2020
First Published
4.25
Average Rating
256
Number of Pages
Part of Series
What is the role of quality in contemporary capitalism? How is a product as ordinary as a bag of tea judged for its quality? In her innovative study, Sarah Besky addresses these questions by going inside an Indian auction house where experts taste and appraise mass-market black tea, one of the world’s most recognized commodities. Pairing rich historical data with ethnographic research among agronomists, professional tea tasters and traders, and tea plantation workers, Besky shows how the meaning of quality has been subjected to nearly constant experimentation and debate throughout the history of the tea industry. Working across fields of political economy, science and technology studies, and sensory ethnography, Tasting Qualities argues for an approach to quality that sees it not as a final destination for economic, imperial, or post-imperial projects but as an opening for those projects.
Avg Rating
4.25
Number of Ratings
8
5 STARS
38%
4 STARS
50%
3 STARS
13%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
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Author
Sarah Besky
Author · 2 books
Dr Sarah Besky is the Charles Evans Hughes 1881 Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. From 2012-2015, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. She received a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. Her areas of interest are: labor, environment, commodities, agriculture, plantations, ethical trade, gender, development, Himalayas, India, environmental justice and ethics.
