Tasting Qualities - (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century) by Sarah Besky (Hardcover)

About the Book

"What is the place of quality in contemporary capitalism? How is a product as ordinary as a bag of tea valued for its quality? In her innovative study, Sarah Besky addresses these questions by going inside an Indian auction house where experts taste and value 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 over the history of the tea industry. Working across political economy, science and technology studies, and sensory ethnography, the book 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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

"Refreshingly focused on spaces 'in between' plantation production and restorative consumption, Besky incisively details the expert work of blending, tasting, evaluating, and auctioning that regularizes every bag of 'regular' black tea to deliver a 'nice cuppa'--producing qualities, she argues, that also reproduce India's plantation form of monocrop agriculture."--Heather Paxson, author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America

"A 'nice cup of tea' may be a small thing; the making of that 'niceness' is as big a subject as any taken on by anthropologists or historians. Tasting Qualities is an impressive account of the complex networks of expert practices and sites--plantations, auctions, blending rooms, scientific laboratories--in which qualitative judgments are made and then transformed into a priced product on the market."--Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University

"From plantation to laboratory to digital auction, Sarah Besky has drawn from the modern history of ordinary black tea to create something much more extraordinary: an ethnography of quality. Her attention to the diverse experts and experiments behind quality's production makes for a book rich in ideas, imagery, and ultimately humanity."--Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History

Review Quotes

"Besky offers anthropologists and other interdisciplinary scholars an ethnography to teach, think with, and push their studies of work, agriculture, finance, and commodities a bit further toward our collective understanding of quality."-- "Exertions"

"Combining ethnographic and archival description, Sarah Besky's Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea cleverly turns an analytic lens on the dependable and standardized aesthetics of modern capitalism."-- "American Ethnologist"

"Tasting Qualities is a persuasive ethnography of quality and its many unseen constituents."-- "Journal of Interdisciplinary History"

"A fascinating view of the Indian tea industry. . . . Manages to easily deconstruct and demystify the space between the plantation and the cup of tea."-- "Tea Journey"

"With a fine eye for detail and sparkling writing that makes the seemingly mundane fascinating . . . Tasting Qualities is a highly original, deeply researched, and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of Indian tea's modernity, which adds to the scholarship on commodities and capitalism."-- "Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society"

"Engages deeply with the theoretical aspects of assessing the quality and value of commodities through the lens of tea."-- "CHOICE"

"A wonderfully layered and immaculately researched exploration of the enduring tastes of empire."

-- "Allegra Lab"

"Tasting Qualities will be a beneficial read to a broad range of scholars with interest in food, labor, and commodity studies, the intersection of food, nutrition, and health knowledge, science and technology."-- "Food, Culture & Society"

"Provides an unusual and rich understanding of the process of creating, reproducing, and evaluating the quality of tea."-- "American Anthropologist"

"A stimulating account of Britain's favourite drink."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"[Besky's] nuanced study of Indian tea . . . is a refreshing brew of botany, business and culture."-- "Nature"

About the Author

Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the ILR School at Cornell University. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair Trade Tea Plantations in India.