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.
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.
"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
256 pp.6 x 9Illus: 13 b/w figures, 1 table
9780520303249$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
May 2020