Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.TSUKIJI: The Fish Market at the Center of the World. By Theodore C. Bestor. Berkeley (California), Los Angeles, London (UK): University of California Press. 2004. xxviii, 411 pp. (B & W photos, illus.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 0-520-22024-2. Towards the end of his book (p. 308), Bestor makes the following observation: "Anthropologists have long argued about formalist and substantivist views of markets and exchange, counterposing interpretations that emphasize rational choice in terms of quantifiable calculations with those that concentrate on the socially and culturally embedded contexts of exchange." Instead of a lot of jargon about feedback and homeostasis 1. The ability or tendency of an organism or a cell to maintain internal equilibrium by adjusting its physiological processes. 2. The processes used to maintain such bodily equilibrium. ho  me·o·stat and re-equilibration occlusal equilibration modification of the occlusal stress, to produce simultaneous occlusal contacts, or to achieve harmonious occlusion. e·quil·i·bra·tion (  -kw, he remarks that the interaction is a bit like the rock-scissors-paper game: "culture sustains institutions, institutions shape the economy, the economy recalibrates culture and so on and on." Both that detached non-committal attitude to solemn methodological polemics and the imaginative leap of the simile simile (sĭm`əlē) [Lat.,=likeness], in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which an object is explicitly compared to another object. Robert Burns's poem "A Red Red Rose" contains two straightforward similes: are typical of the virtues of this rich book. Bestor has been in love with the Tsukiji fish market for years. Other people's love affairs are often hard to comprehend, but such is the infectiousness of his enthusiasm and the liveliness of the writing with which he conveys it that even non-sushi-lovers can begin to understand the depth of his affection. The information he has acquired about the market and its participants is formidable in depth and quantity, and splendidly varied in perspective. There are not many books that will be read with equal interest by anthropologists and gourmets, historians and travel agents, geographers interested in the spatial organization of economic activity, sociologists interested in patterns of inheritance and economists interested in auction markets Auction markets Markets in which the prevailing price is determined through the free interaction of prospective buyers and sellers, as on the floor of the stock exchange.. The last are likely to get much more than they bargained for, even if they are the sort of economists who acknowledge the remoteness of formal games theory models from practical reality and try adding additional parameters in an attempt to move closer. As Bestor's detailed, and highly readable, ethnography shows, the complexity of the changing relations among seller, buyer and auctioneer--the degrees of trust and mistrust, the mix of obligation and competition, of legal control and social control, of formal rights and informal rights--is too great for any simple model-tweaking. The auctions, and the intermediate wholesalers who participate in them, as well as the transition from the unincorporated family firm to the bureaucratic corporation, comprise what one might call the analytical core of the book. But there is much more in its four-hundred-odd pages. The first chapter mixes an account of Bestor's fieldwork history with facts about fish in the Japanese economy and in Japanese culture and about Tsukiji in both, tethering "the gruff masculine worlds of fishing and markets to the elegant domains of cuisine and feminine domesticity" (p. 26). The second gives a travel-writer's description of the market, vividly evoking the look and the feel of the place, the extraordinary variety of the human types who inhabit it and the transactions and the banter that go on between them. In the following account of Tsukiji's history, from the mythical seventeenth-century origins, through the Nihonbashi market of Tokugawa Tokugawa (tō'k  gä`wä), family that held the shogunate (see shogun) and controlled Japan from 1603 to 1867. Founded by Ieyasu, the Tokugawa regime was a centralized feudalism. times, the shift to Tsukiji, the great earthquake and aborted removal plans, Bestor is as interested in what people believe happened as in what probably actually did happen, but makes a clear distinction between the two. "The raw and the cooked," the fourth chapter, place Japanese fish lore and fish aesthetics in the Levi-Straussian tradition of analysis of the "meanings" of food. "Visible hands" and "Trading places" are the punning titles of the chapters describing the evolving structure of the fishing and fish-distribution industry, the operations of the market, the rights to participate and the multiple ways in which transactions differ from simple spot trading. A chapter on family firms--kinship, both blood and fictive, apprenticeship and the problematic processes of inheritance--is sandwiched between them. The last chapter, "Full circle," intertwines the annual cycle, culminating in a frenetic year-end and a ritual-rich new year, with the story of the economic cycle of Japan's bubble economy and its aftermath. For good measure, there are some fascinating illustrations and an appendix that offers a tourist guide for those--and there will be many--who want to go to see Tsukiji for themselves. RONALD DORE Castel di Casio, BO, aItaly |
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