Buying bread in a culturally distant place – material culture part 2

In the last paragraph of my last blog about material culture, I say ‘so-labelled “other cultures”’ because this phrase can too easily mean ‘those foreigners’ who are ‘not like us’. As well as encouraging prejudice, this is missing a huge opportunity. 

Seeing the connection there between small material cultural practices, in a shop in Britain and a classroom in China, opens up other connections across distant places and times. It makes me think of buying fresh bread, noon-e sangak, in Iran. Even though a distant memory, I now realise how it and similar experiences have had a huge impact on my engagement with the intercultural everywhere. 

It isn’t just a matter of stating your order when it’s your turn. The queue is in the street and there’s some negotiation about how to get noticed when you arrive at the counter. If you’re not quick you can be overlooked and even ignored. You also realise that it’s not just because you’re ‘a foreigner’. Not everyone in the queue is good at this, even though they’ve been brought up with the process.

There’s a lot of activity in the bakery. Perhaps five or six people kneading and setting out the dough, putting it on paddles, positioning it skilfully inside the large oven, calculating when to take it out, and hanging it out to cool. The bread comes out in large pieces perhaps three feet long (90cm) and half the width, hot and difficult to hold. Customers have different methods for taking and carrying it – some with plastic baskets, others with newspaper or cotton bags, some skilfully folding the bread without getting burnt.

At the counter, the head baker responds to how particular customers make eye-contact or speak in ways that show knowledge, respect, appreciation of the process, and more deserving of quick service and the freshest bread. Customers have to have confidence, focus, and just the right demeanour – and knowledge of all the nuanced social skills and sometimes quite specialist turns of phrase that make this work. There’s also a small and diverse community in the queue Itself – age, gender, neighbourhood, ethnicity, province, education, class, religious devotion, and degrees of experience of buying bread and being with other people in the queue.

It’s hard to know exactly the sequencing of experience that I brought to and took away from this one of buying bread – at which I of course never became a master.

The other event from my time in Iran, which I have already written about in detail, was catching communal taxis. This also involved the delicately nuanced social skills of timing, eye-contact, language, and observation of behaviour within small transient cultures of drivers and other passengers.

Sparked by the connection in my previous blog, between smelling baking in Britain and a child making a pastry in China. Thinking about buying bread in Iran in the 1970s, reminds me and helps me to make more sense of the hours as a child I spent with with my grandmother in Britain in the 1960s. 

She had a small business making dresses for wealthy women; and I used to accompany her to the haberdashery department in a large store where she bought fabrics and threads. Like the Iranian bread-buyers, I watched how she related to the shop assistants – the language she used, the knowledge she showed, and the mutual respect she gained for their and her expertise. It wasn’t just the language – the way she and the shop assistants touched the lengths of cloth to show and assess its quality, the deftness of their fingers like those of the Iranian baker working with bread. 

Even though getting bored waiting for what seemed to take ages, I was learning the basic small culture formation on the go methodologies that I carried to help me to notice what was going on at the Iranian bakery.

And to make more sense of memories of the specific phrases I needed when sent out as a child to the local shop. In those days the shopkeeper would wrap things in paper, where I would notice again the specialist finger movement in the precision of folding – almost at eye-level on the counter in front of my childhood eyes. And then forward again to the local shop in Cairo in the late 80s – with the similar dexterity and methodology, but different types of folds – and the folding of carpets and fabrics in shops in the bazars in Damascus and Istanbul.

This material cultural influence on my professional life was gradual. As a student working in a department store and as a hospital porter. Also as a student, the specialist language and demeanour necessary to be taken seriously and engage with subject areas, lecturers, administrators, departments, accommodation own­ers and fellow students from a huge range of unfamiliar backgrounds. And the groundwork for much of this was surviving within complex structures and hierarchies in primary and secondary school.

Working in Damascus University in the early 1980s was excellent preparation for working in a British university – learning about structures, politics and academic discourses.

So what difference does it make whether or not we separate these material cultural experiences, in our think­ing-as-usual, between ‘another’ and ‘my culture’? The diagram implies this, with ‘the foreign culture’ on the left.

This division is constructed by very old and sustained prejudice – a false ‘us’-‘them’ Orientalist notion that ‘they belong to non-Western cultures that are more relational, collectivist, and less self-directed than us’ so that ‘what they do’ is not something with which we can possibly identify – but something to be fascinated by and put up with – something to tell stories about when we return home.

I’m therefore proposing a rearrangement of the diagram in which I don’t separate according to this or that culture – thus getting away from the false Orientalist fixity of national or civilisational culture.

This makes me think about what these experiences share – that they are all examples of small culture formation on the go – where all parties are making sense and positioning and repositioning themselves with all aspects of what’s going on and the other people there.

This then means that all the experiences I have described become to represent the shared underlying methodology for this process. This is therefore what I put in the centre of the diagram along with a listing of the elements which are shared between the experiences – which can then somehow be related to how we all learn from observing and practising cultural materiality through all our life experience. 

I then divide the diagram with softer dotted lines. And putting the more micro experiences on the left – whether they are in Iran, Britain or indeed anywhere else, and similarly the more macro on the right and the link to later professional live. Here, the arrows go in multiple directions because, actually, wherever we are in the temporal sequence of events, we continue to make new sense of experiences in the past – as I now do of going shopping with my grandmother. 

There are different ways to divide experience – childhood and family versus workplace. However, in whatever ways we do this, opportunities shouldn’t be missed. I’m thinking here about research students travelling to other places to study and seeing no connection between, for example, what they are researching in their country with what they see around them in the university and in other parts of social life in their new country of residence – and then in other parts of social life in the wider location of their research setting. The researcher who connected the shop in Britain with the classroom in China will now make unexpected connections with other locations in China.

Also for me. When I was working in Iran in the 1970s, was I learning anything from watching people buying bread that might have dispelled my own Orientalist native-speakerist attitude to teaching English which was so falsely framed as ‘teaching them how to think’?

For more on material culture and how we encounter it every day, see Ros i Solé (2024), Material Interculturality, Routledge, and Badwan & Hall (2020), Walking along in sticky places: post-humanist and affective insights from a reflective account of two young women in Manchester, UK, Language & Intercultural Communication, 20(3), 225–239.