University of Wisconsin-Madison

Graduate Student, Anthropology

Thesis Title: The Darjeeling Distinction: Changing Agricultural Practice, Regimes of Value, and Visions of Justice

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Sarah Besky is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Her dissertation, “The Darjeeling Distinction:  Changing Agricultural Practice, Regimes of Value, and Visions of Justice,” asks how ideas about the “empowerment” of farmers, the connections of products to places, and the promotion of universal social and ecological standards, have informed the ways in which tea workers, brokers, and consumers construct both a product, fair trade organic tea, and a place, the Darjeeling district of West Bengal.  From February 2008 – May 2010, Sarah followed debates about environmental and social justice from fair-trade tea plantations and cooperatives, to international NGOs, and into the increasingly tense struggle of ethnic Nepalis in the region to form an independent state, Gorkhaland. In tea tasting rooms and auction halls in Kolkata, she investigated the meanings of taste and the creation of value for a wide range of Indian teas.  Her dissertation explores how debates about labor standards, taste, rights to place, and the legacy of colonialism have informed both the production of boutique tea and the revitalization of the Gorkhaland movement.  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, Sarah is exploring the changing meanings of “justice” and “empowerment” for third world agricultural workers.

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