"Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City" by Theodore C. Bestor, in American Anthropologist (Mar. 2001), American Anthropological Assoc., Ste. 640, 4350 N. Fairfax Dr., Arlington, Va. 22203–1620.

On a dock early one evening in tiny West Atlantic bluefin tuna weighing 270 to 610 Point, Maine, several fishing crews and a mix pounds each. A few decades ago, the giant of American and Japanese buyers gather for fish sold (if they could be sold at all) for cat a silent auction. The bidders inspect 20 food at a penny a pound. Now, a high-quality tuna can fetch more than $30,000. The day after the Maine auction some of the fish will turn up at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market, the largest fish market in the world. They will be displayed alongside tuna from Cape Anne, Massachusetts, from towns on the Spanish Costa de Luz on the Atlantic side of the Straits of Gibraltar, and from Colombia, Croatia, and other countries. That night, the Maine tuna may be sent on its way from to sushi bars in Tokyo and Palo Alto, while Spanish tuna steaks may make their way to a North Carolina supermarket.

In this unique and highly specialized worldwide market, Bestor, a Harvard University anthropologist, finds some intriguing insights into the nature of globalization.

It’s a market originally made by the Japanese hunger for sushi and sashimi but since vastly expanded as the world has acquired Japan’s taste for raw fish. With the Japanese economy in a long-term slump, the industry continues to thrive on American appetites. Bestor sees more than a retooling of Western palates; the taste for sushi, along with the cultural vogue for things Asian, signals the emergence of a new global map in which the Asia-Pacific zone may loom largest. Such developments give the lie to any notion that globalization is a one-way process, just a synonym for Americanization. The economic-cultural traffic is two-way and even multiway.

Out, too, must go the thought that globalization always implies homogenization and standardization. In Bestor’s view, global markets don’t function like giant global blenders, rendering place irrelevant. Rather, they reconnect places (and local markets) in different ways. "Halifax, Boston, Pusan, and Cartagena are close neighbors in the [new] hinterland, distant—on this [tuna] scape—from Toronto or New York or Seoul or Madrid." Dealing with Japanese markets has immersed West Point fishers and their counterparts around the world in aspects of Japanese culture; to survive, they must be well versed in such things as the nuances of kata (ideal form) and its implications for the proper handling of tuna.

The new world market for tuna, like so many other global markets, doesn’t impose "a uniform logic on each place," but gives each place "material and cultural means that ...may be new, alien, or transformed, but [are] no less important for creating local meanings and local social conditions. It is in these interactions that one can find the local in the global."