World Tea Expo 2017

SARAH BESKY
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
BROWN UNIVERSITY


Sarah Besky is Charles Evans Hughes 1881 Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She has been conducting research on Indian tea for the last ten years. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014), which won the Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize in 2014. She is currently writing a new book based on research in West Bengal entitled: The Cost of Cheap Tea: An Ethnography of Value in India. This project combines historical and contemporary research, following tea produced for the domestic Indian market from plantations to urban auction houses to blending and packeting factories. In addition, Sarah is working on a project on the relationship between long-term landscape change—including tea production, as well as landslides, annual monsoons, and deteriorating infrastructure—and the rise of subnational sovereignty movements in Darjeeling, India.

Sessions :