Online Event
This event is part of the ANSO Seminar Series.
The identification of distinguishing characteristics of commodities—a process known as “qualification” frequently involves the use of specialized lexicons. Before Indian teas are auctioned, brokers evaluate them using a glossary of some 150 English words. This glossary was devised at the end of the British colonial period by industrial chemists who aimed to subject the aesthetic judgments of brokers to experimental scrutiny. These “teawords” formed part of a late colonial effort to ensure the circulation of “quality” tea from plantation to market. I attend not only to what quality is and whereit is, geographically and historically, but I also ask what quality does—what claims about it are made, by whom, and with what consequences. Quality is less a thing in the world and more of a set of ongoing experiments. One consequence of those experiments, is the perpetuation of the plantation as a socio-ecological system. While tea plantations might seem like past formations, in South Asia, they are continually, experimentally, rearticulated. “Quality” is the language and discipline through which the plantation continues to be thinkable and knowable. The plantation remains the answer to the question of how “quality” black tea is produced, despite attempts to do otherwise.
Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist, whose research uses ethnographic and historical methods to study the intersection of nature, labor, and capitalism in India.
She is the author and co-editor of three books. The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014), which won the Society for Economic Anthropology book prize. Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020), blends historical and ethnographic research on science, value, and the idea of quality in the tea industry to analyze efforts at economic reform in India. How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019), which Besky co-edited with Alex Blanchette (Tufts University), brings together contemporary theoretical conversations in posthumanism with questions about political economy, precarity, and the meanings of work. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Antipode, and Environmental Humanities, as well as other interdisciplinary journals.