Ciências Sociais

Texto publicado em Horizontes Antropológicos ­ Diferenças Culturais vol 5, p.140­180, julho
1997 em Antropologia em Primeira Mão, PPGAS/UFSC, 1995.

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Os fast­foods
1
uma homogeneidade contestável na globalização cultur al

Carmen Sílvia Moraes Rial
Professora do Programa de Pós­Graduação em Antropologia e do Curso de Jornalismo
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Abstract:
Through this ethnographic study of fast­food restaurants (the consumer's image of them, the work organization, the employees, the menu and the publicity), I pretend to consider divers dimensions of the globalization process which characterizes the modern world.
Initiated in the late fifties, the fast foods can be found in more than seventy countries including Brazil and France which I study in greater detail, although I had to explode the traditional notion of fieldwork in Anthropology in order to consider the fast­food restaurants in a planetarian perspective. I try to show how, despite their supposed homogeneity, fast foods become localizes, taking on the cultural context of the place. Seen as false restaurants by certains social groups and targets of protest by nationalist and ecological movements, they are considered by other, on the contrary, as symbols of an idealized modernity.
I conclude that what most characterizes these restaurants is the taste for an image, the adhesion to a profusion of images around which the clients, fascinated, share a sense of communion. * * *
"Pela primeira vez na minha vida, me encontrava atrás do balcão de um fast­food, um território muito diferente do que poderia imaginar enquanto consumidora. Minha primeira impressão foi estonteante. Todos se moviam freneticamente, os objetos são deslocados de um lado a outro, apitos e luzes jorram das máquinas. Tentei relacionar o que via com um outro lugar