Abstract
This chapter examines the meanings embedded in the material culture of the marketplace (as visible in Borough Market’s built environment and specialized stall displays). It argues that a market-wide system of meanings (e.g. semiotics) emerges as individual elements of material culture assemble together. This ‘material-semiotic’ shapes meanings about foods’ production and consumption and comes to bracket consumption in the marketplace, providing the backdrop to the marketplace’s social-sensuality characterizing, and ultimately governing commodity exchange. Like many such marketplaces, Borough Market has a distinctive visual aesthetic. Derived from a material culture that incorporates objects, signage and photography as well as timeworn building materials, and coupled with an architecturally notable and historically built environment, this material culture mobilizes individual temporal and spatial, and otherwise geographical meanings and imaginations about foods’ provenance. As these are drawn together within the space of the marketplace, however, these meanings and imaginations slip, becoming generalized to the marketplace and its cultures of consumption. Drawing from literatures concerned with materiality and the material ‘turn’, this chapter traces the disparate meanings of the marketplace embedded in its material culture, interrogates the ways in which various forms of social sensuality emerge from their assembly into a material-semiotic, and examines the ways in which these materialities and meanings combine to provide the ‘architecture’ from which commodities are valued and the market is made.
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Notes
- 1.
This document was alluded to in Borough Market’s Board Meeting minutes, and the debate over replacing the old market hall ensued, circa 1820.
- 2.
One of challenges of using ‘ethnographic’ methods is recognizing ‘market-speak’ as part of Borough Market’s discursive system. Though certainly not a ‘material semiotic’, ‘market-speak’ contributes to how materials in the market can be interpreted.
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Coles, B. (2021). Imagined Geographies of the Marketplace: Fashioned Materialities. In: Making Markets Making Place. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72865-6_3
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