From Local to Global
Interactions between global (especially Western) influences and locally differentiated traditions constitute the fabric of contemporary life. The increasing flow of capital, products, ideas and people, as well as everyone’s consciousness of these interconnections, produces a process of cultural globalization, readable in food studies. The anthropology of Polynesian food presents a privileged vantage point for the analysis of global and local interrelations and adaptations, i.e., « food glocalization ». Applied to the Society and Rapa Islands of French Polynesia, food anthropology sheds light on the ever-changing complexity of interactions among people, their traditions and external influences. Social actors’ awareness of new normative models allows them to surpass those food models sometimes experienced as compulsory in ways that alternate between resistance, adaptation and hybrid creation.