I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan.
I received my Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. In my research, I ask how ideas about the “empowerment” of farm workers, the connections of products to places, and the promotion of internationally regulated social and ecological standards have informed the ways in which tea workers, brokers, and consumers construct both a product, Darjeeling tea, and a place, the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India.
During 26 months of dissertation fieldwork between 2008 and 2010 (and post-Ph.D research in 2012) I followed debates about environmental and social justice from fair trade and organic tea plantations and cooperatives, to international NGOs, and into an increasingly tense struggle of Indian Nepalis, or Gorkhas, in the region to form an independent state, Gorkhaland.
I am interested in how debates about labor standards, taste, rights to place, and the legacies of colonialism have informed the production of boutique tea and the revitalization of the Gorkhaland movement. I am interested in the changing meanings of “justice” in an era of trade liberalization, the retreat of the state from environmental and social welfare, and increased consumer consciousness about the conditions of food production.
I am in the final stages of work on a book manuscript based on this research, In the Market for Justice: Fair Trade, Tea Production, and the 21st Century Plantation in Darjeeling, India, which investigates the extension of fair trade certification to plantations. Plantations are, after all, colonially-rooted unequal land tenure systems, in which laborers are tied to land on which they live and work, but have no rights to this land. In this project, I ask how the plantation has been remade to be palatable and consumable in an age of ethical trade.
I am in the early stages of a new research project that will take me back to Kolkata, India and to Colombo, Sri Lanka and Mombasa, Kenya. This project asks how tea brokers, tasters, and blenders act as arbitrators not just of value, but of taste. To critically examine the production and politics of taste, I trace contemporary brokerage to the British colonial tea trade, when Kolkata, Colombo, and Mombasa became important nodes in the circulation of tea in and out of Asian and African plantations. I bridge this history with ethnography of tea auction centers in these postcolonial cities, where inter-Asian identities meld with ideas of regional specificity, and colonial aesthetics merge with cosmopolitan sensibilities.
All pictures © Sarah Besky 2013
Website last updated: April 2013
SARAH BESKY
Department of Anthropology &
School of Natural Resources and Environment
University of Michigan
101 West Hall
1085 South University Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107
737.615.3367