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Sarah Besky Books

    Dr. Sarah Besky delves into the intricate relationships between labor, environment, and ethics within a global framework. Her scholarship often focuses on agricultural plantations and ethical trade, uncovering the complex moral questions embedded in commodity production. Through an anthropological lens, she analyzes how issues of gender and development shape environmental justice and ethics in regions such as the Himalayas and India. Her research offers profound insights into the interconnectedness of global economies and local realities.

    The Darjeeling Distinction
    Tasting Qualities

    • Tasting Qualities

      • 250 pages
      • 9 hours of reading
      4.0(1)Add rating

      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.

      Tasting Qualities

    • The Darjeeling Distinction

      Introduction : reinventing the plantation for the 21st century -- Darjeeling -- Plantation -- Property -- Fairness -- Sovereignty -- Conclusion : is something better than nothing?

      The Darjeeling Distinction