Shoppers browse the various food stalls inside Boston Public Market.
The Boston Public Market, a bustling marketplace in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts, can feel overwhelming. Brightly lit, well-designed booths pack the five aisles of the market, offering everything from organic soaps to self-serve apple ciders. Food vendors, scattered throughout these aisles, represent cultures from around the world. Food from places like Thailand, France, Israel, and many others creates a multicultural atmosphere that seems to globalize the confined space. The market is “hip.” White families, mostly young, peruse their many “cultural” options. Indie-alternative rock plays, providing an all-too appropriate background ambience.
During my first visit to the market, I strolled through the marketplace alongside these families, considering the various options that the market presented. Each booth seemed to be set up perfectly, with every aesthetic detail in order. As I examined the menu, the French booth made me feel like I had been dropped suddenly into Paris. The booth selling pad thai was accented with a Thai flag and other Southeast Asian memorabilia, and staffed by Southeast Asian employees. Almost all the booths, actually, exhibited continuity between the good or service they offered and the identities of their employees. While there were exceptions — a Congolese man sold Jewish cuisine down the hall from a young, white woman who worked at a sushi stand — the overwhelming majority of the booths offered more than just food from a far away country. The booths offered a holistic sort of experience — a way to touch, feel, or speak with a culture, and not just to make a purchase.
In the 21st century, with more sellers competing for our attention and money, providing a desirable experience along with a good or service has become a new normal. This new economy, known as the experience economy, is best defined by the Harvard Business Review as the next progression of economic advancement — the commodification of experience as a value-add to any good or service. The Boston Public Market serves as a case study for an unfortunate side effect of this development: the expansion of the experience economy provides an engine for the commodification of experience, thereby furthering Western cultural essentialism and the erasure of intra-cultural subtlety.
To gaze upon vendor booths in the Boston Public Market, as I did while wandering during my first visit, is to become enthralled by stereotypical representations of a myriad of cultures. Stepping back, though, I started to think about the challenges of turning an entire culture into a small booth in an American market. Through this process, the market becomes a cultural space designed for consumption, with each booth competing with the next for relevance and appeal, and subsequently, for more profit. This competition for relevance to the market’s largely white audience turns cultural display into an exhibit of otherness that is evaluated and purchased — or not — by American onlookers.
To attempt to share authentic cultural experiences is not a crime, particularly given that creating space for cultural exchange helps diasporic communities survive, and even thrive, in environments in which they are underrepresented. An issue arises, though, when capitalist profit motives create incentives to distort or reduce cultures. When culture becomes commodified, we begin to overlook nuances. Marketing culture tends to be a reductionist process, as people make business decisions based on limited understandings of diverse and expansive cultures. In some cases, these cultures might not even be their own. In the experience economy, every aesthetic, every detail, is part of a cultural package, and must therefore be simplified to fit into a Western-relevant cultural stereotype.
Understanding culture with a nuanced viewpoint is already an issue in the West, and the experience economy aggravates this problem by working against cultural distinction and deepened cultural knowledge. As stereotypes become more common through the mass adoption of the experience economy, the Western world will experience an erasure of cultural subtleties. Cultures of non-Western origin will increasingly become commodified in the name of profit, and diasporic communities will become more likely to ignore intra-cultural nuances in an attempt to appeal to simplistic, hegemonic stereotypes of cultures not familiar to the Western world. While the experience economy as a whole might be the natural next step in economic advancement, the neo-liberal threat that accompanies it, of reducing culture to a commodity, must be taken seriously.
Walking through the Boston Public Market, gazing at the many booths, seemed, when I first went, to be an innocent act. I felt removed from Boston, injected into a multicultural limbo in which I could consume the entire world in a moment. But the gaze of Westerners upon non-Western cultures and people has long been, at best, reductive, and, at worst, accompanied by acts of violence. Without at least a recognition of the neo-liberal habits and patterns the West is undertaking in the development of the experience economy, cultural reductionism will continue, and Western stereotypes of culture will continue to grow, replacing the complex cultures that they once strove to represent.
Image Credit: Wikipedia Images/NewtonCourt