Cultural diversity and the ethnoscapes of taste in Australia

This chapter explores the consequences of increasing ethnic diversity for practices of cultural consumption and the distribution of taste in Australia. Changing migration patterns and generational changes have produced a wider array of goods, sites and audiences, and an increasing transnational nature of practices and relations. This chapter shows that while migration has both produced ethnic-specific markets and reshaped 'mainstream' tastes in Australia, the data raises questions about the complex ways in which ethnicity and cultural consumption are interrelated in a globalised world. It argues that we need to think less about ethnicity as a neat dividing line of taste and more about the dynamic flows captured by the idea of the 'ethnoscape'. The chapter considers the implications of the data for debates about emerging cosmopolitan forms of capital alongside the ongoing significance of national cultural capital. It argues for the need to disentangle a variety of processes in the composition and recomposition of cultural capital: diversification of markets, transnationalisation of consumption and the cosmopolitanisation of taste.