Hawker food culture : producing a local cosmopolitan cultural identity in Singapore

Abstract

This thesis traces the historical and social evolution of hawker food culture in Singapore. Utilising concepts of cosmopolitanism from Appiah, which include values of cultural hybridisation, intercultural disposition, and a communal sense of social morality, this paper provides an in-depth study of the key socio-cultural facets of Singapore's hawker food landscape - its foods, hawker spaces, and the everyday interactions within these spaces - to reflect a evolving hawker food culture from the 1960s to 1980s. Instances of cross-cultural hybridisation within Singapore's hawker cuisine, the transformation of the hawker space into Bhabha's "third space", and a shared sense of social morality found in everyday transactional exchanges, reveal a budding cosmopolitan identity within the local hawker food landscape that stakeholders of the community - hawkers and patrons - identified with during the time period.