Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023
This article draws from long-term research on Indian tea plantations. It argues that if the plant... more This article draws from long-term research on Indian tea plantations. It argues that if the plantation is to be at all useful analytically, then enslaved people, indentured laborers, and workers who find themselves otherwise stuck on those land tenure formations called plantations need to come to the analytical forefront. One means of centering labor in these discussions is to attend to acts and processes of social reproduction. Certainly, the plantation is a space of production, but the plantation would not persist as such a space without acts of childrearing, feeding, eating, care, and maintenance. Attention to these acts centers workers' perceptions of time, space, accumulation, and the plantation itself. Even in the context of monocultural expansion, plantation workers live not just in service to single crops but through diverse forms of provisioning. Social reproduction and nonmarket exchange, then, are not a redemptive outside to plantation production, but integral to it.
In 2019, a debate arose among Maine lobster fishers and environmental groups over the role of lob... more In 2019, a debate arose among Maine lobster fishers and environmental groups over the role of lobster traps in killing North Atlantic right whales, the world's most endangered whale species. Maine fishers denied that their gear was killing whales. To do so, they leveraged longstanding representations by regional natural and social scientists of lobster fishing as part of a unique and ecologically sustainable "heritage" economy-one that was itself "endangered" by over-regulation. Setting this debate in the context of a global climate crisis that is irrevocably changing Atlantic coastal environments, this article shows how ecological fragility and white workingclass fragility become yoked together. Efforts to understand what lobster traps do, and how they might do it differently, perpetuated a key feature of settler colonialism, namely, the tendency to seek harmony between resource extraction and conservation.
The identification of distinguishing characteristics of commodities-a process known as "qualifica... more 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 one hundred and fifty English words. This glossary was devised at the end
While the colonial and contemporary economy of Bengal’s Himalayan foothills is most often associa... more While the colonial and contemporary economy of Bengal’s Himalayan foothills is most often associated with the tea plantations of Darjeeling and the Dooars, the small farms of nearby Kalimpong were also a key space in which colonial agents and missionaries worked to “settle” the mountainous terrain. Focused on Kalimpong, this article traces the trajectory of one technology of settlement, agricultural extension, from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. It highlights agricultural extension’s racialized and gendered politics, as well as its implication in a long-term project that merged material (i.e., food) provision with social reproduction (i.e., childrearing, kin-making). Agricultural extension created a patchwork of relatively biodiverse small farms that historical and contemporary accounts describe as a “green belt”: a socio-ecological outside to the plantation monocultures that dominate the hills. British governors attempted to use non-plantation space for multiple ends. In this sense, their work might be termed “biopolitical,” in that it was geared toward supporting and amplifying the life chances of certain human bodies and certain botanical species. Through a series of experiments, colonial agents made calculated choices about which of these forms of life should be made to flourish, and which might be allowed to perish. Importantly, settlement, as a set of intertwined projects, did not unfold in a coherent or deliberately sequential manner. Settlement was, and continues to be, a sedimentary process.
In the mid-1800s, plantation-produced tea from India came onto the British market. Tea retailers ... more In the mid-1800s, plantation-produced tea from India came onto the British market. Tea retailers blended this more malty and black tea with the lighter Chinese-grown tea to which consumers had become accustomed. By the turn of the 20th century, blending helped Empire-grown tea supplant Chinese-grown tea on the market. Scholars of tea have shown how British tea companies working in South Asia stoked racialized fears that Chinese tea arrived in Britain in an adulterated state, laden with impurities that included dyes, perfumes and even human sweat. This article describes how concerns about protecting tea leaves from outside adulteration gave way to concerns about the potential digestive threat that lay inside tea leaves themselves. Medical journals linked the increased consumption of Indian teas to a population-wide 'epidemic' of indigestion. The most cited culprits in this epidemic were tannins, chemical compounds that were also thought to give black tea its characteristic bitterness and color. The normalization of black tea consumption among the British public was not just a work of marketing or branding but a work of resolving uncertainty about what tannins were at a material, biophysical level. As this uncertainty was resolved scientifically, tea was materialized not as a singular, unified product but as an active chemical assemblage.
On tea plantations in Darjeeling, India, a house comes with every job. These domestic spaces cons... more On tea plantations in Darjeeling, India, a house comes with every job. These domestic spaces constitute a significant portion of workers’ compensation. Jobs—and the houses that come with them—are inherited by successive generations of workers, but houses remain the property of plantations. Archival and ethnographic stories about the provision, inheritance, and upkeep of houses bring attention to the continued importance of “fixity” to capitalist regimes of accumulation. Fixity has three dimensions: a persistent association between ethnicity, place, and work; the fostering of senses of belonging through systems of inheritance; and the routine maintenance of infrastructures, including housing. As a theoretical and descriptive tool, fixity highlights a tension in late capitalism between work and life, and between freedom and bondage. [colonialism, gender, commodities, agriculture, work, Himalayas, West Bengal]
The XQs (Ten Questions) series is a conversation with the author of new and exciting works in Sou... more The XQs (Ten Questions) series is a conversation with the author of new and exciting works in South Asian Studies, whose aim is not to " review " but to contextualize, historicize and promote new scholarship. Interview conducted via e-mail, and published on www.chapatimystery.com on January 22, 2017.
Darjeeling, a district in the Himalayan foothills of the Indian state of West Bengal, is a former... more Darjeeling, a district in the Himalayan foothills of the Indian state of West Bengal, is a former colonial " hill station. " It is world famous both as a destination for mountain tourists and as the source of some of the world's most expensive and sought-after tea. For decades , Darjeeling's majority population of Indian-Nepalis, or Gorkhas, have struggled for sub-national autonomy over the district and for the establishment of a separate Indian state of " Gorkhaland " there. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amid the Gorkhaland agitation in Darjeeling's tea plantations and bustling tourist town. In many ways, Darjeeling is what Val Plumwood calls a " shadow place. " Shadow places are sites of extraction, invisible to centers of political and economic power yet essential to the global circulation of capital. The existence of shadow places troubles the notion that belonging can be " singularized " to a particular location or landscape. Building on this idea, I examine the encounters of Gorkha tea plantation workers, students, and city dwellers with landslides, a crumbling colonial infrastructure, and urban wildlife. While many analyses of subnational movements in India characterize them as struggles for land, I argue that in sites of colonial and capitalist extraction like hill stations, these struggles with land are equally important. In Darjeeling, senses of place and belonging are " edge effects " : the unstable, emergent results of encounters between materials, species, and economies.
In India, an industrial reform movement called ‘Tea 2030’ is underway. Tea 2030 is driven by conc... more In India, an industrial reform movement called ‘Tea 2030’ is underway. Tea 2030 is driven by concern about two numbers: tea prices, determined by expert tasters in auction houses, and labor costs, calculated on tea plantations. According to reformers, prices are too low and labor costs are too high. If this problem could be corrected, reformers claim, tea could change, too, from an oppressive legacy of the British colonial era to a ‘hero crop.’ A hero crop would deliver development benefits in addition to income, improving the lives of farmers and undoing the injustices of a colonial past. The hero crop narrative, however, elides a longstanding, embodied set of relationships between tea and numbers in India. Ethnographic and archival material from tea plantations and tea auctions in Northeast India shows how prices and labor costs emerge as part of colonially rooted evaluative practices. Prices are the outcome of a sensory and linguistic process in which bodies value, while labor costs are the outcome of legal and technical processes that value bodies. These evaluative processes are embodied algorithms. Tea 2030’s proposed restructuring of embodied algorithms for prices and labor costs may, however, do more harm than good.
ABS TRACT: In this article, we use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a b... more ABS TRACT: In this article, we use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a bulwark of social theory and an under-theorized category of social analysis. Scholarship on plants brings together three overlapping approaches to territory: biological and behaviorist theories; representational and cartographic perspectives; and more-than-human analysis. We argue that these three approaches are not mutually exclusive. Rather, diff erent epistemologies of territory overlap and are imbricated within each other. We further argue that these three approaches to territory inform three distinct domains of territoriality: legibility and surveillance; ordering and classifi cation; and exclusion and inclusion. Th rough examples of how plants operate in these three domains, we illustrate the analytical potential that a more-than-human approach to territory provides. We conclude, however, that attention to the particularities of plant ecologies can help move multispecies discussions more fi rmly into the realm of the political economic. Territory is an elusive concept. It is material and ideological. It is a product of collectivity and an object of control. Territory is inextricably social. Territory has much in common with closely related concepts such as property, place, or landscape, yet it remains conceptually distinct. In some framings, territory refers to the extension of power over space. It involves processes of boundary making, surveillance, control, exclusion, and defense. In these framings, territory is a mode of sovereignty, and the power involved is oft en that of the state. Yet territory also refers to the more subtle forms and practices of non-state actors who seek to establish control over resources or space. In this article, we think with plants about the nature of territory. Plants participate in more than human territorialities, we argue, and we suggest that social scientists look beyond anthro-pocentric discourses of law and statecraft to understand the territorial projects that are entangled in the sprouts, stalks, and roots of plants, in their distributions and migrations, in their communities as well as in our own. Doing so holds out the promise of reconfi guring the way
A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. ... more A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. On one side of this debate is Fair Trade USA, which supports plantation certification. On the other is the retailer Equal Exchange, whose leaders fear that fair trade’s longstanding commitment to small farmer cooperatives may be in jeopardy. Drawing on the two organizations’ experiences with tea plantations and cooperatives in Darjeeling, India, as well as my own ethnographic research, I explore how advocates in the Global North identify who counts as a legitimate laboring subject of agricultural justice. This debate underscores that social justice in global agriculture is fundamentally multiple—in Nancy Fraser’s terms, “abnormal.” The seeming intractability of this debate shows that while the agricultural justice movement has attended to questions of economic distribution and cultural recognition, it must do more to address problems of political representation at national and international scales.
In this article, we propose a critical framework for labor-sensitive food studies. First, we revi... more In this article, we propose a critical framework for labor-sensitive food studies. First, we review recent food studies scholarship on agriculture, which leans heavily toward studies of alternative and small-farmer agriculture. We then overview different analytical and theoretical framings dominant in the study of labor and agriculture in the Americas, tracing work from anthropological analyses of peasant and plantation agriculture, to cultural ecologies of smallholders, to American agrarianism, and finally to studies of commodity chains and the labor process. In the review's penultimate section, we curate scholarship that merges macro-level political economic analysis with detailed narrative and interpretive inquiry into the lives of laborers. We aim for this review to provide groundwork for future intersectional food studies research that is sensitive to the lived experience of waged labor. In our conclusion, we argue for further theoretical and empirical expansion to engage the relationship between labor and food in the twenty-first century.
In the former colonial hill station of Darjeeling, claims to belonging reveal the paradoxes of li... more In the former colonial hill station of Darjeeling, claims to belonging reveal the paradoxes of living in a place built for someone else.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023
This article draws from long-term research on Indian tea plantations. It argues that if the plant... more This article draws from long-term research on Indian tea plantations. It argues that if the plantation is to be at all useful analytically, then enslaved people, indentured laborers, and workers who find themselves otherwise stuck on those land tenure formations called plantations need to come to the analytical forefront. One means of centering labor in these discussions is to attend to acts and processes of social reproduction. Certainly, the plantation is a space of production, but the plantation would not persist as such a space without acts of childrearing, feeding, eating, care, and maintenance. Attention to these acts centers workers' perceptions of time, space, accumulation, and the plantation itself. Even in the context of monocultural expansion, plantation workers live not just in service to single crops but through diverse forms of provisioning. Social reproduction and nonmarket exchange, then, are not a redemptive outside to plantation production, but integral to it.
In 2019, a debate arose among Maine lobster fishers and environmental groups over the role of lob... more In 2019, a debate arose among Maine lobster fishers and environmental groups over the role of lobster traps in killing North Atlantic right whales, the world's most endangered whale species. Maine fishers denied that their gear was killing whales. To do so, they leveraged longstanding representations by regional natural and social scientists of lobster fishing as part of a unique and ecologically sustainable "heritage" economy-one that was itself "endangered" by over-regulation. Setting this debate in the context of a global climate crisis that is irrevocably changing Atlantic coastal environments, this article shows how ecological fragility and white workingclass fragility become yoked together. Efforts to understand what lobster traps do, and how they might do it differently, perpetuated a key feature of settler colonialism, namely, the tendency to seek harmony between resource extraction and conservation.
The identification of distinguishing characteristics of commodities-a process known as "qualifica... more 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 one hundred and fifty English words. This glossary was devised at the end
While the colonial and contemporary economy of Bengal’s Himalayan foothills is most often associa... more While the colonial and contemporary economy of Bengal’s Himalayan foothills is most often associated with the tea plantations of Darjeeling and the Dooars, the small farms of nearby Kalimpong were also a key space in which colonial agents and missionaries worked to “settle” the mountainous terrain. Focused on Kalimpong, this article traces the trajectory of one technology of settlement, agricultural extension, from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. It highlights agricultural extension’s racialized and gendered politics, as well as its implication in a long-term project that merged material (i.e., food) provision with social reproduction (i.e., childrearing, kin-making). Agricultural extension created a patchwork of relatively biodiverse small farms that historical and contemporary accounts describe as a “green belt”: a socio-ecological outside to the plantation monocultures that dominate the hills. British governors attempted to use non-plantation space for multiple ends. In this sense, their work might be termed “biopolitical,” in that it was geared toward supporting and amplifying the life chances of certain human bodies and certain botanical species. Through a series of experiments, colonial agents made calculated choices about which of these forms of life should be made to flourish, and which might be allowed to perish. Importantly, settlement, as a set of intertwined projects, did not unfold in a coherent or deliberately sequential manner. Settlement was, and continues to be, a sedimentary process.
In the mid-1800s, plantation-produced tea from India came onto the British market. Tea retailers ... more In the mid-1800s, plantation-produced tea from India came onto the British market. Tea retailers blended this more malty and black tea with the lighter Chinese-grown tea to which consumers had become accustomed. By the turn of the 20th century, blending helped Empire-grown tea supplant Chinese-grown tea on the market. Scholars of tea have shown how British tea companies working in South Asia stoked racialized fears that Chinese tea arrived in Britain in an adulterated state, laden with impurities that included dyes, perfumes and even human sweat. This article describes how concerns about protecting tea leaves from outside adulteration gave way to concerns about the potential digestive threat that lay inside tea leaves themselves. Medical journals linked the increased consumption of Indian teas to a population-wide 'epidemic' of indigestion. The most cited culprits in this epidemic were tannins, chemical compounds that were also thought to give black tea its characteristic bitterness and color. The normalization of black tea consumption among the British public was not just a work of marketing or branding but a work of resolving uncertainty about what tannins were at a material, biophysical level. As this uncertainty was resolved scientifically, tea was materialized not as a singular, unified product but as an active chemical assemblage.
On tea plantations in Darjeeling, India, a house comes with every job. These domestic spaces cons... more On tea plantations in Darjeeling, India, a house comes with every job. These domestic spaces constitute a significant portion of workers’ compensation. Jobs—and the houses that come with them—are inherited by successive generations of workers, but houses remain the property of plantations. Archival and ethnographic stories about the provision, inheritance, and upkeep of houses bring attention to the continued importance of “fixity” to capitalist regimes of accumulation. Fixity has three dimensions: a persistent association between ethnicity, place, and work; the fostering of senses of belonging through systems of inheritance; and the routine maintenance of infrastructures, including housing. As a theoretical and descriptive tool, fixity highlights a tension in late capitalism between work and life, and between freedom and bondage. [colonialism, gender, commodities, agriculture, work, Himalayas, West Bengal]
The XQs (Ten Questions) series is a conversation with the author of new and exciting works in Sou... more The XQs (Ten Questions) series is a conversation with the author of new and exciting works in South Asian Studies, whose aim is not to " review " but to contextualize, historicize and promote new scholarship. Interview conducted via e-mail, and published on www.chapatimystery.com on January 22, 2017.
Darjeeling, a district in the Himalayan foothills of the Indian state of West Bengal, is a former... more Darjeeling, a district in the Himalayan foothills of the Indian state of West Bengal, is a former colonial " hill station. " It is world famous both as a destination for mountain tourists and as the source of some of the world's most expensive and sought-after tea. For decades , Darjeeling's majority population of Indian-Nepalis, or Gorkhas, have struggled for sub-national autonomy over the district and for the establishment of a separate Indian state of " Gorkhaland " there. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amid the Gorkhaland agitation in Darjeeling's tea plantations and bustling tourist town. In many ways, Darjeeling is what Val Plumwood calls a " shadow place. " Shadow places are sites of extraction, invisible to centers of political and economic power yet essential to the global circulation of capital. The existence of shadow places troubles the notion that belonging can be " singularized " to a particular location or landscape. Building on this idea, I examine the encounters of Gorkha tea plantation workers, students, and city dwellers with landslides, a crumbling colonial infrastructure, and urban wildlife. While many analyses of subnational movements in India characterize them as struggles for land, I argue that in sites of colonial and capitalist extraction like hill stations, these struggles with land are equally important. In Darjeeling, senses of place and belonging are " edge effects " : the unstable, emergent results of encounters between materials, species, and economies.
In India, an industrial reform movement called ‘Tea 2030’ is underway. Tea 2030 is driven by conc... more In India, an industrial reform movement called ‘Tea 2030’ is underway. Tea 2030 is driven by concern about two numbers: tea prices, determined by expert tasters in auction houses, and labor costs, calculated on tea plantations. According to reformers, prices are too low and labor costs are too high. If this problem could be corrected, reformers claim, tea could change, too, from an oppressive legacy of the British colonial era to a ‘hero crop.’ A hero crop would deliver development benefits in addition to income, improving the lives of farmers and undoing the injustices of a colonial past. The hero crop narrative, however, elides a longstanding, embodied set of relationships between tea and numbers in India. Ethnographic and archival material from tea plantations and tea auctions in Northeast India shows how prices and labor costs emerge as part of colonially rooted evaluative practices. Prices are the outcome of a sensory and linguistic process in which bodies value, while labor costs are the outcome of legal and technical processes that value bodies. These evaluative processes are embodied algorithms. Tea 2030’s proposed restructuring of embodied algorithms for prices and labor costs may, however, do more harm than good.
ABS TRACT: In this article, we use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a b... more ABS TRACT: In this article, we use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a bulwark of social theory and an under-theorized category of social analysis. Scholarship on plants brings together three overlapping approaches to territory: biological and behaviorist theories; representational and cartographic perspectives; and more-than-human analysis. We argue that these three approaches are not mutually exclusive. Rather, diff erent epistemologies of territory overlap and are imbricated within each other. We further argue that these three approaches to territory inform three distinct domains of territoriality: legibility and surveillance; ordering and classifi cation; and exclusion and inclusion. Th rough examples of how plants operate in these three domains, we illustrate the analytical potential that a more-than-human approach to territory provides. We conclude, however, that attention to the particularities of plant ecologies can help move multispecies discussions more fi rmly into the realm of the political economic. Territory is an elusive concept. It is material and ideological. It is a product of collectivity and an object of control. Territory is inextricably social. Territory has much in common with closely related concepts such as property, place, or landscape, yet it remains conceptually distinct. In some framings, territory refers to the extension of power over space. It involves processes of boundary making, surveillance, control, exclusion, and defense. In these framings, territory is a mode of sovereignty, and the power involved is oft en that of the state. Yet territory also refers to the more subtle forms and practices of non-state actors who seek to establish control over resources or space. In this article, we think with plants about the nature of territory. Plants participate in more than human territorialities, we argue, and we suggest that social scientists look beyond anthro-pocentric discourses of law and statecraft to understand the territorial projects that are entangled in the sprouts, stalks, and roots of plants, in their distributions and migrations, in their communities as well as in our own. Doing so holds out the promise of reconfi guring the way
A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. ... more A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. On one side of this debate is Fair Trade USA, which supports plantation certification. On the other is the retailer Equal Exchange, whose leaders fear that fair trade’s longstanding commitment to small farmer cooperatives may be in jeopardy. Drawing on the two organizations’ experiences with tea plantations and cooperatives in Darjeeling, India, as well as my own ethnographic research, I explore how advocates in the Global North identify who counts as a legitimate laboring subject of agricultural justice. This debate underscores that social justice in global agriculture is fundamentally multiple—in Nancy Fraser’s terms, “abnormal.” The seeming intractability of this debate shows that while the agricultural justice movement has attended to questions of economic distribution and cultural recognition, it must do more to address problems of political representation at national and international scales.
In this article, we propose a critical framework for labor-sensitive food studies. First, we revi... more In this article, we propose a critical framework for labor-sensitive food studies. First, we review recent food studies scholarship on agriculture, which leans heavily toward studies of alternative and small-farmer agriculture. We then overview different analytical and theoretical framings dominant in the study of labor and agriculture in the Americas, tracing work from anthropological analyses of peasant and plantation agriculture, to cultural ecologies of smallholders, to American agrarianism, and finally to studies of commodity chains and the labor process. In the review's penultimate section, we curate scholarship that merges macro-level political economic analysis with detailed narrative and interpretive inquiry into the lives of laborers. We aim for this review to provide groundwork for future intersectional food studies research that is sensitive to the lived experience of waged labor. In our conclusion, we argue for further theoretical and empirical expansion to engage the relationship between labor and food in the twenty-first century.
In the former colonial hill station of Darjeeling, claims to belonging reveal the paradoxes of li... more In the former colonial hill station of Darjeeling, claims to belonging reveal the paradoxes of living in a place built for someone else.
Nestled in the Himalayan foothills of Northeast India, Darjeeling is synonymous with some of the ... more Nestled in the Himalayan foothills of Northeast India, Darjeeling is synonymous with some of the finest and most expensive tea in the world. It is also home to a violent movement for regional autonomy that, like the tea industry, dates back to the days of colonial rule.
In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region. This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations.
Readers in a variety of disciplines—anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies—will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers. The Darjeeling Distinction challenges fair-trade policy and practice, exposing how trade initiatives often fail to consider the larger environmental, historical, and sociopolitical forces that shape the lives of the people they intended to support.
[The CM Roundtable is a new series that presents multiple, in-depth reviews of an exciting new bo... more [The CM Roundtable is a new series that presents multiple, in-depth reviews of an exciting new book. Each new roundtable will conclude with the author's response. We thank each of our distinguished panelists and the authors for engaging in this public dialogue. We aim to have each roundtable available as a single beautifully produced e-book available at the conclusion– for classroom or referential usage.]
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Papers by Sarah Besky
In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region. This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations.
Readers in a variety of disciplines—anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies—will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers. The Darjeeling Distinction challenges fair-trade policy and practice, exposing how trade initiatives often fail to consider the larger environmental, historical, and sociopolitical forces that shape the lives of the people they intended to support.