Blackwell Reference Online

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Cut-'n'-mix experiences in consumer behavior, lifestyles, and identities are common and everyday, for example in food and menus. Hybridity refers to the mixture of phenomena that are held to be different, separate. Hybridization is defined as “the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with new forms in new practices” ( Rowe & Schelling 1991 : 231). The theme of hybridity matches a world of intensive intercultural communication, everyday multiculturalism, growing migration and diaspora lives, and the erosion of boundaries, at least in some spheres. Hence, hybridity has become a prominent theme in cultural studies. New hybrid forms are indicators of profound changes that are taking place as a consequence of mobility, migration, and multiculturalism. However, hybridity thinking also concerns existing or, so to speak, old hybridity, and thus involves different ways of looking at historical and existing cultural and institutional arrangements. This suggests not only that things are no longer the way they used to be, but were never really the way they used to be, or used to be viewed. Anthropologists studying the travel of customs and foodstuffs show that our foundations are profoundly mixed, and it could not be otherwise. Mixing is intrinsic to the evolution of the species. History is a collage. We can think of hybridity as layered in history, ... log in or subscribe to read full text