A01=Sarah Besky
anthropology
Author_Sarah Besky
Category=JHB
Category=JHM
Category=WBN
colonial rule
darjeeling
disciplines
environmental studies
eq_bestseller
eq_food-drink
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
expensive tea
fair trade practices
fairness
geography
himalayan foothills
justice
northeast india
nuanced ethnography
postcolonial separatist politics
region
regional autonomy
sociology
tea industry
tea leaves
tea workers
value
violent movement
Product details
- ISBN 9780520277397
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 23 Nov 2013
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Sarah Besky is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
