Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. xvii, 315 pp. (Tables, illus.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5150-4.
Before you settle down to read Paige West’s book, make yourself a cup of coffee. It may be the last time you drink coffee without being troubled by a number of concerns, the least worrying of which could be knowing that the use-value of your cup may not be fully realized. The coffee itself may not satisfy the romantic images that the people who sold it to you have tried to implant in your mind: images of the growers as primitives, or as the poorest of the poor, or as the poorest-of-the poor-bare-breasted-primitives. Perhaps you have images of an unsullied tropical rain forest where you have been led to believe the coffee is grown. Perhaps you hold a superior feeling of consuming a particular sort of coffee and you think of the shining copper coffee roasters which produced it. Or maybe you just have a good feeling that you are consuming a commodity that provides a fair return to its distant Third World producers.
Coffee is the world’s most traded agricultural commodity; the trade is worth over US$15 billion, and almost 100 million bags of coffee are moved around the world, every year. The International Coffee Organization estimates over two billion cups of coffee are consumed every year. Coffee was introduced into Papua New Guinea (PNG) in the 1950s and is now that country’s second most important agricultural export.
West uses coffee growing in PNG to analyze the circulation of coffee in the world and the images of the coffee in the context of neo-liberalization to show, in her own words, “how various forms of value, labor and politics emerge along coffee’s circulatory routes” (28). She focuses on the “materiality” of coffee, in the sense of its impact on the environments in PNG where it is grown, on the people who grow it, as well as on the people who buy it from the growers, prepare it for export and trade it, import it, roast it and sell it in coffee shops in Australia, Germany and the US.
A book that has as its main themes criticisms of neoliberal economics and fair trading could have been rather dull. But Paige West brings these themes to life by using her ethnographic skills to meet and talk with the growers, the buyers, the traders in PNG and overseas and the coffee shop owners. These people may not know each other, although many have associations with PNG, but they are inextricably linked to each other by the coffee bean.
Describing the realities of life in a fringe Eastern Highlands coffee-growing village is West’s bread-and-butter as an anthropologist. She intimately knows the Gimi-speaking people of Maimafu from numerous visits over many years. They do not grow coffee on anything like the scale of villagers in the Asaro Valley or the Wahgi Valley (they are not connected by road to Goroka and depend on an aircraft to carry their coffee to the market), but nevertheless coffee has changed the way they “come to be in-the-world as persons” such that a neoliberal project that has originated on the far side of the world, can “alter their cosmological view of what it means to be a person” (129). Descriptions of village coffee growing are preceded by an excellent short history of the introduction of coffee into the Eastern Highlands.
West carries these ethnographic and very personal approaches with her to Goroka, where she spends time with “coffee families,” European and Papua New Guinean, living the coffee trade in work and in play. She then goes overseas to Australia, Germany and the US, where she again makes many visits to individuals in their warehouses, coffee roasting facilities and coffee shops, as well as to her 101-year-old grandmother who drinks instant coffee. In many cases these people have become more her friends than her informants. As a result, although West’s criticisms of some of the things they do to sell more coffee are rigorous they are not ad hominem. As fashions change some of these things include creating images of the PNG growers as primitive, poverty stricken, or the recipients of fair returns on their labour. The structure of the book means that the readers already know how the Maimafu producers are faring and also know the Papua New Guineans who have bought the coffee, transported it to Goroka and have exported to the international markets. West understands why these images are created and why they are not meant to be harmful to her Maimafu friends. But she convincingly argues that these images can become dangerous when they spread beyond coffee drinkers to international politicians and economists who develop policies and practices based on such fantasies.
West succeeds in weaving descriptions of her personal relations with her village growers, buyers, exporters and sellers of coffee across the world, with some reasonably heavy theory. As a result, the theory is lightened but is not weakened. The analogy of the schoolboy who asks what is the point of doing mathematics comes to mind. In West’s book, the point of knowing something about the theory is there throughout the book in the way in which the lives of the villagers at Maimafu are directly influenced by the outcomes of economic theory, marketing practices and aid policies. The plain language West uses to describe the lives of her coffee growing and trading friends is not noticeably different from the language she uses to discuss neoliberal economics, market fetishism, or embedded social relations for example, and so her theoretical discussions are more accessible than they would have been if they were presented in isolation from those who directly feel the repercussions.
Bryant Allen
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
pp. 198-200