually swamped and stock moves rapidly; he makes fantastic sales! This is because he permits customers to exercise their sensory food knowledge intensely; Liao‟s messy display invites zealous and extensive burrowing for the best fish, without his interference. Since Liao lacks a precise weighing and pricing system, customers may obtain more than the actual worth of the goods. Many customers engage in price bargaining, while Lim, Hui and Lee encounter fewer bargainers or refuse them with a flat no. Nonetheless, Liao usually does not relent or simply „adds a bit‟. Liao‟s drama of buying and selling, largely, attracts seasoned but working class shoppers who are unable or unwilling to spend large amounts of money on fish. His customers are usually the elderly, housewives, Malay or dialect speakers who are not conversant in English, hold blue-collared jobs, or are unemployed. Some potential buyers inquire into Liao‟s prices, and spend a moment to think about whether Liao‟s fish is worth the money. They transit to Liao‟s neighbours, repeating this process. Unlike my middle class, „look-see‟ customer-interviewees, these individuals scour Bedok Market for the lowest prices, eventually returning to Liao as they realize that he has the cheapest fish. I construe transactions at Liao‟s as a bargain hunt. His chaotic display contains unpredictable and unexpected finds, and encourages burrowing that mimics a treasure hunt. Playful deception pervades. A calculated pricing system is absent; rather, low prices and (attempted) haggling abound. Small amounts of money exchange hands. 92 Thrift constitutes a primary motivation for purchasing; after gathering information about (higher) prices in the marketplace, consumers return to „buy a saving‟ (Gregson and Crewe, 1997b) at Liao‟s. 4.4. Back stages of the drama Through front stage performances, actors gather the know-how of navigating the marketplace in the space itself. They amass „accumulated knowledge‟ (Gregson and Crewe, 1997a:99) – information grounded in practical experiences attainable only in Bedok Market. However, customers also prepare for performances in two „back stages‟ (Goffman, 1959), where they acquire „local knowledge‟ (Gregson and Crewe, 1997a:99) of manoeuvring the marketplace. „Local knowledge‟ refers to „geographical knowledge of network of places and sites, and of differences between places in particular areas‟ that is procured in spaces other than Bedok Market (ibid.). The kitchen is one back stage where actors evaluate the props – foods – on the front stage, and hawkers‟ claim of honesty. At home, as Madeline washes and packs Lim‟s prawns, she deploys her sensory food knowledge to look at, touch and smell his wares. She assesses Lim‟s cutting skills up close, the quality of his prawns, and his vouch of honesty – „he promised to give me only big prawns but there‟re three small ones!‟ As she cooks and consumes his food, she monitors its taste, „experiencing his fish‟. Satisfied, she is now Lim‟s regular. As I have indicated, in the hierarchy of senses in food consumption, taste overrides all senses, determining whether a customer returns. For Sally and Charlotte, the kitchen is a feminine space in which they were trained, by their mothers, in the skills and knowledge needed to navigate the front stage. When they were young housewives with only a budding stock of embodied food knowledge, their mothers scrutinized and appraised their purchases when they 93 returned from the marketplace. Their mothers imparted a sense of „how to see food, how food is produced and cooked, what foods there are and their prices‟; Sally and Charlotte were socialized into their mothers‟ comprehensive corpus of embodied food knowledge, which they require and practise when manoeuvring the front stage. The supermarket makes up another back stage. Here, customers are free to flex their embodied food knowledge. They inspect foods, refer to labels and brochures that list the name, price, origin, packing and expiry dates of the foods, and marvel at the range of foods available. The strengthening of their embodied food knowledge in the supermarket equips customers with the information necessary to perform on the front stage, where they often compare supermarket foods with marketplace ones. Hawkers occupy four back stages. Like customers, they cook in the kitchen, using their embodied food knowledge to evaluate their foods. Also, hawkers visit other marketplaces. Hakim notes that Bedok South Market was upgraded from February to October 2012, and dropped by in November. Observing the number of stalls, foods sold, prices, and the flow of customers in this marketplace enabled him to gauge the amount of competition the space may pose. On her free days, Hui visits the three supermarkets in Bedok,35 inspecting the freshness, prices and varieties of salmon and codfish. She surveys these against her stock. Should customers inquire about her higher prices, she explains that her fish is fresher and of superior quality; supermarket ventures hone Hui‟s „ability to talk‟. The front stage of Bedok Market doubles up as a back stage in the wee hours of the morning. Much menial labour is invested in erecting the front stage. Setting up involves travelling to the wholesale market to procure stock or having it delivered; cutting, sorting, arranging and replenishing stock; cleaning; weighing; stock taking; 35 There are three major supermarkets in Bedok: FairPrice, Sheng Siong and Giant supermarket. 94 price setting; preparing the day‟s orders and deliveries; buying ice and styrofoam boxes from sellers who make their rounds in the marketplace; replenishing the supply of plastic bags and loose change; buying and selling stock to fellow hawkers, to make up for slack stock; and having breakfast before the first customers stream in at about 5.30am. Such (physically exhausting) labour fortifies the hawkers‟ embodied food knowledge and price considerations – activities that underpin the drama of transactions. 4.5. Dramas of conflict, exclusion, and asymmetry Multiple dramaturgical ingredients animate buying and selling interactions in Bedok Market. When actors draw from the spectrum of techniques, transactions are rather uneventful and devoid of overt conflict. Still, actors sometimes fail to utilize these tactics, and clashes arise. Furthermore, one interviewee – Samantha – is painfully incompetent in marketplace performance components, and is cheated by hawkers who are well-versed in them. Thus, there are degrees of inclusion and exclusion in marketplace drama and asymmetries in the hawker-customer relationship, where a proficiency in the range of ingredients forms the basis of inclusion or exclusion and inequalities. Transactions turn surly when actors deviate from the abovementioned spectrum. I list four instances. Hawkers may prevent customers from exercising their sensory food knowledge when choosing food, and imbue exchanges with a streak of racism: My granddaughter loves soursop. The man had two beautiful ones. I‟m sure it won‟t cost more than S$7; at most more than S$10. I wanted one. His reaction was very funny. “No, you cannot touch or see. It‟s more than S$10.” So what? You mean it‟s S$10, so I‟m not going to buy? I thought I‟ll take half, give my daughter the other half. But the way he reacted! Maybe he thought, “Think this Indian lady can afford S$10? No!” We can have a friendly talk, give it to me; I‟m willing to pay! What? Want me to just give you money like that? I walked away. (Sally) 95 Conflict bursts forth when hawkers fail to upkeep the image of an accommodating businessman, and customers retaliate to „pushy‟ personas: A middle aged lady storms to Ting‟s stall; she‟s furious. Her maid trails behind. She tells her to remove a bundle of kangkong from her bag and turns to Ting. Lady: Why did you force this on her? She already said she didn‟t want it. Ting: I didn‟t. I asked her if she wanted it. She said yes. Maid: I didn‟t but he kept telling me to take it. He put it in my bag, took my money, sent me off. Lady: She says she doesn‟t want it, and I don‟t. Here‟s your vegetable, now return us the money. Ting: I didn‟t force her. I‟ll return the money but only this time. When I do business, I look at the person carefully to see what kind of person she is. Lady: Fine. You didn‟t force her. Now, the money. Maid: [Ting returns lady S$3.] Not S$3. S$3.50! Ting: S$3, not S$3.50. [To lady] You must teach your worker not to accuse people like that. Lady: I‟ll teach her to speak properly. She says it was S$3.50. Hand it over. [Ting refuses.] Lady: [To maid] Never mind. Just take S$3. Learn your lesson. Maid: He added too much cabbage. I told him I didn‟t want so much but he put it in. Lady takes the cabbage and demands a refund. Ting: I asked if this much is okay and she said yes. I weighed it very carefully! I won‟t cheat her. No, I‟m not returning the money. You go home and teach your maid proper manners. Lady: [To maid] Never mind. Keep the cabbage. Next time don‟t buy from this stall! Quick refusals also ensue when customers pit their sensory food knowledge against the hawkers‟: 96 An Indian lady looks at the silver pomfrets and asks Ping for the price. There are only three left, and Ping wants to sell them quickly. “S$18. Take all!” He whispers to me, “They‟re not fresh.” I agree. One has a red eye. All have a red tint near their gills. Ping asks if she wants to cut the fish. She waves him off and leaves. He raises his eyebrows, “That Indian lady knows how to see fish. She knew it‟s not fresh.” (Fieldnotes, 27 May 2012) Hostility is aroused when consumers are impolite to the hawkers: Florence and I are outside Mei‟s stall. A lady enters her stall. She had placed an order with Deng, Mei‟s sister, and left to run some errands. The order was not ready upon her return. She beckons Deng but Deng serves a younger customer first. Lady [in English, a language hawkers are not competent in]: I don‟t know how to do business, but I know there‟s a law called „first come, first serve‟. That‟s basic courtesy. We [refers to Florence and I] are English educated and know this but these people [Mei and Deng] don‟t! Young people [refers to the other customer] nowadays have no respect for old people! Mei quickly takes a whole chicken, weighs it and tells the lady it costs S$7.50. She pays Mei and leaves begrudgingly. Deng [in Mandarin]: Just because she has lots of money, she thinks she‟s the queen? She came first but wanted to choose her chicken, so I attended to others. Want me to wait? That‟s not the way to do business. This kind of customer is really rare; usually people don‟t say anything! (Fieldnotes, 1 August 2012) Some hawkers „do in‟ customers such as Samantha, who are handicapped in the dramaturgical techniques of buying and selling. In turn, Samantha jilts exchanges. She represents a supermarket shopper who is alien to marketplace theatre. Not only does she detest the „wet and smelly‟ marketplace, but her mastery of embodied food knowledge is fragile. She does not know how to „see, smell, and touch fish and meat‟ or know the range available, what more their production and consumption methods, prices, and weights. Samantha‟s lack of embodied food knowledge and confidence align her for asymmetrical transactions. Some fishmongers exploit Samantha‟s weaknesses and cheat her: 97 My mother-in-law said I should buy threadfin from Bedok North Market for the children. I didn‟t know which fishmonger was good, so I randomly picked one. I didn‟t even know what threadfin looks like, so I asked him in Mandarin, “Where‟s your threadfin?” He knew I didn‟t know the fish well. He just cut and gave me a price. I couldn‟t even reject because I can‟t bargain and didn‟t know the price…I couldn‟t act confident or like I knew my stuff…I was rehearsed to fail…And they speak Hokkien or Cantonese; I cannot relate. The second time I went to a different fishmonger. I said, “What fish is this?” “Silver pomfret.” “How much?” He already put the fish in the bag, told me to buy, take the bag. That‟s it. My mother-in-law came to my kitchen. Both times, she saw the fish. “Not fresh! How much did you buy the threadfin for?” “S$35.” “S$35 for that small piece? You were cheated! Next time you don‟t buy! I buy for you.” She delivers fish, chicken and pork from Chinatown, Bugis and Middle Road Markets to me. (Samantha) Because interacting with hawkers is stressful, Samantha‟s mother-in-law and mother – seasoned buyers – act on her behalf: When I was young, I followed my mother to the market. She‟s very good in languages. She goes to one stall, speaks in Cantonese. At another stall, Hokkien. Another, a bit Malay. Then Mandarin. She‟s very good at bargaining. She tells the fellow, “Don‟t bluff. You‟ve so much food you can‟t sell it.” If it‟s expensive, she takes some spring onions, “Here, add these in.” The hawker says, “Okay. Give you more.” They know each other well. (Samantha) Presently, Samantha shuns the marketplace completely; she favours the supermarket, which does not replicate asymmetrical hawker-customer relationships. She does not „meet nasty hawkers who don‟t attend to me because I don‟t know fish‟. She finds refuge in the interactions among supermarket patrons, and the situational cues or sensory landscape of the supermarket: The supermarket‟s so friendly, not like market hawkers and aunties. Choose whatever you want. Take your time, take the food and see. In the market, no! Hawkers say, “How much you want?” They give. That‟s the end; you‟ve no chance to react! Aunties bargain in the market, so they‟re quite nasty. In the supermarket, they know they can‟t – fixed prices – so they behave nicer…And air-con[ditioning] makes people relaxed; when you talk, people are more likely to answer nicely. (Samantha) 98 In the supermarket, Samantha does not require the know-how of navigating the marketplace – a developed corpus of embodied food knowledge. Confessing she has „no interest in cooking, so who cares if food is less fresh‟, she relies on situational cues to discern food quality: I buy fruits according to their seasons – when there‟s a lot on sale. I gauge. If the staff keep replenishing, I treat it as a season. When there‟re promotions, they really bring in a lot. In Sheng Siong, they call it the Korea or Taiwan fair, where they sell different fruits from different countries. If I see the staff, I ask, “What‟s the usual price?” “It‟s very worth buying for this price! It was more expensive!” “Which country is it from? When did the promotion start?” “We just opened the box today.” FairPrice gives free printed recipes! So simple; just follow the instructions and no need to ask any hawker or aunty for help! (Samantha) In Chapter 4, I have utilized Goffman‟s (1959) dramaturgical framework to shed light on buying and selling encounters between hawkers and customers. I have also alluded to the idea of marketplace performances as a type of „relational work‟, in which hawkers and customers define the hawker-customer bond, and frame buying and selling exchanges as economic transactions. Moreover, Bedok Market is simultaneously an inclusive and exclusive playing field for hawkers and customers who partake in relational work and the dramas of buying and selling. These actors display a remarkable sense of agency and creativity as they negotiate the four performance ingredients, and exchange foods, money, and food knowledge. A sense of liminality manifests as participants negotiate power relations that draw from cultural norms in Bedok Market. A range of dramaturgical techniques enforce conformity to these norms, and non-compliance results in negative consequences for the parties involved. In these ways, I contend that social organizations and meanings of sociality and performativity play out in the marketplace, but are also produced and maintained in this site. In Chapter 5, I muse 99 over the social memories of the vanishing marketplace, and consolidate the themes in Chapter 3 and 4. 100 Chapter 5. Narratives of the vanishing marketplace 5.1. Framing the narratives of the disappearing marketplace In the last four years, a number of neighbourhood wet markets have been shut down, and there has been some anxiety about the demise of these spaces. This death takes two forms: a gradual disappearance, where hawking is described as a sunset industry that is slowly fading; and a quick and sudden end, succinctly encapsulated in the 2009 Sheng Siong-Housing Development Board (HDB) saga.36 A torrent of memories was unleashed in response to the vanishing marketplace. Some stories revolved around the micro-level culture of the space, while others did not. In Chapter 5, I complement a meaning-centred approach (Wherry, 2012) to the culture of Bedok Market with a narrative angle to the memories of the disappearing marketplace. I elicit the tales of four groups – hawkers, customers, the National Heritage Board (NHB) staff and their collaborators on the Community Heritage Project, and heritage bloggers.37 By musing over the memories of diverse categories of individuals, I examine how their stories differentially invoke the qualities of marketplace socialities, embodied food knowledge, the sensory landscape of the marketplace, and notions of nostalgia and heritage. Put in another way, I tease out the varying extents and manners through which the groups engage the lived realities and logics of the marketplace – the heartbeat of Chapter 3 and 4 – or fail to do so. Multiple and heterogeneous narratives emerge from the four groups. Hawkers and customers are consumed by practical worries that ensue from the dying 36 I mentioned the Sheng Siong-HDB saga in Chapter 2. In 2009, Sheng Siong bought over six wet markets from private developers, and sought to convert them into supermarkets. Although HDB personnel eventually intervened to stem this conversion, a public furore arose in the media. Confronted with the possibility of the sudden demise of these six marketplaces, hawkers and members of the public seriously pondered over the meanings that they affixed to these spaces. Part of this reflexive project included the negotiation of „Singaporean‟ spaces, and what it meant to be „Singaporean‟. 37 I laid out NHB‟s definition of „heritage bloggers‟ in Chapter 1, and reiterate it here. „Heritage bloggers‟ refer to people who „share their passion for Singapore‟s past and present‟ by blogging about issues that relate to Singapore‟s past and „heritage‟ (NHB, 2012a). 101 marketplace, where these evoke marketplace relationships, embodied food knowledge, and the sensory atmosphere of the site. Hawkers articulate the difficulties of their trade at present and in the past. Buyers are inconvenienced by the disappearing marketplace, and express disdain for the embodied food knowledge and „situational cues‟38 (Figuie and Bricas, 2010) or sensory landscape of the supermarket. The narratives of both groups are devoid of nostalgia and heritage. These actors are resigned to the gradual vanishing of the contemporary marketplace. NHB staff attend to the present marketplace, but position themselves as formal, armchair historians, as custodians of a national narrative and „social heritage‟, and as instructors. Their Community Heritage Project inserts the marketplace into „The Singapore Story‟, and is emblematic of what Goh (2007) coins as „History N‟ or national history. History N fails to shed light on the lived realities of the marketplace. Then, the space is romanticized from afar as a „living museum‟ of history, and as an educational site. These are processes through which NHB staff impose normative and ideal(istic) portraits of what the marketplace should be, and gloss over what the space is really like. Bloggers view the marketplace through the eyes of a child and tourist. When they occupy these roles, they disembody and exoticize the everyday rhythms and actors of the space. Bloggers relate a sense of nostalgia in their reminiscences, and objectify the space as a site of memory. Critical of the History N that NHB staff worship, they voice „Histories A‟ (Goh, 2007) or alternative definitions of „heritage‟. 38 In Chapter 3, I employed Figuie and Bricas‟ (2010) concept of „situational cues‟ to denote the environment of the place of sale as perceived by the senses. In other words, situational cues refer to cognitive and „indirect qualification procedures [that] link the subject and object through the intermediary of a third party[,] enabling the quality of the product to be evaluated‟ (ibid.:179). In Chapter 5, when I talk about the situational cues of the wet or supermarket, I mean the atmosphere of the wet or supermarket as perceived by the senses. I use what I call the „sensory landscape‟ or „sensory atmosphere‟ of the wet or supermarket interchangeably with the term „situational cues‟. 102 In addition, bloggers express a sense of alienation from the contemporary marketplace. Rather, they are attached to its 1960 counterpart – a space that no longer exists.39 5.2. Of hardship and resignation: the hawkers‟ narrative Conceding that the contemporary marketplace is slowly dying, hawkers speak about the present difficulties of their trade. These hardships pertain to alterations over time in marketplace ties, the set up of the space, embodied food knowledge, the sensory atmosphere of the site, and price. The first component of the hawkers‟ story about their present difficulties relates to two marketplace relationships. Over the years, Hakim has witnessed many vegetable sellers leave the trade one by one; they were probably unable to survive the competition from the supermarket. He misses the jokes, conversations and friendship they shared – features of hawker-hawker anchored personal relationships. Besides the annulment of some anchored personal ties, hawkers point to a lack of successors who desire to take over their business. Chapter 3 notes that familial ties propel hawkers into the trade, and these bonds have a tint of obligation, hardship, and filial piety. Such associations are absent today. Not only is Lee‟s son unwilling to take over Lee‟s business, but he does not even wish to help his father now. Neither do hawkers intend to pass their stalls to their children, who may be highly educated and overly qualified for the profession. Aziz‟s three sons have university degrees and hold white collared jobs. Lim‟s daughter is pursuing a Masters degree in Psychology in the United Kingdom, and has absolutely no intention of taking over Lim‟s stall. It seems that hawking may cease to be a family business. These dynamics are contrary to the 39 The bloggers constantly talk about the marketplace of their childhood, before the government set out to relocate street peddlers into newly built wet markets and hawker centres in the late 1960s. I call this the 1960s marketplace. This 1960s marketplace is often compared to the renovated wet markets we see today. I refer to these new wet markets as the present or contemporary marketplace. 103 functions of familial relationships in Chapter 3, and accelerate the decline of the marketplace. Another hardship that hawkers endure relates to the strenuous nature of setting up their stalls everyday. Lee foregrounds his fatigue from the tasks that go into preparing his stall and his desire to retire someday: Selling fish is full of hardship. I get up in the wee hours of the morning, drive to Jurong to get stock, come back and set up the stall. You need much skill and energy to arrange the fish, cut and clean it quickly and neatly. All these tire me, and I hope to retire sometime. (Lee) As Chapter 4 highlights, hawkers monitor their cost and profit margins closely when negotiating price. In the face of the disappearing marketplace, some hawkers find it increasingly challenging to cover the cost of operating their business and reap profits: I sublet my stall for S$1000. It‟s difficult to get my own stall. Last time, the government gave stalls to the poor so they could make money. Their rent was low. Now rent is high and stalls are difficult to get. Expenses are high: S$1000 for rent; S$35 per day for transport; money for stock, electricity and water. Profit is low: S$1 for 1kg of whole chicken; S$0.50 for 1kg of wings. Very hard to make ends meet and sustain the business. (Aziz) The competition that the supermarket poses also features prominently in the hawkers‟ narrative of hardship. Of the six supermarket chains in Singapore,40 hawkers notice that many people flock to FairPrice and Sheng Siong. In recent years, the physical setting of the marketplace, price considerations, the range of foods retailed, and the sensory landscape of the marketplace have been „transposed‟ (Stillerman and 40 The six supermarket chains are Cold Storage, Giant Hypermarket, FairPrice, Prime Supermarket, Sheng Siong, and (Jason‟s) Market Place. Giant Hypermarket bought over Shop N Save in 2013. Sheng Siong and FairPrice pose the most competition to the wet market for the reasons listed in this section, and because they are the dominant players in the market. As of 2013, FairPrice has 96 FairPrice stores. In addition, it has nine FairPrice Finest outlets, and six FairPrice Xtra hypermarkets (Quek, 2012). FairPrice Finest supermarkets and FairPrice Xtra hypermarkets „carry a wider variety of products as well as international and organic produce‟ than FairPrice supermarkets (Quek, 2011). As of 2013, Sheng Siong has at least 31 outlets (Quek, 2012). Its selling point is its „extensive live seafood section including oysters, and mussels [with] interesting finds [such as] Adabi soup spices…and ready-made lontong‟ (Quek, 2011). 104 Salcedo, 2012)41 to the supermarket. When it pertains to the (cost) price of fish in the wet and supermarket, Hui says that Sheng Siong has a plethora of inexpensive fish; it makes bulk purchases at low prices, and retails its fish cheaply. Sheng Siong deepfreezes most of its stock, and sells it bit by bit throughout the week. Hui, however, procures a lower quantity of fish everyday at higher prices, and retails it more expensively. Her stock cannot be kept for more than two days because it will lose its freshness. The dynamics that Hui outlines – supermarkets are a severe threat to wet markets because they sell similar foods at lower prices – resonate with Lim and Ping. Their sales have plummeted over the years, because many of their regulars now purchase (cheaper) seafood from Sheng Siong. Hawkers comment that the physical setting of Sheng Siong bears striking resemblance to the marketplace. It has a seafood section where there are tanks of live fish, and a series of whole and cut ones. Customers enjoy personalized services; Sheng Siong staff artfully slices their fish however they like it. When it comes to the situational cues or sensory landscape of the supermarket, Sheng Siong is „wet, smelly, bloody‟, and populated by a Mandarin-speaking staff. In 2011, Sheng Siong opened Elias 1 Station Market, an air-conditioned, hybrid wet-cum-supermarket that is partitioned into a wet and dried goods section. (Besides seafood, Sheng Siong sells other inexpensive fresh and dried foods in these two sections. These foods are retailed in transparent packets or loose form.) Although Sheng Siong states that „the premises remain a wet market with stalls run by individuals selling a variety of fresh produce and setting their own prices‟ (Lim, 2010), 41 I borrow the term „transposed‟ or „transposition‟ from Stillerman and Salcedo‟s (2012) study of how consumers interpret and appropriate malls in Santiago, Chicago. They argue that „Santiago‟s patterns of socio-economic segregation and ample public transport facilitate cross-cultural interactions in malls…encouraging visitors to transpose practices and meanings from other public settings to the mall, drawing on rules for public interaction. Residents adapt mall infrastructures for noncommercial uses and engage in informal and formal resistance, reflecting conflicts between abstract and social space‟ (ibid.:309). 105 the space imitates the physical setting and sensory landscape of a supermarket. It has dry floors, digital weighing scales, cashier terminals and bar code scanners, and longer opening hours. Supermarkets do not merely replicate wet markets, but absorb them too. The strong competition from the supermarket is compounded by changes in the demographic profiles of customers who (refuse to) patronize the marketplace. Hawkers observe that their customers are mostly the middle aged or elderly, and this group has shrunk over the years. On the flip side, hawkers lament about the attitudes that the young have towards the marketplace, and render that these are vital in inciting the death of the space. A dearth of embodied food knowledge looms among young customers. They lack the sensory food knowledge or „body cues‟ (Figuie and Bricas, 2010) necessary in food selection: Young customers don‟t know how to pick or choose fish. “Give me 1kg of this, 1kg of that.” That‟s how they order. Those who know how to choose fish are different. They take time to look at, smell, feel, appreciate the fish. (Hui) Young customers are impoverished in the knowledge of food preparation. „They don‟t know how to cut chicken, what more cook it‟ (Mei). More importantly, the young are nonchalant about their deficiencies in the knowledge of manoeuvring the marketplace. They are more than happy to patronize the supermarket, where the price and quality of foods are lower: Young people don‟t care if the fish is fresh or nice to eat. The supermarket‟s fish is not fresh or tasty. But they don‟t care! As long as it‟s cheap and fills their stomach. (Hui) Hawkers reckon that the young are repulsed by the situational cues of the marketplace: Young people are very particular about cleanliness. To them, the market is wet, smelly and dirty, so they don‟t come. They don‟t like the sight or smell of live 106 animals or blood; they won‟t even go near those! That‟s why these people avoid the seafood section in Sheng Siong – it‟s dirty and wet – and head for the dry section. (Betty, Mei‟s daughter) Hawkers claim that it is hard for young, working adults to integrate grocery shopping into their daily schedule. Working adults work on weekday mornings, and cannot shop in the marketplace then. Because they work long hours, they have little energy to prepare dinner and opt to eat out. Thus, there are few reasons to patronize the marketplace. If young adults go grocery shopping, they gravitate towards the supermarket because they favour its sensory atmosphere. Hakim comments that the young like the dry and air-conditioned supermarket. The soft music and sterilized scents of the supermarket make for a pleasant shopping experience. Moreover, supermarkets have long operating hours: Sheng Siong opens from 7am to 10pm daily, and many FairPrice outlets run for 24 hours. The marketplace, on the other hand, operates from 4am to 1pm and closes on Monday. Lee remarks that „the supermarket caters to working couples who work until 6pm or 7pm. After dinner, they go grocery shopping and get everything in the supermarket. Why come to the market when the supermarket‟s a one-stop place for everything?‟ The attitudes of the young towards the marketplace and supermarket signify the process of „distantiation‟ that accompanies the modernization of the food system (Figuie and Bricas, 2010:174). The proliferation of supermarkets and disappearance of marketplaces are signs of this modernization (ibid.:178). Distantiation connotes the increased distance between production and consumption (sites), products and consumers, which surfaces during industrialization and urbanization (also see Malassis, 1979; Fonte, 2002). Distantiation bears upon the food qualification processes of the young through the demise of sensory food knowledge, and the 107 heightened importance allocated to disembodied signifiers of food quality in food selection, preparation, and consumption. These disembodied indicators include pre-packed foods that impede direct contact with foods, and strip buyers of the ability to evaluate foods using their senses (Figuie and Bricas, 2010:179). They also refer to the presentation of packaged foods – the use of brands, labels, plastic or styrofoam boxes to provide printed information about foods such as the weight, price, packed date, and expiry date. Therefore, the expertise and power of decision-making about the production, selection, consumption, and freshness of foods are transferred from the customers‟ senses and embodied food knowledge, to the sellers‟ or supermarket‟s formal knowledge about foods (ibid.:190). The young believe that the sensory landscape of the place of sale is crucial in deciding where to shop. The luscious music and sanitized scents of the supermarket attract young customers (ibid.). In other words, these are qualities that are contrary to the embodied ones that are deployed in navigating the marketplace (see Chapter 4). Also, the vanishing marketplace conjures up tales about the past difficulties of hawking, where these invoke the labour invested in the profession, and the inadequate equipment from which the hawkers plied their trade. Having sold fish since he was nine, the backbreaking character of preparing the stall in the old Joo Chiat Market is still etched in Lee‟s mind. Some fishmongers complain about the equipment from which they sold fish in the old marketplace. Aluminium sheets were placed on wooden planks. Fishmongers set their wares and ice on these sheets and hawked from there. There were no refrigerators to store foods, so foods perished quickly. The supply of water was not constant. In short, the disappearing marketplace brings to mind memories of the inconveniences of the physical set up of the old marketplace. 108 The present (and renovated) marketplace greatly alleviates these hardships, and hawkers appreciate the „cleaner and more hygienic market‟ (Lee) today: After the government renovated the market several times, our conditions really improved. We had proper partitions. The ground was tiled. We had proper display trays and a fixed water supply. There were refrigerators! Life was a great improvement from last time! (Lee) Hawkers piece together a tale of present and past hardships vis-à-vis the dying marketplace. These are practical concerns that recall marketplace socialities, the set up of the stalls, embodied food knowledge, the sensory atmosphere of the space, and price matters – the subjective rhythms of the marketplace in Chapter 3 and 4. A sense of resignation follows these worries and the gradual vanishing of the contemporary marketplace. Nostalgia and heritage – aspects of the NHB staff‟s and bloggers‟ narratives, as we will see – are negligible: We‟re old, so we‟re not really particular about the market dying out. If we‟re eliminated by the supermarket soon, we‟ve no choice. There‟s no way around it as the market‟s slowly disappearing. It had its good days before the supermarkets took away our business, and when we were still making money. If it‟s time to let go of the market, there‟s nothing we can do. (Hui) 5.3. Of inconvenience and resignation: the customers‟ narrative Some customer-interviewees have been shopping in the four marketplaces in Bedok since adolescence. I asked my customer-interviewees if they would miss the different kinds of socialities that animate the marketplace. They would not. They barely knew other customers, and did not know the hawkers very well either. When I raised the subject of the declining marketplace, my customerinterviewees conveyed that business in these spaces was brisk in the 1960s, and gradually dipped after their renovations in the 2000s. Bedok South Market is a case in point: 109 Some hawkers didn‟t return after the renovation. The market became too big and really quiet. Last time it was very crowded; the stalls were swamped. Now there‟re only a few people walking around during the weekends. (Madeline) As evidenced, the notion of the vanishing marketplace often engenders comparisons of the 1960s marketplace and its contemporary counterpart. My customer-interviewees discern variations in the types of foods sold, their prices, and the freedom to uninhibitedly select their foods. These changes are not viewed favourably; my customer-interviewees prefer the ways these activities were performed in the 1960s marketplace. A wider variety of foods was retailed in the past. Prices were lower. Customers took their time to choose their foods; hawkers permitted customers to exercise their sensory food knowledge more leisurely and liberally. My customer-interviewees claim that, at present, these qualities are less common in the buying and selling transaction. They miss these features of the 1960s marketplace. Nonetheless, my customer-interviewees positively perceive the alterations in price bargaining. Price bargaining flourished in the 1960s but hawkers are less tolerant of it today. Charlotte notes that many hawkers now have fixed prices, and some even have price tags. Two customer-interviewees welcome the minimization of price bargaining at present. Charlotte says that „prices are more transparent so I can estimate whether the food is worth buying. Gives me more time to think rather than haggle with hawkers and get upset‟. Jessica feels that „fixed prices are controlled prices, so I don‟t feel like I‟m cheated or paying more for something I can get cheaper elsewhere‟. Thus, while customer-interviewees miss some performance components in the 1960s marketplace, they are glad for the changes that other aspects have undergone. Mixed receptions also surface in the ways in which customers take to the changes in the sensory landscape of the marketplace. Jessica fondly reminisces about 110 the groups of men who gathered daily in the fringe of Bedok South Market, and the vibrant atmosphere during Chinese New Year. These activities no longer occur today: Last time, Bedok South Market was full of activity! There were older men in singlets who gathered outside the market, listening to songbirds. They competed to see whose songbird was the prettiest and sang the sweetest. During Chinese New Year, lanterns and spring couplets were hung. Sometimes there‟ll even be lion dances. The market was packed with people making big orders. Now the songbirds and people have disappeared. (Jessica) Although customers recall the pleasures associated with the sensory landscape of the 1960s marketplace, like the hawkers, they do not neglect the sensory inconveniences of this space: Before the renovation, Bedok Market was very dark, dirty, wet. It stunk to high heavens! The floor was unpaved and had pools of dirty water. Rats ran all over – even over your feet! The stalls were cramped together; there were no partitions. Hawkers didn‟t have refrigerators to store their meats, so they put their meats on big slabs of ice. They had cement tops or hangers to hang foods, and foods were exposed to all the filth. Shopping there was horrifying! (Charlotte) The sensory difficulties of buying and selling in old Bedok Market are not written out either: Last time, live chickens were slaughtered on the spot. You chose a chicken and the hawkers cut its throat and immersed it in a basin of hot water. The chicken shrieked as it was killed. After it was removed from the basin, it was defeathered and cut. Feathers and innards flew everywhere, and there was much blood. Very messy and unhygienic! (Sally) In contrast, customers prefer the sensory landscape of the renovated marketplace. It is „much cleaner, brighter, drier and hygienic‟ (Madeline): Markets today are much cleaner than in the past. Hawkers have proper stalls and partitions. They have better equipment – trays and refrigerators to put foods. The ground is tiled and not wet with dirty puddles. Now Bedok Market is closed every few months for cleaning. So today‟s markets are much better. Good; I like the change! (Madeline) 111 Customers bring up the transposition of the physical setting of the present marketplace to the supermarket. Like the hawkers, they credit the demise of the marketplace with this shift. Customers understand this transposition by evaluating the supermarket using the embodied food knowledge needed to navigate the supermarket, and the situational cues of the supermarket. The narrative about the embodied food knowledge and sensory landscape of the supermarket is largely dismal. The supermarket offers a limited range of foods. Food is not fresh. Frozen foods are abundant, but these are of lower quality and taste compared to fresh foods. Customers dislike the situational cues of Sheng Siong‟s seafood section; they emphasize the sensory inconveniences of the supermarket. Air-conditioning causes this section to stink. The stench is enclosed in a small area and not allowed to dissipate. Customers are divided about the ability to flex their sensory food knowledge in the supermarket. Madeline spots customers who employ their sensory food knowledge to choose loose foods such as prawns: Madeline: One thing good about FairPrice is, even small prawns, people can pick and choose. This lady bought 2kg but really picked one by one – the small not big prawns, mind you! The staff came to pour some more. Wah! Everyone rushed! Florence: Because they‟re not the owners, so the staff don‟t bother. If you‟re the owner, you don‟t want them to spoil. Madeline: The staff leader doesn‟t care! But the supervisor scolded the customers and said cannot pick and choose. But customers don‟t care! They like picking! If you pick like that in the market, hawkers will scold you! Still, packaged foods hinder the deployment of sensory food knowledge. Packages conceal, from the senses, the precise conditions of foods: Cut fish are packed, so you cannot choose what you really want. You choose packets, not a part from a whole. For packed fish, you cannot see or touch the back of the fish because you cannot open the packet. What if the back is dented? (Charlotte) 112 The event that epitomized the abrupt disappearance of the marketplace is the 2009 Sheng Siong-HDB saga. I was interested in what my customer-interviewees thought about it. They emitted a guise of detachment and practicality. Charlotte pointed out that the marketplaces acquired were small and inaccessible. Their closure might not affect the residents much, if they could access bigger marketplaces and supermarkets nearby. Since my customer-interviewees did not patronize the six marketplaces, their potential closure did not affect my customer-interviewees‟ shopping routine or bother them in general. They were more concerned about the four marketplaces in Bedok, since they shopped there. This pushed me to pose a hypothetical scenario: how will my customerinterviewees react to a sudden closure of Bedok‟s four marketplaces? They claimed that this would merely inconvenience them. Their shopping routine would be disrupted, and they would flock to other wet markets or supermarkets. They would miss flexing their sensory food knowledge in the marketplace. Although they would cling on to the bleak account of embodied food knowledge and situational cues about the supermarket, they would simply resign themselves to shopping in the supermarket. I have illustrated that, among hawkers and customers, practical worries sprout from the dying marketplace. Both groups are resigned to the vanishing of the present marketplace, and their narratives are starkly devoid of nostalgia and heritage. Rather, these matters are engrafted into the memories that NHB staff and bloggers articulate, and I turn to them now. 5.4. Of formal history and „social heritage‟: NHB‟s narrative In 2012, NHB staff embarked on a Community Heritage Project that „document[ed] our community heritage…of living in the heartlands‟ (NHB, 2012b:4). The project concentrated on three „social heritage spaces‟ – provision shops, wet 113 markets, and void decks. Travelling exhibitions of the marketplace were put up in several marketplaces, community centres, and schools. Community Heritage Series II: Wet markets, was released in 2012. I muse over the ways in which NHB staff construct the marketplace vis-à-vis its disappearance, and contemplate the positions that the staff take in relation to the subjective characteristics of the space. In the Community Heritage Project, NHB staff come across as formal historians and documenters. Their project reviews the history of marketplaces in precolonial and colonial Singapore, and the development of marketplaces and hawker centres from the 1960s onwards. It also records what the staff render as the „unique characteristics of wet markets‟. Community Heritage Series II explains how the term „wet market‟ came about. Another „unique characteristic‟ lies in the „nature of transactions‟ in the marketplace. NHB staff render that stallholders offer „personalized services‟ and allow bargaining: Markets offer personalized services because many stallholders are familiar with the preferences of their regulars…Some stallholders may give a better deal to their regulars by rounding down the total price or adding in free goods such as an extra bunch of vegetables. Till today, transactions…are mostly verbal and bargaining is still widely practised. (ibid.:11) A third feature is the fluctuations in food prices according to variations in demand and supply, and throughout the day: Prices of goods…fluctuate due to variations in demand and supply. When supply is affected due to droughts or monsoon rains, prices are similarly affected…There are also seasonal price variations especially during the festive periods…Prices of fresh produce...see variations within the course of a day. By late morning or mid-day, some stallholders will reduce prices…to cut their losses and maximize sales before they close for the day. (ibid.:11) I argue that the NHB staff have simplified ideas about the „unique characteristics‟ of the marketplace. As Chapter 3 mentions, „personalized services‟ are a means of doing relational work – and „doing business‟ – and forging transitory 114 relationships that accrue economic advantages for hawkers. Transitory ties accommodate a bounded notion of intimacy and closeness. Hawkers only know their regulars‟ food preferences, shopping habits and bits of information about their family – nuggets of knowledge about the regulars‟ private lives, since sharing is minimized and anonymity is the order of the day. „Personalized services‟ too need to be understood as a way through which hawkers differentiate themselves from others who retail similar foods, in order to negotiate price and cultivate a set of regulars, as Chapter 4 unveils. Furthermore, NHB staff have an underdeveloped picture of the bargaining that occurs during transactions. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, hawkers respond in four manners to price bargaining: they dismiss it, lower prices on their conditions, give in, or „add a bit‟. In the negotiation of price, some customers empathize with the hawkers who are concerned with costs, and refrain from price bargaining. Others comment that price bargaining is disallowed in the present marketplace. Although it is true that prices fluctuate according to changes in demand and supply, and throughout the day, NHB staff do not capture other possible reasons for price variations. Chapter 4 shows that in the middle class drama of exchanges, some fishmongers classify their customers according to their class positions, trusting that class statuses affect the price that customers are willing and able to pay for a highly differentiated food. In sum, the Community Heritage Project proffers rudimentary ideas about the lived rhythms of marketplace socialities and theatre. NHB staff appear as formal, armchair historians and researchers who document the marketplace from a distance, and are ill-equipped in excavating the complex and multifarious realities on the ground. 115 The project closes by interrogating what NHB staff perceive as „challenges for the wet market‟ today – competition from the supermarket and hypermarket, the lack of succession and staff to take over businesses, and the evolution of the marketplace. Unfortunately, the description of this evolution writes out the nuances of the transposition of the marketplace setting to the supermarket. Evan, who spearheaded the project, discloses that his staff used these methods to put the project together. They dipped into archival and academic research on „the history and heritage of markets‟, conducted one-off interviews with selected stallholders and customers, and „projected ahead to see what the future prospects of the market are‟ and „whether markets are disappearing‟ (Evan). This methodology and project focus emit a guise of „objectivity‟, typical of a top-down and authoritarian historian: At NHB, we try to be objective when we gather data and do research. We‟re interested in the history and heritage of the markets and the characteristics of the market, being the National Heritage Board. Less on the sociological aspects or ethnography. (Evan, emphasis his) During my interview with Evan, I divulged that some heritage bloggers question the institutional definition of „heritage‟ – that in Singapore, conservation largely translates into the preservation of facades or physical structures of spaces, while the ways of life and peoples in these spaces are not saved. Evan admits that „this is an issue we [NHB staff] always wrestle with when dying or traditional trades are concerned. Our hands are tied because markets fall under NEA, a separate statutory board. The preservation of physical structures falls under the Preservation of Sites and Monuments.42 There‟s only so much we can do.‟ Ultimately, NHB staff can only 42 The Preservation of Sites and Monuments is „the national authority that advises on the preservation of nationally significant sites and monuments in Singapore‟ (http://www.nhb.gov.sg/NHBPortal/AboutUs/OurFamily/PreservationofSitesandMonuments/AboutPS M/AboutPreservationofSitesandMonuments?_afrLoop=2722548607195188&_afrWindowMode=0&_a 116 document these trades and spaces, and „bring out the historical and heritage bit‟ (Evan). NHB staff appear as formal historians who simply „document‟43 a linear, „objective‟, and unproblematic history and past, and who distance themselves from what Goh (2007) terms as „Histories A‟ or alternative definitions of heritage. Rather, the bloggers‟ memories of the disappearing marketplace are exemplary of Histories A, and I will flesh out their stories in the next section. As the „custodians of Singapore‟s heritage‟, NHB staff „champion the development and promotion of a vibrant culture and heritage sector‟ that „tells The Singapore Story, shares the Singaporean experience and imparts our Singapore spirit‟ (NHB, 2012c). This is accomplished via „our national culture, heritage programmes, festivals and activities [that] connect the past, present and future generations through a shared experience‟ and heritage (ibid.). NHB staff endorse two forms of „heritage‟. The first is „museum‟ or „institutional heritage‟ which documents, curates, and presents national and milestone events through national museums and exhibitions, community heritage institutions, heritage interpretation centres and precincts (ibid.). „Museum heritage‟ is pieced together by the „experts‟ for the „community‟, and deals with the „hard, historical facts of “history” and “origins”‟ – „we return to the past to see how things started‟ (Evan). Its version of „The Singapore Story‟ is top-down, formalized, institutional, and hegemonic. Presently, NHB actively promotes what it coins as „social‟, „community‟ or „heartland heritage‟. „Social heritage‟ incorporates „community stories‟ and zooms in frWindowId=16sow6olic_1#%40%3F_afrWindowId%3D16sow6olic_1%26_afrLoop%3D2722548607 195188%26_afrWindowMode%3D0%26_adf.ctrl-state%3D16sow6olic_110). This board makes up one of the several divisions in NHB. 43 NHB staff and journalists use these terms repeatedly to refer to the process of putting together the Community Heritage Project: „document‟, „research‟, „collect‟, „chronicle‟, „map‟, „record‟, „compile‟ and „capture‟. 117 on „spaces in the heartlands or common spaces where Singaporeans gather and interact‟ (Evan). These spaces are familiar and everyday ones that „form part of Singaporeans‟ growing up years‟, and Singaporeans have „fond and nostalgic memories‟ of them (Evan). Through „social heritage‟, NHB staff strive to relate the national narrative „in collaboration with the community, for the community‟ (NHB, 2012d:20). Because ordinary Singaporeans are co-narrators, „social heritage‟ tells „The Singapore Story‟ from the ground-up. This move is supposed to „take heritage engagement to the next level‟ – „empowerment‟ – because Singaporeans display a „sense of ownership towards our shared past and identity‟ (ibid.:4). The Community Heritage Project is paramount in consolidating and advocating the objectives of „social heritage‟, because „it explores topics close to the hearts of Singaporeans‟, and its travelling exhibitions „bring our multicultural heritage to the doorsteps of Singaporeans in shared spaces, such as schools, libraries, community centres and even wet markets‟ (ibid.:20). The project too „preserves, documents and presents our intangible heritage and culture‟ for future generations, in light of the disappearance of some heritage spaces (NHB, 2012b:1). The marketplace is framed as a „social heritage space‟ that meets the aforementioned criteria: [Wet markets] represent shared experiences, emotional attachments and nostalgic memories for Singaporeans who associate markets with their growing up years and daily lives. (NHB, 2012e:29) As a „social heritage space‟, the marketplace is thought to shed light on „the Singaporean way of life‟ (ibid.:1). The space „serves the basic needs of Singaporeans and…[is] a source of livelihood for…stallholders‟ (ibid.:3) because it „offer[s] a wide range of fresh meats and vegetables at affordable and often “bargainable” prices‟ 118 (ibid.:1). Furthermore, the marketplace is assumed to extend a „unique sensory experience‟: The early morning hustle and bustle, scents of fish and raw meat intermingling with curry powder and fresh flowers, and shouts of stall owners attempting to attract more customers. These sights, sounds and smells are part of our shared Singapore experience. (ibid.) The marketplace is upheld as a „microcosm of Singapore‟s multicultural society‟ (ibid.): It is at our markets where visitors can find a Malay stall selling mutton next to a Chinese stall selling vegetables or fish, or an Indian stall selling spices and condiments. (ibid.) Markets are important social spaces where residents of diverse backgrounds can meet and interact while purchasing cheap and fresh produce as well as household groceries…They are a common ground for Singapore‟s ethnically diverse population to interact and bond, and contribute to Singapore‟s vibrant community heritage. (ibid.:29; 3) Most significantly, the marketplace is deemed to be a „social space‟. „Personalized relationships and lasting friendships are forged…between residents and stallholders‟ (ibid.:29): Shopping is a community experience – visitors know they can receive friendly and personalized services from stallholders they patronize regularly – often over many years. (ibid.:1) Supposedly, close ties are fostered among residents who patronize their neighbourhood market (together): Markets are common spaces where all Singaporeans, irrespective of race, language or religion, can mingle while purchasing fresh produce and other household necessities…It is a common sight to see friends and neighbours visiting markets together. (ibid.) Overall, marketplaces are presumed to enhance „community‟ and „neighbourhood relations‟ (NHB, 2012e:29): 119 Wet markets contribute to the building of community ties and establishment of cohesive neighbourhood communities, especially in Singapore‟s modernized high-density HDB living. (ibid.) The abovementioned conceptions of the marketplace as a „social heritage space‟ are extremely idealized and romanticized, out of touch with actual marketplace socialities. The idea that personalized and perennial friendships manifest between the hawkers and customers is contrary to transitory hawker-customer relationships, and the nature of these ties. That residents bond through grocery trips completely overlooks fleeting customer-customer relationships. Chapter 3 asserts that friends become strangers; conventions of friendship do not hold in the marketplace but resume outside it. Neither do unknowns mingle with one another; they practise civil inattention or occasionally band together against the hawkers for the practical purpose of getting a good buy. The marketplace is not, like what NHB staff assume, a space where Singaporeans gather to socialize. Some customers do not patronize the wet market in their residential area but „hop‟ across several marketplaces, as Chapter 4 lays out. In these senses, „neighbourhood communities‟ are not built in the marketplace. That the marketplace contributes to „the Singaporean way of life‟ as a „unique sensory experience‟ and „microcosm of Singapore‟s multicultural society‟ reeks of national rhetoric and propaganda. „Multiculturalism‟, „multiracialism‟, and „racial harmony‟ are ideologies that the state uses to frame the ethnically and religiously heterogeneous populations in Singapore. These terms are also frequently associated with a sense of national identity or what it means to be „Singaporean‟; Singaporeans are taught that Singapore is a „multicultural country‟. In sum, NHB staff enshrine a normative narrative of what the marketplace should ideally be – a reflection of Singapore‟s multicultural fabric – rather than what it realistically is. 120 My arguments that NHB staff have premature notions of the „unique characteristics‟; that the positioning of the marketplace as a „social space‟ is heavily romanticized; and that the conception of the space as a „Singaporean way of life‟ is ideological, find a home with Goh‟s (2007) concept of „History N‟. As a form of national history, NHB‟s narrative anteriorizes both the ethnographic and multifaceted rhythms of the marketplace, and the bloggers‟ Histories A. It segments the history of the marketplace into the temporal stages of past, present and future, choreographing these in a linear and neat fashion (ibid.:317). Understandings about the marketplace are also used to serve the state‟s communitarian ideology (Chua, 1995a cited in Goh, 2007:317). This communitarian ideology, along with normative conceptions of the marketplace, frames „Singapore society‟ as a mythological Asian communitarian society which is placed in an unspecified and unspecificable distant past (Chua, 1995a). Thus, the myth of communitarianism is a utopian vision that reinvents a cherished past (ibid.). Finally, NHB staff employ the marketplace for educational purposes. In their project, the staff partner primary schools to organize Learning Journeys44 to the neighbourhood markets that they document. I will demonstrate that, through such Learning Journeys, the NHB staff‟s narrative or History N orients students towards a common identity by recruiting schools into the co-creation of the marketplace as a „social heritage space‟. The marketplace is used to administer NHB‟s overarching ideology of „social heritage‟ and nation-building. 44 In Chapter 2, I defined „Learning Journeys‟. I repeat the definition here. According to the Ministry of Education, Learning Journeys form a part of the National Education curriculum. They refer to „all trips out of schools which teachers and students embark on together to extend and enrich the educational experience. Besides helping to make real and concrete what has been learnt in schools, Learning Journeys will broaden the mental horizons of students and contribute to their total development.‟ Learning Journeys need to fulfill four criteria. They should instill pride in Singapore‟s achievements; help their participants understand the constraints, challenges and opportunities that Singapore faces; build confidence in Singapore‟s future; and highlight the point that Singapore is our home (http://www.ne.edu.sg/index.htm). I assert that these definitions cause Learning Journeys to come across as a form of propaganda that works to instill nationalistic values in students. 121 I interviewed Jacqueline, a teacher who brought eight students on a Learning Journey to Chong Boon Market. Jacqueline shares that her students and their parents usually shop at the supermarket. To her students, „buying food equates to the supermarket where there‟s air-con[ditioning], fixed prices, labels, neatly arranged foods‟ (Jacqueline). The physical setting of the marketplace represents „a very new experience for my students‟ (Jacqueline). Here, foods are randomly arranged and crammed into the small space of a stall. Also, the activities of buying and selling in the marketplace are distinct from those in the supermarket: The students had never seen the uncle cut and descale fish. They‟ve never seen an entire threadfin – the really huge one – being chopped. They‟ve never seen big slabs of pork being chopped. These are the back end work they‟ve never seen. (Jacqueline) The sensory landscape of the marketplace differs from the supermarket‟s: Everything in the supermarket is so clean. The market‟s wet, smelly, noisy, hot. Things are messy and the smells are very natural. You go to the fish stall, you have one smell. At the meat stall, another smell. Very different from the supermarket where there‟s no smell. (Jacqueline) Students are told that the qualities of the hawker-customer tie cannot be found in the supermarket: In the market, the students realize there‟s a relationship between hawkers and customers. If you‟re a regular, the hawkers give you a better price. It‟s not a consistent price; can bargain. (Jacqueline) Through Learning Journeys, the marketplace is constructed as a site of difference from the supermarket. Jacqueline stresses these contrasts because Learning Journeys have an explicitly didactic purpose; they „broaden the children‟s experiences and horizons beyond the supermarket‟. Jacqueline instructs her students to sieve out 122 the differences between the wet and supermarket, and declares that the marketplace is an „eye-opener‟ and „interesting experience‟: I told my students to look at how things are done in the market. “See the difference or contrast between what you know about the supermarket and what you see now?” Using the prior knowledge of the supermarket, how are foods arranged in the wet market? How do the aunties react? It was an exciting and interesting experience – an eye-opener where they really learned. (Jacqueline) Students are encouraged to „document the changing face of the wet market‟ and „stud[y] the working lives of the stallholders‟ (Lim, 2012). In enlisting schools to chronicle the marketplace as part of its heartland or historical project (ibid.), NHB staff dish out not only knowledge about the marketplace, but their own interpretative lens to comprehend the space. Jacqueline‟s students are taught to gaze upon the lived characteristics of the space, just like the formal historians and educators from NHB. Students learn „observational skills‟, as they look at the types of ties enacted between hawkers and customers, the presentation of the stall, and the negotiation of price. They are imparted „presentation‟ or „interview skills‟, as they learn how to ask the hawkers for their life stories. NHB staff and journalists joined the students on their Learning Journeys, and asked for their thoughts on them. Thus My students had to learn how to express their ideas in front of the media, and be very positive about the market. They couldn‟t say anything negative in front of the media, because they‟re representing the school. (Jacqueline) Jacqueline echoes the NHB staff‟s conception of the marketplace as a „heritage space‟. She voices that the marketplace is „part of our childhood, growing up and culture – what Singapore is‟. Jacqueline adds that „this heritage is disappearing because young people don‟t want to take over [the business]. We need to tell students that our heritage is disappearing and they should treasure what they have now‟. She 123 applauds NHB staff for involving schools in their project, trusting that this, along with a „photo-logue‟ of the marketplace, will go a long way in „preserving‟ the space. Having articulated the NHB staff‟s narrative of History N about the contemporary marketplace, I now attend to the stories that the bloggers tell. These tales are saturated with ideas of nostalgia and heritage, and make up „Histories A‟ (Goh, 2007) that interrupt and problematize History N. 5.5. Of childhood, nostalgia, and loss of heritage: the bloggers‟ narrative The bloggers encounter the marketplace in several capacities: as children and tourists, and with an air of nostalgia. I explore the ways in which the bloggers (dis)engage marketplace socialities, embodied food knowledge, the sensory atmosphere of the site, and ideas of nostalgia and heritage. I also contrast the bloggers‟ interpretations with NHB staff‟s story of History N. The bloggers first entered the marketplace in the 1960s, when they were children. The demise of the present marketplace arouses childhood memories of places that no longer exist. Back then, the bloggers accompanied their mother on shopping trips. These were eagerly anticipated, and so were the breakfast treats that concluded the visits. When they were children, the bloggers were struck by the sensory landscape of the 1960s marketplace. The sights, sounds, smells, and touch of foods, activities, peoples, and the atmosphere were sometimes unpleasant. But the bloggers had never experienced the sensory evocations of the marketplace before. These arousals activated all the senses: Going to the market was an unpleasant and sometimes traumatic experience for a four year old boy, having to tread over the wet, slippery, messy floor tiles, at the risk of slipping and falling, being stomped on by cha-kiak45 clad feet, and inhaling the foul mix of smells that came from live chickens, ducks, fish 45 Cha-kiaks are red wooden clogs that many women used to wear from the 1960s to 1980s. 124 and pork that permeated the air. Fishball vendors sold a variety of foodstuff like tofu cubes soaked in water, soft ones on a platter, and salted vegetables soaked in brine. As a child, these sights, sounds and mess were new and like nothing I had seen before. There was much to hear, smell, touch. (Peter, blog entry)46 The bloggers also approached the buzz of activities, peoples, and foods with a mixture of wonder and fascination, pleasure and disdain. At times, the feeling of disgust at these sensory arousals escalated into repulsion, even as the evocations were totalizing and ruptured the senses: Old markets had the smell of raw meat. The slippery floor that rendered the market more like a bathroom. The gruesome innards that were triumphantly and unapologetically hung. The bewildering array of raw foods that looked so different from their cooked state. Repulsive! An intoxicating experience that a child couldn‟t easily attain. In Choa Chu Kang Market, one need not go to a Lim Chu Kang farm to encounter animals in a more unadulterated form. It was like a visit to the farm or pet shop. (Stephanie, blog entry) The vastly different sensory experiences moulded the marketplace into a playground – „a whole new world‟ and „adventure‟ (Peter) – which the bloggers enthusiastically explored: What first motivated me to follow my mother to the market was the opportunity to wear the gleaming new rubber Wellingtons I acquired on the walk of discovery around the estate. That was the only way to keep out the splatter of smelly water that came from trudging through the wet, slippery floors. The market, I discovered, was a whole new world to explore, the sights and sounds of which are still etched in my memory. There were fishmongers chopping, [de]scaling and degutting; chickens slaughtered by slitting their necks; fishballs made by hand. These were some of my adventures in the market. (Peter, blog entry) As I have previously depicted, for hawkers and customers, embodied nuances of the 1960s marketplace are inseparable from the sensory difficulties and inconveniences of buying and selling in an unpleasant and poorly equipped site. On 46 In this chapter, the quotes taken from the bloggers‟ blogs will be labeled as such. I also interviewed four of the five bloggers in this thesis face-to-face. The extracts from these interviews will not be labeled. 125 the contrary, for the bloggers, the embodied arousals of foods, peoples, activities, and situational cues of the old marketplace morphed into performances that the bloggers watched, listened to, smelt, and touched. The bloggers objectified, from afar, the filthy and unsanitary 1960s space as a playground and spectacle. In addition, the old marketplace was a voyeuristic space that the bloggers looked into from a distance. When they were children, the bloggers were simply voyagers passing through the space. Only their mothers forged relationships with the hawkers, and partook in buying and selling transactions. The bloggers did not interact with the hawkers but gazed upon the marketplace and its constituents through a protective bubble that their mothers had set up. They never transacted with the hawkers or knew them. Eventually, they outgrew their interest in the marketplace; in their adolescence, the bloggers stopped following their mother on shopping trips. The bloggers are now in their fifties or sixties, and re-enter the marketplace as tourists. They frequent overseas marketplaces. Such trips are included in the itinerary as part of the tourist experience, and are therefore short and one-off. The bloggers exert a „tourist gaze‟ (Urry, 1990) on overseas marketplaces. They crave experiences that depart from the established practices and spaces of everyday life, and engage their senses with stimuli that contrasts with the everyday and mundane (ibid.:2). The tourist gaze is drawn to landscapes that are distinguished from what is usually encountered in daily life or is out of the ordinary (ibid.:3). The bloggers pursue this sense of difference or the extraordinary by examining the ways people go about their everyday lives in overseas marketplaces, where these spaces are understood to be unusual ones. Peter believes that daily routines in an overseas marketplace bestow insights into the ways of life and foodways of a foreign country. He seeks these out: Wherever I go…I like to visit the market. It‟s always an interesting place and different from the markets we have at home. In overseas markets, you see what 126 life‟s about, especially in the mornings, when they‟re busy with people and activity. You see how people behave, what foods they buy. The market‟s a window into a country‟s life, culture and cuisine – the heart and soul of a country. (Peter) Stephanie continues to tease out differences between overseas and local marketplaces in terms of the foods sold in these spaces. This search excites her; the tourist gaze induces pleasurable experiences which are out of the ordinary (Urry, 1990:11): Hong Kong markets are like those of 1960s Singapore – dirty, smelly, wet. They sell all kinds of exotic foods that I think if Singaporeans see, they will faint. A Chinese wet market had small, chirping birds that were defeathered. So cruel! But the Chinese have no qualms about eating them. Hong Kong markets have things you can‟t find here, like a whole range of freshwater crabs you‟ve never seen. Exploring these markets were exciting experiences. I enjoyed seeing things that Singapore doesn‟t have. (Stephanie) Not only are the bloggers interested in viewing foreign worlds, but they frame these spaces through photography. Brandon has two Facebook pages – „Fruits and vegetables of the world‟ and „Wet markets in Singapore‟ – that showcase pictures of foods in marketplaces. Through photography and Facebook, Brandon „records what foods there were and are now because so many foods have disappeared over time and new ones have appeared‟. Because „there‟s so much I don‟t know and haven‟t seen‟, Brandon wishes to expand his knowledge of food by photographing and sharing his tourist experiences with Facebook users. During their childhood, the bloggers took in the physical setting of the marketplace in a sensuous manner; all their senses were enthralled in a convolution of pleasure and repulsion. Still, these embodied experiences were realistically, disembodied ones, since the marketplace became a playground and spectacle. I posit that through photography, the tourist gaze also disembodies and reduces marketplace drama, this time, to the visual consumption of images of foods. Photography 127 appropriates the objects being pictured – the front stage and its constituents in Chapter 4 – and tames the objects of the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990:139). For instance, the food knowledge that Brandon documents lacks the embodied qualities of smell, touch, and taste that the embodied experience of knowledge in marketplace theatre possesses. Moreover, photography disembodies the marketplace as a performative, corporeal, and lived space. Photography and the tourist gaze objectify the space and its dramaturgical ingredients as passive objects, because they neutralize the embodied and cultural messages of these constituents. Because of the photograph‟s ability to appropriate objects, Sontag (1977:4) states that photography establishes a power/knowledge relationship between the photographer and photographed. Collecting images of foods on Facebook is akin to collecting the world(s) of the marketplace(s), and this accumulation perpetuates the power/knowledge relationship. Thus, foods and marketplaces transform into mental and collectable objects (ibid.). The bloggers strive to capture the largest number of subjects and experiences only to churn them into images. Brandon‟s Facebook pages turn the world(s) of the marketplace(s) into an exhibition; the marketplace becomes a picture that is arranged as an object of display before a virtual audience. The photograph‟s power to objectify, disembody, and amass points to the bloggers‟ power to take possession of the ethnographic logics of the marketplace from a distance. Photography enables the milieu of the „Other‟ to be controlled from afar, and marries detachment and mastery. It is by seeking distance that a proper „view‟ of the marketplace is attained, and divorced from the hustle and bustle of everyday life (Urry and Larsen, 2011:158). The bloggers are also domestic tourists who visit local marketplaces. Brandon goes to Chinatown Market occasionally to photograph foods there and update his 128 Facebook pages. He quips that his trips are „full of adventure because I‟ll never know what I‟ll find, especially since foods in Chinatown Market change with the festive seasons‟. Brandon conducts tours of Chinatown Market for friends who holiday in Singapore, since marketplaces are „attractions that they cannot find back home‟. He acts as a tour guide who structures the tourist gaze that his friends exercise on Chinatown Market, and objectifies everyday foods and activities in the space as sites of difference and spectacle: I bring my overseas friends to Chinatown Market – a place they‟ve never seen and don‟t have back home. Some attractions include killing live snakehead and turtles. But some people can‟t take it. My friend‟s daughter-in-law cried because she saw rabbits and turtles sold – not being even killed! She doesn‟t have the concept that this is food. (Brandon) Like in their childhood, the bloggers do not interact with the hawkers and customers in overseas and local marketplaces. They do not participate in marketplace socialities, nor do they understand the dynamics of hawker-customer exchanges. In fact, Brandon dismisses the behavioural norms that undergird hawker-customer interactions. Hawkers dislike having their wares or themselves photographed. Despite knowing this, Brandon ignores their wishes or even reckons that photography and the tours that he conducts may rake in business for hawkers. This implies that bloggers do not merely have a touristic understanding of hawker-customer socialities, but believe that they have a „right‟ to photograph the marketplace: Use a small camera in an uncertain environment; don‟t be obvious when taking pictures. Some hawkers don‟t like it! That‟s why I use my wife as a decoy. She buys and bargains; I take pictures…I‟m more interested in taking photos for my Facebook pages…Don‟t ever photograph hawkers! They‟ll get angry. They don‟t understand that we‟re creating awareness for their business. If I bring a foreigner, chances of him buying are minimal. But friends tell friends; people hear, come and buy! (Brandon) 129 Furthermore, their experiences of the 1960s marketplace alert the bloggers of the possibility that „the “present” is not “the only way things necessarily can be” and that “reality” need not be bound by immediate presence in time and space‟ (Chua, 1995b: 226). An awareness of how the past is distinct from the present can prompt one to relativise extant reality (ibid.). Nostalgia is one way of distancing and relativising reality (ibid.). Bloggers infuse an air of nostalgia into the disappearing marketplace, and this nostalgia takes two forms. First, bloggers exhibit „private nostalgia‟; the marketplace is a symbolic image and allusion from a past that is located in a particular person‟s biography (Davis, 1979:123). Memories of the marketplace are individuated in their reference, and compose a person‟s identity (ibid.). In the face of the vanishing contemporary marketplace, the bloggers recall childhood memories – personal and idiosyncratic recollections – of its 1960s counterpart, as a means of remembering who they were as children, and who they are now as middle age or elderly adults: I connect with street markets in Malaysia because they remind me of the markets Singapore had when I was a child. They remind me of my childhood encounters with the market: the times I spent with my mother, my excitement at wearing new Wellington boots, my fascination with the fishball and rempah vendors. They remind me of what I was like as a child – who I was – and help me reflect on who I am now. (Peter) Private nostalgia does not merely encompass the remembrance of particularistic images and identities in childhood, but the very search for childhood and desire for return via memories of the 1960s marketplace. This quest occurs as bloggers grow older: Remembering my childhood encounters with the market is part of missing and returning to my childhood. Childhood meant happy, carefree, simple days. As you grow older, you delve more into yourself. You look into the past, go back to your fond memories of childhood – the market was one. When you age, you grow wiser. Life isn‟t so innocent anymore. Yet you need to know how you got there. (Peter) 130 Davis (1979:52) remarks that nostalgia is most pronounced in transitional phases in the life cycle that extract from us the largest demands for identity change and adaptation. For the bloggers, the transition from their middle age years to late adulthood represents a period of discontinuity in their lives. Private nostalgia for the 1960s marketplace and childhood bestows continuity in their sense of self (ibid.:3233). In assuaging uncertainties and identity threats, private nostalgia reassures the bloggers of their past or childhood self and happiness, and helps them make sense of their present self. In his article about the nostalgia that Singaporeans exhibit for the kampong, Chua (1995:226) writes that the ideas enfolded in the disappeared and „imagined‟ kampong are the quintessential themes of Singaporeans‟ nostalgia. Lost space is connected to lost time. The demise of the kampong is, collectively and individually, the loss of the innocence of childhood (ibid.). Likewise, the bloggers‟ hunt for their childhood is linked to the disappearance of these childhood spaces too, now equated with „the Singapore I once knew‟ (Peter). The 1960s marketplace comprises a childhood space and „old Singapore‟. Peter claims that „I don‟t recognize the market now. It‟s too different from the past‟, and „the old market is really the Singapore I‟m most familiar with‟. Because the 1960s marketplace no longer exists, Peter visits overseas marketplaces that resemble a „familiar Singapore‟ to reconnect with it. The bloggers‟ private nostalgia incorporates a feeling of loss, wistfulness, and pessimism tinged with the past (Chase and Shaw, 1989:6). Moreover, private nostalgia involves a search among memories of old places to give meaning to the present (Davis, 1979:vii). Nostalgia is an immanent critique of the present; past experiences are summoned as a critical foil to the present (Chua, 1995b:227). The present is viewed as deficient in comparison to a personally experienced, comfortable, and adored past 131 (Davis, 1979:15-16). It is marked as a moment of decline, destabilization, and alienation (Turner, 1987:150): Markets and much of Singapore have changed to the extent that I don‟t recognize them anymore. They‟re places that I sometimes struggle to connect with…[or] even call home. Markets and other places were dear to me in my childhood; there‟s a certain fondness for them. In recalling things about the past, walking these places I used to walk, I now feel torn away from them. Many of these spaces have disappeared, so I can‟t return to them. (Daniel) The preceding snippets suggest that the bloggers‟ private nostalgia is what Davis (1979) calls „simple nostalgia‟. The bloggers invoke a favourable „lived past in the context of some negative feeling towards the present‟ (ibid.:18). The 1960s marketplace and positive connotations of the self, childhood, and old Singapore compose this lived past, while the present sees the demise of these entities. The bloggers subscribe to an unexamined belief that „things were better then than now‟ – a portrait of „The Beautiful Past and Unattractive Present‟ (ibid.). In the bloggers‟ private nostalgia, only the pleasurable aspects of the old marketplace are remembered. The bloggers did not personally experience or recollect – or elected not to remember – the difficulties and inconveniences that hawkers and customers faced in the past. Private and simple nostalgia upholds a golden past or „memory with the pain removed‟ (Lowenthal, 1985:8). If there is any pain, „the pain is today‟ (ibid.). Thus, simple nostalgia is highly conservative and blunted; it is self-serving, selective, and neglects the subjective realities of both the old and new marketplace. Simple nostalgia reduces lived experiences to abstract and pleasant recollections, by writing out the specific historical and material contexts in which these subjective qualities surfaced (Chua, 1995b:231). It resituates these lived instances in an imagined „golden past‟ that poses as being „real‟ by the facticity of these experiences themselves (ibid.). 132 The bloggers‟ nostalgia for the 1960s marketplace has a collective dimension too. In „collective nostalgia‟, the marketplace turns into a symbolic object that has a public, shared, and familiar character. It is able to spark waves of nostalgia in many people at the same time (Davis, 1979:122-123). Collective nostalgia surfaces when untoward major historic events and abrupt social change pose the threat of identity discontinuity and anxiety among millions in the same moment of historical time (ibid.:102). Sudden change „has the capacity of eliciting in us that startle response, that sudden gestalt inversion of existential figure and ground which…often occasions the release of nostalgic feeling‟ (ibid.:103). A compound of reasons has caused the bloggers to turn nostalgic for the 1960s marketplace. The modernization of the marketplace is one such factor, and also epitomizes an unsettling occurrence that orchestrates the stirring up of nostalgic emotions. In the late 1960s, wet markets and hawker centres came under the purview of the Hawker Centres Development Unit. In 2002, the majority of these spaces fell under the ownership of the National Environment Agency (NEA), and NEA has overseen them ever since. As part of the Hawker Centres Upgrading Programme, NEA renovates these spaces from time to time. When I talk about the modernization of the marketplace, I refer to these processes of renovation, institutionalization, and formalization. Modernization represents, for the bloggers, the absence or demise of personal wholeness and moral certainty. Values that once ensured „the unity of human relationships, knowledge and personal experience‟ collapse (Turner, 1987:150). While bloggers celebrate the 1960s marketplace as a social space where relationships flourished, they bemoan that modernization prompts the loss of this sociability in the contemporary marketplace and wider society: 133 Markets today are less of a social space. The markets I grew up with were where people went to interact, not just shop. They were community centres. You found women gathered, gossiping with neighbours, friends, stallholders…People from all walks of life and races came together. Now, you find less of that. People just go about their own business. There‟s very minimal interaction…As a society, we‟ve forgotten how to talk to one another. (Peter) The modernization of the marketplace ushers in homogeneity and uniformity. It disciplines the „spontaneous character of the space‟ (Brandon) or the individual freedom and autonomy to arrange the space as one pleases. I have shown that hawkers and customers relish the standardization of space that modernization brings. Modernization alleviates the obstacles and inconveniences of the 1960s marketplace, and both groups prefer the contemporary space. Bloggers, however, do not view the „organic‟ nature of the old marketplace in problematic terms. They miss it and frown upon standardization: Markets now lack character. Like the new structure of Tiong Bahru Market has destroyed the original atmosphere and environment. Last time, hawkers were given their own space; go and make your own stall. Some were more innovative than others, and the ways they arranged things were different. Now everything is controlled and ordered. I miss the old days when everything was up to them, free and easy because you give people space to think about how things can be done. (Brandon) Moreover, modernization fuels the disappearance of „diverse heritage foods‟ (Brandon): My comparisons of foods in past and present markets show a smaller range of foods today. Many stalls sell the same things, and don‟t have what I used to eat! My maid has to go to three markets before she can buy what I want. What a waste, that our heritage foods are disappearing! Like blimbing,47 and good keluak nuts to make ayam buah keluak.48 (Brandon) 47 Blimbing is the Malay name for averrhoa bilimbi. It is a small, sour, green or yellow cucumbershaped fruit. It can be used as a substitute for tamarind or tomato in some dishes. It can also be used in Malay dishes such as sambal belimbing prawns or sambal belimbing chicken. Sambal means „chilli‟ in Malay, and belimbing is another way of spelling blimbing. 48 Ayam buah keluak is a Peranakan dish that combines chicken pieces with keluak nuts and spicy tamarind gravy. 134 The bloggers locate the death of the marketplace not only in the modernization of the space, but in the economic modernization of the food system. They stress the expansion of supermarkets, and how this drives many hawkers out of business: There‟re many pressures in running a business because the costs are very high. Big players – supermarkets – have moved in. They‟ve the market share and economies of scale. They buy and sell cheap. They‟re one-stop shops with everything. So they squeeze out the small players who can‟t cope – how can the hawkers compete with Sheng Siong? (Stephanie) To return to the concept of collective nostalgia, the bloggers situate their concerns about vanishing spaces and „heritage‟ in a period of maturation that they presume Singapore is currently facing. Singapore is now reflecting on the swift and brutal upheavals that modernization has engendered, and is looking to the past to anchor the country vis-à-vis a murky present and future. This entails rethinking the destruction and preservation of „heritage‟ spaces among ordinary people and government officials, since the negotiation of these spaces is also a negotiation of what it means to be „Singaporean‟: In the 1970s, there weren‟t thoughts of conservation. Let‟s flatten everything! Let‟s renew the space! Which is why the government formed URA49 and acquired Chinatown, Bras Basah and Raffles Place for urban development. Private developers were indiscriminate too. Our needs were different then. In the 1980s…we started maturing as a society, looking back at what we have lost and should preserve. What and where are spaces we call „Singapore‟? That drove even government officials to rethink their policies. What exactly does it mean to be „Singaporean‟? (Peter) In the present period of social discontinuity, collective nostalgia for the 1960s marketplace is a means through which bloggers retain and reaffirm identities that were bruised during modernization. Collective nostalgia is a safety valve in times of abrupt 49 URA stands for Urban Redevelopment Authority, a statutory board in Singapore. URA deals with issues of (physical) land use planning, conservation, and sustainability (http://www.ura.gov.sg/uol/about-us/our-organisation/mission.aspx). 135 change because it defuses powerful panic-prone reactions into appropriate self-regard over the past (Davis, 1979:110): Between the 1970s and now are the lost years of Singapore. We don‟t know what happened in these years because we were all busy surviving and lost the need to transfer our heritage. We even killed heritage in the name of progress. Now we realize that much of our heritage – like old markets – is lost or disappearing. So we look to our past to find it. This somewhat comforts us even though we know much is lost. (Brandon) Through the dying marketplace, the bloggers ponder over the definitions of „heritage‟ and whether the marketplace is truly, as NHB staff purport, a „social heritage‟ space. The bloggers delineate „heritage‟ in five ways. First, „heritage‟ encompasses ways of life that are passed down from the older generations to younger ones; they are „personal inheritances‟ (Brandon), and cannot be invented top-down by institutions like the state. Second, „heritage‟ refers to ways of life that are „preserved in their original form or function‟ (Peter), and do not change over time. Third, there is an „emotional or mental connection‟ (Kenneth) between „heritage‟ and its audience; recipients must recognize „heritage‟ in their personal memories and feel attached to it. Fourth, „heritage‟ necessitates the total preservation of ways of life in a space – the architecture, functions, peoples, and activities. These give the space its „essence‟ or „spirit‟ (Brandon). The preservation of individual items or merely a building‟s façade or architecture does not count. Fifth, because „heritage‟ consists of ways of life that are inherited by the subsequent generations, „heritage‟ should be preserved from the ground-up by ordinary people, instead of official institutions. The bloggers conclude that on the basis of these definitions, the contemporary marketplace is not a „heritage space‟. It has evolved over time; it has undergone a process of modernization and its architecture, inhabitants, and activities have altered. A total preservation of the past marketplace has not occurred. Peter complains that 136 Lau Pa Sat, Singapore‟s first major marketplace, is „no longer a wet market but a hawker centre. Although the government reconstructed its façade, Lau Pa Sat‟s function, peoples, surroundings are gone. Now it‟s submerged in the Central Business District.‟ In the eyes of Peter, Lau Pa Sat is a „dead space‟ and not a „heritage‟ site. The bloggers express an unnerving feeling of disconnect from the contemporary marketplace. Perhaps only the 1960s marketplaces – the „original‟ marketplace of their memories – would qualify as „heritage spaces‟, had they survived until today. The bloggers disapprove of the top-down „preservation‟ of the marketplace as a „heritage‟ space, through NHB‟s Community Heritage Project: Why do we need a Heritage Board if we‟re able to carry on our heritage? Whenever you have to create something to preserve „heritage‟, it means you‟ve lost it or are in danger of losing it…We‟ve been moving so fast. The government stops and says, “I think we‟re losing our heritage. Let‟s set up a group to take care of it.” That‟s very plastic. You want to preserve the market and heritage but at the same time you‟re killing them. (Kenneth) Through the vanishing marketplace and their ruminations on „heritage‟, the bloggers articulate broader worries about disappearing spaces and „heritage‟ in Singapore. They question NHB‟s and the Urban Redevelopment Authority‟s (URA) definition of „heritage spaces‟ such as Chinatown, Boat Quay, and City Hall. They criticize the two institutions for only preserving the facades of these „heritage spaces‟: In Europe, the government preserves old houses but allows their people to live there…A lot of things are still there but you‟ve modern comforts. That‟ll never happen here! And if Singapore‟s really interested in preservation and letting people live the way they want, you cannot just have façades. Like Chinatown shophouses look old and nice upfront but…there‟s nothing inside at all, what more any evidence of how people used to live...There‟s a joke…that Chinatown has really become Chinatown. You don‟t see Singaporean businesses or the old people and places. Mainland Chinese have taken over, and so have KTVs!50 Chinatown‟s spirit is lost. (Brandon, emphasis his) 50 KTV stands for karaoke television. It is a form of popular entertainment and leisure. 137 The bloggers take the government to task for even sometimes failing to conserve façades; some „heritage spaces‟ have been demolished and rebuilt as something else. The decision in 2012, to exhume a significant proportion of Bukit Brown cemetery,51 is telling: Let‟s take the demolishing of Bukit Brown, which I‟m actively involved in protesting against. The government says progress is very important; eight main roads are more important than tombs. We can take one tomb and put it in the museum. But is that „heritage‟, when the cemetery is now a road? And what about other spaces that have disappeared over the years? (Brandon) I argue that the bloggers‟ ruminations about the definitions of „heritage‟ align themselves with Goh‟s (2007) notion of „Histories A‟. Alternative histories or definitions of „heritage‟ are „affective memories of human belonging‟ that question and disrupt the unbending rhetoric of History N (ibid.:315) or institutional understandings of „heritage‟. Histories A centre on the meanings and conceptions of „heritage‟ that bloggers – ordinary people – hold. Where Histories A are part of the larger Histories A of lived „heritage‟, they are critical of the History N that NHB staff laud, and have different traits from History N. Histories A are immensely nostalgic. They consist of multiple ways of defining „heritage‟, which are complex and irreducible to one another. Finally, Histories A are tools yielded by the powerless (bloggers) who are unable to conserve the 1960s marketplace and other 51 Cheah (2013:1) reports that, in 2012, the Singapore government announced its plan to build an eightlane road through Bukit Brown cemetery. The government also planned to exhume over 3000 of the 100 000 graves in the cemetery, and by 2014, to construct a highway that cuts across the cemetery (ibid.). Small but active community groups sprung up around the exhumation of Bukit Brown cemetery. These groups sought to document the site and give tours of it. They set up Facebook pages and blogs that debated the exhumation. Moreover, civil societies such as Nature Society, and Singapore Heritage Society, along with academics like historian Dr Chua Ai Lin, descendants of those buried in Bukit Brown cemetery, artists, and volunteers pushed for the conservation of the space (ibid.). These groups of people lamented that the government had not consulted members of the public before deciding on the exhumation. They also highlighted the splendor of the space, and the fact that Bukit Brown cemetery is home to the graves of many Chinese Singapore pioneers (ibid.:2). In other words, these individuals emphasized Singapore‟s Chinese and immigrant roots and „heritage‟ in Bukit Brown cemetery, Singapore‟s oldest Chinese cemetery. 138 disappeared/disappearing spaces, and are only able to pass down alternative conceptions of „heritage‟. 139 Chapter 6. Coming full circle: Concluding the ethnography In this thesis, I immersed myself and the reader in a ground-up study of Bedok Market, a neighbourhood wet market in Singapore. I deployed Wherry‟s (2012) meaning-centred perspective to explore the everyday, subjective, and multifarious logics that animated the marketplace, and the interpretative lens through which marketplace participants viewed their social milieu and their place within it. What were the cultural meanings, intentions or norms that framed the ways people acted in the marketplace? To grapple with this question, I delved into two aspects of the microlevel culture of Bedok Market – the range of socialities, and the drama of buying and selling. Then, I merged the ethnographic nuances of how people behaved within preestablished structures of cultural norms, and the meanings of their actions and practices, with a narrative slant that elicited the stories that four disparate groups articulated about the declining marketplace. As Chapter 2 affirmed, I penned this ethnography with the aid of a multimethod and a multi-sited approach. I also highlighted the utility of wet and supermarket tours; they eased me – a novice wet market patron and researcher – into my fieldsites, and socialized me into the „body cues‟ (Figuie and Bricas, 2010) necessary to navigate these spaces. My interpreter was of immense help to me during my fieldwork, and I detailed her role as a co-constructor of data in Chapter 2. Lastly, a history of marketplaces in Singapore and of Bedok, along with a journey through Bedok Market, lent some (historical) context to this thesis. When I investigated the various socialities in Bedok Market, I found a multiplicity of lived and dynamic interconnections. In Chapter 3, fleeting bonds characterized the relationship among customers. Friends behaved like strangers in the marketplace, and subverted conventional norms of friendships. Buyers who did not 140 know one another outside Bedok Market made random and one-off contacts with a body of heterogeneous others. Unknown customers exercised „civil inattention‟ (Goffman, 1963) or entered sporadic but utilitarian alliances against unfamiliar hawkers. Their loyalty lay with fellow buyers who shared the desire to make the best purchase. Hawkers and customers defined and negotiated their ties to be transitory ones, and matched relevant economic transactions, exchange media, and negotiated meanings with these bonds. This process was known as „relational work‟ (Zelizer, 2005; 2012). Furthermore, I contended that relational work went beyond the forging of marketplace socialities. It was relational work; hawkers and customers laboured to create, navigate, and cut ties that (did not) supply economic benefits. Transitory bonds were short-lived, and produced a sense of anonymity and gratuitous sociability. Although the hawkers demarcated such impersonal relationships from more intimate ones, the customers sometimes crossed the boundaries. In short, between the two groups, there were stark asymmetries in the personal information revealed, and the power to inquire into each other‟s lives. Among the hawkers, business partnerships were worked out relationally too. Familial ties, and various structural considerations that were unique to the marketplace, prompted hawkers to enter the trade. Hawkers also forged long-term relationships and exchanged some degree of personal information. Still, such bonds were anchored to Bedok Market, and could be either congenial and pleasant, or tense and hostile. Zelizer‟s (2005; 2012) concept of „relational work‟ extended into the performance of buying and selling transactions in Chapter 4. I examined four dramaturgical ingredients – the front stage set up; „the ability to talk‟; the classification of customers; and the negotiation of price – to discover multiple and 141 complex interpretations of each component. I presented two dramas in Bedok Market – a middle class theatre that integrated business terminology, and a working class bargain hunt that somewhat dismissed this vocabulary. I posited that these four cultural practices were meaningful in their own terms, but were also instrumental to other ends; they helped hawkers bring in and keep their customers. Therefore, the marketplace contained social and performative value, debunking the conception of the marketplace as simply a generator of economic gain. In addition, I attended to the exclusive and asymmetrical character that some exchanges took. Stressful hawkercustomer interactions sprung up when the spectrum of dramaturgical ingredients was abandoned. Such encounters brought out the qualities of the middle class and working class theatres more sharply. Chapter 3 and 4 disclosed that Bedok Market was simultaneously an inclusive and exclusive playing ground for hawkers and customers who conducted relational work and buying and selling transactions. These actors showcased some degree of agency and creativity in navigating the micro-level culture of the marketplace. A sense of liminality surfaced as actors negotiated power relations that drew from cultural norms in Bedok Market. Put in another manner, a spectrum of socialities and dramaturgical techniques enforced conformity to the norms, and non-conformity induced negative consequences. Hence, social organizations and meanings manifested in the marketplace, but were also engendered and sustained in this space. The narratives of the disappearing marketplace in Chapter 5 wrapped up the concerns of Chapter 3 and 4. Four categories of individuals invoked the rhythms of marketplace socialities, embodied food knowledge, the sensory landscape of the marketplace, and the concepts of nostalgia and heritage, in dissimilar ways. The hawkers and customers aired practical concerns that followed the disappearance of the 142 marketplace. The hawkers spoke about the difficulties of their profession at present and in the past. Buyers were inconvenienced by the vanishing marketplace, and voiced their aversion to the embodied food knowledge and sensory landscape of the supermarket. In other words, the two groups evoked the lived realities of the marketplace. Their stories were devoid of nostalgia and heritage. On the other hand, NHB staff and their collaborators came across as „objective‟ historians, custodians of „History N‟ (Goh, 2007) and „social heritage‟, and teachers who grossly simplified marketplace culture. The marketplace was reduced to a „living museum‟ of history, and a pedagogical tool. When the bloggers were children or tourists, they expressed a sense of nostalgia for the subjective idiosyncrasies of the 1960s marketplace. In this process of reminiscing, they objectified and exoticized the marketplace as a site of memory. The bloggers also raised alternative definitions of „heritage‟ – „Histories A‟ (Goh, 2007) – that interrupted NHB‟s version of „History N‟ (ibid.). My meaning-centred study of the marketplace is valuable in a few ways – first, in terms of the contributions that it renders to research in cultural and economic sociology, and studies in social memory. From the beginning, I engaged with the criticisms of three dominant theoretical perspectives – neoclassical economics, the substantivist paradigm, and social networks theory. Zelizer‟s (2005; 2012) „relational work‟ concept was helpful in formulating my arguments. In this thesis, I took empirical and meaningful marketplace ties and exchanges as my starting point. By interrogating the contents and qualities of socialities and performances, I illustrated that relationships and transactions in Bedok Market – micro-level culture – were socially, relationally, and dramaturgically constituted. These ties and interactions also 143 pointed to the interweaving of economics and social life, and the ambiguous and processual nature of relational work. Rather than speculating, from a distance, what people (should) do in the marketplace, I „dirtied my hands‟ and went knee-deep into my fieldsite. I married meaning-making and practice to make explicit how diverse groups of people acted in and constructed memories of the marketplace, and what these actions and stories meant to them. Because actors in Bedok Market were pragmatic and were endowed with a sense of agency, strategy and negotiation, complex and colourful pictures of marketplace culture and narratives were painted. In these ways, I hope that these depictions and the idea of „relational work‟ assuage the limitations of neoclassical economics, the substantivist perspective and social network theory, and add to the paucity of studies about the socialities, dramaturgy, and social memories in and of marketplaces. The juxtaposition of the narratives told by four categories of individuals provides the means of producing and evaluating knowledge about marketplaces that problematize top-down and armchair data analysis, policy formulation and execution. Thus, I endeavoured to question the master narrative about marketplaces that descended from above. Chapter 5 showed that the impressions of and investments in the marketplace that the NHB staff and bloggers harbour are largely divorced from those of the hawkers and customers. I suggest that there is a need for a deeper exchange among the four categories of people. In particular, I urge the NHB staff and bloggers to engage the hawkers and customers more closely in the marketplace, to attain a more honest and intimate look at the realities that the two groups negotiate in a lived and corporeal space. This will also enable the NHB staff and bloggers to critically reflect upon and politicize their own ideas about the marketplace, and add 144 more complex layers to these. In these senses, the hawkers‟ and customers‟ experiences and narratives are a powerful alternative to the bloggers‟ and NHB personnel‟s imaginations of the marketplace, and can help to correct and deepen the latter‟s understandings of the space. Finally, I stake a claim on the importance of the continuity of wet markets in Singapore. Marketplaces are of tremendous social and performative value, and their decline is compelling to my informants and wider society. Moreover, it is paramount to remember that the contemporary marketplace is not the same as its 1960s counterpart. Given the transformations that marketplaces have undergone over time, deploying evidence from the present marketplace to ask whether marketplaces should be supported into the future is problematic. While returning to the 1960s space is unrealistic and undesirable in every way, using the construction of sociality and buying and selling encounters in the contemporary marketplace is not necessarily the best way to assess the marketplace‟s social meaning or viability. Instead, I call for the need to engage in comparative research that identifies what can be done to make marketplaces more resilient, sustainable, and socially meaningful. 145 [...]... Thus, Chapter 3 and 4 picture Bedok Market as both an inclusive and exclusive playing field for hawkers and customers The marketplace invites the expression of agency and creativity in negotiating sociality and buying and selling exchanges It also provides a sense of liminality in navigating power relations that draw from cultural norms In this sense, I posit that social organizations and meanings are... 20 06b) ruminates how the street markets of Santiago convey the place of grocery shopping in fostering and maintaining relations among vendors and customers Lui (20 08) engages in an ethnographic comparison of the meanings attached to shopping behaviours in wet and supermarkets in Hong Kong, and shows how these meanings incorporate the social relationships that are present among various categories of people... 20 09) (Wet markets began to be privatized in 1990.) Wet markets are dispersed throughout the island, and I divide them into two categories according to their locations First, marketplaces are located in „ethnic enclaves‟; they are „ethnic‟ marketplaces Tekka Market is in Little India; Kreta Ayer Market is in Chinatown; and Geylang Serai Market is in Geylang „Ethnic‟ marketplaces are framed as a component... Heritage Series II: Wet markets (NHB, 20 12e) – along with materials pertaining to the project, and some newspaper articles that dated from 20 09 to 20 13.13 In my interview with Evan and Community Heritage Series II: Wet markets, NHB staff framed the wet market and other everyday, „traditional‟ and disappearing spaces like the provision shop and void deck, as social , „heartland‟ or „communal heritage‟... salient in Bedok Market, but are also created and realized in this space In Chapter 5, I adopt a narrative stance to the tales that four categories of people verbalize vis-à-vis the disappearing marketplace I postulate that multiple and heterogeneous narratives emerge, illustrating that the four groups (dis)engage marketplace culture, and notions of nostalgia and heritage to varying extents These narratives... group are thought to speak a particular mother language The Chinese speak Mandarin; the Malays speak Malay; and the Indians speak Tamil Also, the people from each ethnic group are thought to have a particular skin tone The Chinese are supposed to be fair; the Malays are supposed to be tanned; and the Indians are supposed to be dark I have a mixed ethnic background, and am categorized as a Eurasian However,... framework in their inquiries into a variety of marketplaces They engage „the materiality and sociality of marketplaces – i.e of public exchanges spatially situated‟ (ibid. :2) They adopt the experiences and practices of marketplaces as their leap off point, because „something irreducible occurs in the public, face-to-face encounters of buyers and sellers, of observers and participants, in the terrestrial market ... shared, and familiar character, such that they trigger waves of nostalgia in larger populations (ibid.: 122 ) 1.5 Exploring the culture and social memories of the marketplace In Chapter 1, I have set up the conceptual framework of my thesis I embark on a meaning-centred study of the micro-level culture of Bedok Market, and memories of the declining marketplace I have emphasized the significance of an ethnography... are co-productions that rope in sellers, buyers, and the stage – all integral to the meaning and interpretation of economic performances (Cook, 20 08:7) 1.4.3 Social memory In Chapter 5, I examine and contrast the stories that four groups relate vis-à-vis the disappearing marketplace In doing so, I build upon work on the social memories of and nostalgia for vanishing/vanished spaces For instance, Watson... on marketplace socialities by investigating how the rhythms of Bedok Market affect the customer-customer, hawker-customer, 17 and hawker-hawker relationships there Like Watson (20 09), I contend that the marketplace is a site of multiple socialities; a range of ties thrive, and I delineate the meanings and behaviours that animate it I deviate from Chia (20 10 /20 11) because I am not interested in a spatial ... transiting back and forth between a review of the academic literature, data generation and interpretation 2. 4 A history of hawking and wet markets in Singapore The evolution of wet markets in. .. al., 1957 :24 3) He advocates a substantive understanding of economic that interrogates the material acts of making of a living, and the ways through which humans adapt to the social and natural... approach sees the marketplace as a social space and a dramaturgical stage on which actors adopt roles, perform, and interact with audiences I probe into these conceptions of the space in Chapter and