Convenience Stores as Living Museums of Contemporary Taiwan:Its Material Archaeology and Cultural Representation

• Main Authors: Huang, Yu-Zhen, 黃宇禎
• Other Authors: Peter Cheng-chong Wu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/g53dh4

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 地理學系 === 105 === Convenience stores are not only highly profitable retail business, low-order central places for people's livelihoods, but also special spaces reflecting the contemporary material culture of everyday life. Different from business studies, management science, or sociology, this thesis proposes a geographical perspective in which the metaphor of living museum is adopted to examine goods and services offered in convenience stores. Theoretically, this study is based on Foucault's “archaeological” and “genealogical” methods to portray the essence of everyday life. By reviewing and adapting Highmore’s three questions about “aesthetics”, “archives”, as well as “practices and critiques”, the thesis constructs a way to appreciation, analysis, and interpretation, and rewrites the methodology from Fusco’s spatial ethnography to recognize the main text types to investigate. Empirically, this study uses FamilyMart and 7-Eleven stores, which are representative and accessible, as cases to do 24-hour observations across seasons and periods. Following the three questions and two text types, the thesis discusses the social and cultural meaning from “genealogies” of goods and services. The focus of the discussions includes physical and psychological conditioning of drinks, immediate accessibility of foods, contradictory use of cigarettes and alcohols, efficient spares of daily groceries, unlimited connectivity of multi-media kiosks, face-to-face flexibility of counter clerks, and free consumption of space in convenience stores. This study finds that it is the innovation of transportation and communication technology that keeps convenience stores close to and even creating the needs of contemporary people. Furthermore, the implications of multi-scale everyday lives may add on to the central place theory, and provide a much more comprehensive conception of material culture.