Overview

In this vivid ethnography, Paige West tracks coffee as it moves from producers in Papua New Guinea to consumers around the world. She illuminates the social lives of the people who produce coffee, and those who process, distribute, market, and consume it. The Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in Papua New Guinea's highlands, are eager to expand their business and social relationships with the buyers who come to their highland villages, as well as with the people working in Goroka, where much of Papua New Guinea's coffee is processed; at the port of Lae, where it is exported; and in Hamburg, Sydney, and London, where it is distributed and consumed. This rich social world is disrupted by neoliberal development strategies, which impose prescriptive regimes of governmentality that are often at odds with Melanesian ways of being in, and relating to, the world. The Gimi are misrepresented in the specialty coffee market, which relies on images of primitivity and poverty to sell coffee. By implying that the ""backwardness"" of Papua New Guineans impedes economic development, these images obscure the structural relations and global political economy that actually cause poverty in Papua New Guinea.

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Coffee is a global and of course a ubiquitous commodity. And here lies its analytical challenge: how to grasp the full complexity of a drug whose path from production to consumption entails a world of enormous semiotic, cultural, institutional, political economic and ecological complexity? Paige West takes us deep into the heart of coffee's image world, as a spectacle, as a brand and as a carrier of forms of certified value. But she also pursues the bean into the highlands of Papua New Guinea for whom the crop, paradoxically, has little cultural value and through the global supply chains of corporate shippers and processors. Here is an ethnography which exposes our morning cappuccino to the bright light of modernity. From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive does for coffee what Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power did for sugar: here in short is a meditation on caffeine and power. --Michael Watts, Chancellor's Professor, UC Berkley

Coffee is a global and of course a ubiquitous commodity. And here lies its analytical challenge: how to grasp the full complexity of a drug whose path from production to consumption entails a world of enormous semiotic, cultural, institutional, political economic and ecological complexity? Paige West takes us deep into the heart of coffee's image world, as a spectacle, as a brand and as a carrier of forms of certified value. But she also pursues the bean into the highlands of Papua New Guinea for whom the crop, paradoxically, has little cultural value and through the global supply chains of corporate shippers and processors. Here is an ethnography which exposes our morning cappuccino to the bright light of modernity. From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive does for coffee what Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power did for sugar: here in short is a meditation on caffeine and power. Michael Watts, Chancellor's Professor, University of California Berkley Paige West writes against two kinds of flatness: the flatness of commodity chain studies, and the flatness of ethical consumption's marketing spin. She offers, instead, a richly peopled ethnographic account of coffee's trajectory through time, space, lives and imaginations, and takes us deep into the contradictory heart of our neoliberal times. Penetrating, provocative and moving, this is an excellent read. Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto

Author Information

Paige West is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-founder and co-editor of the journal Environment and Society.

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