Chinese Restaurants' Interior Decor as Ethnographic Objects in Newfoundland 1
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order to present culture of overseas restaurants, descendant of restaurateurs, Karen Tam (who grew up restaurant called Aux Sept Bonheurs in Montreal neighborhood of Rosemont) launched project entitled Gold Mountain Restaurants (2002-2010) to exhibit physical interior of traditional restaurants across Canadian small cities and towns. According to Tam, restaurants that she grew up around and knew well are sites for formation of ideas about ethnicity; her aim in deconstruction and reconstruction of restaurants is to see which elements signify meaning for public and, thus, play role in influencing Western perceptions of Chinese (Karen Tam 2013). A restaurant, in mind of Tam, is a metaphor for an imaginary China, imagined by and as place recreated by in West (Tam 2006). Tam's installed restaurants featured only space itself (not food) and tangible items such as decor and furniture, which aspects she views as cultural elements that are significant but that have not been well studied in folklore studies on ethnic culinary traditions or in material culture studies in realm of folklore and ethnicity. An exception is Shalon Staub's study of Yemenis in New York City (1989). In addition to discussing food, Staub looks at names, signs, and decor of Yemeni restaurants as representing stage of ethnic cultural performance. This challenges the dominant voices in field of ethnic studies to consider construction of ethnic identity as fluid process of social boundary negotiation with variable cultural content (Staub 1989:11). Staub's work represents few instructive attempts by folklorists to understand relationship between architectural elements and ethnicity.In same vein, Lily Cho, writing of western Canada, argues, Of course, restaurant is more than food that it serves-it has an architecture; it is gathering space; it is kitchen and dining area and swinging doors which contact two; it is menu and space of counter (Cho 2010:14). In addition to serving dishes, some restaurants also promote their exoticism and/or authenticity through decorations that include various symbols. Karen Tam's installation investigates sense of tradition in restaurants in terms of physical space and suggests that roles of architecture and interior decor of those restaurants serve not only as supplemental elements to attract business but also as important markers of changing pace of immigration patterns and immigrant identities, such as what Lily Cho saw during her visits to Tam's exhibitions (Cho 2010:109-130). In this sense, decors of restaurants become ethnographic artifacts or objects of ethnography, which Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines as follows:Ethnographic artifacts are objects of ethnography. They are artifacts created by ethnographers. Such objects become ethnographic by virtue of being defined, segemented, detached, and carried away by ethnographers. They are ethnographic, not because they were found in Hungarian peasant household, Kwakiutl village, or Rajasthani market rather than in Buckingham Palace or Michelangelo's studio, but by virtue of manner in which they have been detached, for disciplines make their objects and in process make themselves. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:17-18)In this article, inspired by Tam, I trace changes of those ethnographic artifacts in architectural and interior decor of restaurants in Newfoundland, easternmost province of Canada, to explore interplay of interior spatial arrangements in restaurants and exterior social space of diaspora in various social and cultural contexts.AN EARLY SOCIOECONOMIC HISTORY OF CHINESE IN NEWFOUNDLANDThe first arrival of to Newfoundland can be traced to 1890s, when Newfoundland had not yet brought into confederation (Adams 2001:35; Daily News, 19 August 1895; Ping 1995). …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it