The essences of multiculture: A sensory exploration of an inner-city street market

This paper applies methods and concepts derived from a ‘sensory turn’ within the social sciences to a street market, popular with migrants to east London, to explore the socio-sensory processes through which convivial metropolitan multiculture is produced. Arguing against critiques of “eating the other” (hooks 1992, p.21) and reductive accounts of cross-cultural interaction (assimilation, acculturation, boutique cosmopolitanism etc.) this paper hones a sensory attention on the market place and reveals the ways urbanites come to live with difference and, between them, develop metropolitan multicultures.