Description

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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.

 

About the Author

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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.

Praise For…

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"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

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

"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

"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 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

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

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

"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

"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

"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