Domesticating the French Fry

Abstract

This article is an ethnographic study of how Russian consumers have ‘domesticated’ McDonald’s. Specifically, I am concerned with how Russians blur the boundaries between the personal and the public, the local and the foreign, by simultaneously drawing aspects of McDonald’s into the intimate spaces of their everyday lives and personalizing the public McDonald’s experience. By engaging with recent debates about the nature of localization, I suggest that the Russian case is different because Russian consumers who are participating in nationalist-oriented consumer campaigns are including McDonald’s as an authentically Russian, and hence indigenous, product.