There's a link on the page to an article by Bestor in Foreign Policy... which turns out to be available to us in JSTOR, though it did take a few moves to find that out...(another digression: the Web form of the Science article offers a link to the journal's topical collection on Anthropology, 500+ articles over an extraordinary range of places and subjects)
TITLE Theorizing the city : the new urban anthropology reader / edited by Setha M. Low.Turns out this one has a chapter by Bestor: "Wholesale Sushi: Culture and Commodity in Tokyo's Tsukiji Market" (pp 201-243!). Here's a bit from it:
IMPRINT New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, c1999.
CALL NO. HT119 .T54 1999.
As fish change hands at Tsukiji and are carted out the market's gates, the finishing touches are put on the transformation of fish into food, a process that begins when they are pulled from the water (or even before, as commercial fishers ply their craft with the market's desiderata in mind). Fish are differentiated into culturally relevant categories of commodities as they pass along channels of distribution leading to and through the complex framework of social institutions that make up the marketplace. Fish become commodities in the hands of traders whose calculations of value and utility are shaped by principles of Japanese culinary logic. The cultural valuation of commodities as they become distinctive items of cuisine is, of course, the basis for the economic valuation of these products as items of trade. The principles of Japanese food culture that dictate the menu and the market's trading mechanisms that set the table are both shaped by many factors, including the industrialization of Japan's food supply, changing patterns of domestic food perparation and consumption, and cultural concerns about culinary authenticity and national identity....Tsukiji serves as a central node for the global seafood trade, the focal point for thousands of distinct commodity chains reaching to every corner of the global fishing industry, and the market has major influence, both domestically and internationally, on seafood prices, allocations of fishing effort, the environmental status of targeted species, and food preferences for Japanese consumers as well as for people in other countries. (202-203, 205)
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Developing a growth-transition matrix for the stock assessment of the green sea urchin off Maine - Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis Fishery Bulletin, Oct, 2003 by Yong Chen, Margaret Hunter, Robert Vadas, Brian Beal
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So where might I go from here? I could decide to look into sushi, thinking that it might make an interesting topic for a Project...
...but a couple of days later I got Bestor's book myself. It's wonderful. Some nice quotes:
From one perspective Tsukiji is a freewheeling spot market where one might expect to find competitive, individualistic, short-term profit maximization to be the normal course of events. This book analyzes instead how patterns of trade emerge from and are ordered by the social institutions and cultural patterns in which the marketplace is embedded and without which it could not exist. For the engines of economic activity, culture is not simply a lubricant or a fuel with higher or lower octane ratings. The hand of culture designs the cylinders and camshafts, turns the key, shifts the gears, unfolds the road maps, and writes the traffic tickets. In this study of the Tsukiji marketplace, I hope to make this hand more visible. (38)Reflecting on the ebb and flow of the marketplace, one old trader commented to me, "Tsukiji is not some big machine stamping out products clunk, clunk, clunk. It's an arabesuku (arabesque)." His delicate imagery evokes the precise and intricate footwork of Tsukiji traders as they negotiate the market's "grooved channels" (Geertz 1978) that lead them again and again through familiar settings to familiar partners in accustomed arenas of trade. (51)
The wonderful word shitamachi surfaces early in Tsukiji, and is defined by Japan Reference: "Literally meaning "low town" or "downtown", during the Edo period shitamachi described all districts lower than Edo castle, by opposition to Yamanote or "upper town" (note the name of the JR Yamanote line which encircles the Imperial palace or former Edo castle)."
(Japan Reference looks like it would be useful...)