Sarah Besky
Biographic Data
| ID | 109547 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah Besky |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah |
| FAMILY NAME | Besky |
| SIGNATURE | BESKY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2353-0074 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 179 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Raymond Williams and The Country and the City
Beskyof scholarship offers a way to examine and narrate the totality of capitalism, including imperialism, without being totalizing.In other words, while capitalism and its formative contradictions may be inescapable, its contradictions are not experienced the same way everywhere.Like any good ethnographer, Williams was committed to the particularities of place and time.He was also committed to a Marxism and a socialism that emphasize continuity …
Regeneration and its discontents: Biodynamic agriculture and Darjeeling tea plantations
Feminist Cyberlaw
This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism
Reproducing the Plantation
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 pl…
Plantation capitalism as categorical violence
Agrarian crisis, affect, and accumulation
This commentary responds to Mahanty et al.'s article, which offers ‘rupture’ as an alternative analytic to ‘the Anthropocene’. I apply this concept to fieldwork in Kalimpong, a district of the Indian state of West Bengal in the eastern Himalayas, to highlight the concept's utility for attending to the complexity of environmental crisis
Crisis is in the details
Commentary on Special Issue: Stories of Everyday Life in the Darjeeling Hills
Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India
Recent work in the humanities and social sciences has enlivened inquiry into the growth of plantation capitalism, the experiences of those enveloped by it, and the legacies of the plantation as a socioecological formation. Arnab Dey's Tea Environments and Plantation Culture adds a new, empirically rich account to this global plantation studies conversation.The book is an environmental history of the plantations of the famed tea-growing region of …
Lobsters, Whales, and Traps: The Politics of Endangerment in the Gulf of Maine
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…
Teawords: Experiments with Quality in Indian Tea Production
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 of the British colonial period by industrial chemists who aimed to subject the aesthetic judgments of brokers to experimental scrutiny. "Te…
The Plantation's Outsides: The Work of Settlement in Kalimpong, India
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 194…
Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
Empire and indigestion: Materializing tannins in the Indian tea industry
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 Bri…
Afterword: Work, Place, and the Value of Ethnography
The Land in Gorkhaland
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 subnational autonomy over the district and for the establishment of a separate Indian stat…
Fixity: On the inheritance and maintenance of tea plantation houses in Darjeeling, India
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 …
Tea as Hero Crop? Embodied Algorithms and Industrial Reform in India
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…
Placing Plants in Territory
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, different epistemol…
Looking for Work: Placing Labor in Food Studies
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 e…
Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice? An Analysis of Fair Trade's Plantation Problem: Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice
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 we…
The Future of Price: Communicative Infrastructures and the Financialization of Indian Tea
For more than 150 years, most tea grown on plantations in northeast India has been sold in open-outcry auctions in Kolkata. In this essay, I describe how, in 2009, the Tea Board of India, the government regulator of the tea trade, began to convert auctioning from a face-to-face outcry process to a face-to-computer digital one. The Tea Board hoped that with the implementation of digital technologies, trade would soon revolve around the buying and …
The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations
Can a Plantation be Fair? Paradoxes and Possibilities in Fair Trade Darjeeling Tea Certification
This paper explores interactions between the Indian government's colonially inspired Plantations Labour Act and TransFair USA's fair trade standards. Although fair trade makes claims to universalistic notions of social justice and workers' empowerment, what "fairness" means and how it is experienced varies by locale. In this paper, I discuss how state laws and fair trade certification agencies complement and contradict each other on Darjeeling te…
Can a Plantation be Fair? Paradoxes and Possibilities in Fair Trade Darjeeling Tea Certification
This paper explores interactions between the Indian government's colonially inspired Plantations Labour Act and TransFair USA's fair trade standards. Although fair trade makes claims to universalistic notions of social justice and workers' empowerment, what "fairness" means and how it is experienced varies by locale. In this paper, I discuss how state laws and fair trade certification agencies complement and contradict each other on Darjeeling te…
The Future of Price: Communicative Infrastructures and the Financialization of Indian Tea
For more than 150 years, most tea grown on plantations in northeast India has been sold in open-outcry auctions in Kolkata. In this essay, I describe how, in 2009, the Tea Board of India, the government regulator of the tea trade, began to convert auctioning from a face-to-face outcry process to a face-to-computer digital one. The Tea Board hoped that with the implementation of digital technologies, trade would soon revolve around the buying and …
Fixity: On the inheritance and maintenance of tea plantation houses in Darjeeling, India
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 …
The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations
Placing Plants in Territory
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, different epistemol…
The Plantation's Outsides: The Work of Settlement in Kalimpong, India
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 194…
The Land in Gorkhaland
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 subnational autonomy over the district and for the establishment of a separate Indian stat…
Looking for Work: Placing Labor in Food Studies
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 e…
Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice? An Analysis of Fair Trade's Plantation Problem: Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice
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 we…
Teawords: Experiments with Quality in Indian Tea Production
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 of the British colonial period by industrial chemists who aimed to subject the aesthetic judgments of brokers to experimental scrutiny. "Te…
Tea as Hero Crop? Embodied Algorithms and Industrial Reform in India
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…
Reproducing the Plantation
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 pl…
Lobsters, Whales, and Traps: The Politics of Endangerment in the Gulf of Maine
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…
Empire and indigestion: Materializing tannins in the Indian tea industry
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 Bri…
Regeneration and its discontents: Biodynamic agriculture and Darjeeling tea plantations
Agrarian crisis, affect, and accumulation
This commentary responds to Mahanty et al.'s article, which offers ‘rupture’ as an alternative analytic to ‘the Anthropocene’. I apply this concept to fieldwork in Kalimpong, a district of the Indian state of West Bengal in the eastern Himalayas, to highlight the concept's utility for attending to the complexity of environmental crisis
Can a Plantation be Fair? Paradoxes and Possibilities in Fair Trade Darjeeling Tea Certification
This paper explores interactions between the Indian government's colonially inspired Plantations Labour Act and TransFair USA's fair trade standards. Although fair trade makes claims to universalistic notions of social justice and workers' empowerment, what "fairness" means and how it is experienced varies by locale. In this paper, I discuss how state laws and fair trade certification agencies complement and contradict each other on Darjeeling te…
The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations
Looking for Work: Placing Labor in Food Studies
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 e…
Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice? An Analysis of Fair Trade's Plantation Problem: Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice
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 we…
The Future of Price: Communicative Infrastructures and the Financialization of Indian Tea
For more than 150 years, most tea grown on plantations in northeast India has been sold in open-outcry auctions in Kolkata. In this essay, I describe how, in 2009, the Tea Board of India, the government regulator of the tea trade, began to convert auctioning from a face-to-face outcry process to a face-to-computer digital one. The Tea Board hoped that with the implementation of digital technologies, trade would soon revolve around the buying and …
Tea as Hero Crop? Embodied Algorithms and Industrial Reform in India
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…
Placing Plants in Territory
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, different epistemol…
The Land in Gorkhaland
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 subnational autonomy over the district and for the establishment of a separate Indian stat…
Fixity: On the inheritance and maintenance of tea plantation houses in Darjeeling, India
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 …
Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
Empire and indigestion: Materializing tannins in the Indian tea industry
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 Bri…
Afterword: Work, Place, and the Value of Ethnography
Teawords: Experiments with Quality in Indian Tea Production
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 of the British colonial period by industrial chemists who aimed to subject the aesthetic judgments of brokers to experimental scrutiny. "Te…
The Plantation's Outsides: The Work of Settlement in Kalimpong, India
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 194…
Commentary on Special Issue: Stories of Everyday Life in the Darjeeling Hills
Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India
Recent work in the humanities and social sciences has enlivened inquiry into the growth of plantation capitalism, the experiences of those enveloped by it, and the legacies of the plantation as a socioecological formation. Arnab Dey's Tea Environments and Plantation Culture adds a new, empirically rich account to this global plantation studies conversation.The book is an environmental history of the plantations of the famed tea-growing region of …
Lobsters, Whales, and Traps: The Politics of Endangerment in the Gulf of Maine
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…
Agrarian crisis, affect, and accumulation
This commentary responds to Mahanty et al.'s article, which offers ‘rupture’ as an alternative analytic to ‘the Anthropocene’. I apply this concept to fieldwork in Kalimpong, a district of the Indian state of West Bengal in the eastern Himalayas, to highlight the concept's utility for attending to the complexity of environmental crisis
Crisis is in the details
Regeneration and its discontents: Biodynamic agriculture and Darjeeling tea plantations
Feminist Cyberlaw
This vibrant and visionary reimagining of the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens brings together emerging and established scholars and practitioners to explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. It promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism
Reproducing the Plantation
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 pl…
Plantation capitalism as categorical violence
Raymond Williams and The Country and the City
Beskyof scholarship offers a way to examine and narrate the totality of capitalism, including imperialism, without being totalizing.In other words, while capitalism and its formative contradictions may be inescapable, its contradictions are not experienced the same way everywhere.Like any good ethnographer, Williams was committed to the particularities of place and time.He was also committed to a Marxism and a socialism that emphasize continuity …
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Economics (11 works) · Geography (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Archaeology (7 works) · History (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works)