2020.  University of California Press.  Atelier: Ethnographic Theory in the Twenty-First Century, Kevin O'Neill, series editor

What is the place of quality in capitalism?  How is it produced, where does it circulate, and in what forms?  Tasting Qualities answers these questions through a study of one of the world’s most recognized and popular products: mass-market black tea.

This book traces how contemporary tea industry reformers have mobilized notions of quality in attempts to refit a colonially rooted product and industry for a 21st century global democracy.  My analysis of the effort to make “quality tea” at a time when India is trying to secure a place as a global economic leader shows how, together, the materiality of plants and aesthetic and technoscientific practices mediate—and perhaps impede—economic and political reform.   The book examines how quality became a discrete category of knowledge from the final decades of British rule in India to the early years of Indian independence.  This historical work is paired with ethnographic research among an array of Indian experts, from soil scientists and chemists to professional tea tasters and traders.  I describe how these groups discuss and debate the quality of mass-market tea through an esoteric lexicon of descriptive terms, an ever-changing range of laboratory techniques, and a shifting set of philosophies regarding the regulation of the market.  Bringing together theory from anthropological political economy and science and technology studies,  I argue for an approach to quality that sees it not as a final destination for economic, imperial, or post-imperial projects, but as a generative opening for those projects.

2019. School for Advanced Research (SAR) Press. Co-edited with Alex Blanchette (Tufts University)

Winner of the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize

In India, a prolific cow suddenly refuses to give milk.  In the U.S. heartland, a factory-farmed sow pounds her head violently against the bars of her pen.  In Malaysia, orangutans are forced to learn how to earn their daily meals. In rural Paraguay, indigenous crops are eradicated to make room for a monoculture of soy. In Nicaragua, sugarcane cutters are dying from exposure to heat every day.

These cases raise questions about the changing participants, values, and types of labor in contemporary life.  They ask us to re-think who (or what) is included within an anthropology of work. Drawing on such examples, "How Nature Works" initiates a new approach to critical labor scholarship, one that is attuned to a moment when the planet is wracked with both environmental damage—from climate change to mass-extinction—and economic turmoil—in the form of austerity, industrial intensification, and generalized job loss.

Anthropologists and our intellectual kin have long studied conditions of work, seeking to bring attention to the exploitation and thwarted aspirations of laborers. However, few scholars systematically question the value and necessity of work, nor do they ask why labor, especially in contemporary capitalist societies, has become central to defining what it means to be human (and non-human). The chapters in this book offer divergent and experimental attempts to both re-think the meaning of human work, to re-define how we can study work in its broadest sense. This collection thus highlights the importance of ethnography for developing an approach to life amidst degradation, in ways that are not so heavily determined by human labor.

2014.  University of California Press California Studies in Food and Culture, Darra Goldstein, editor

Winner of the 2014 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize Finalist for the 2015 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize

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.