Coffee Culture: Local Experiences, Global Connections

"The Anthropology of Stuff" is part of a new Series dedicated to innovative, unconventional ways to connect undergraduate students and their lived concerns about our social world to the power of social science ideas and evidence. Our goal with the project is to help spark social science imaginations and in doing so, new avenues for meaningful thought and action. Each "Stuff" title is a short (100 page) "mini text" illuminating for students the network of people and activities that create their material world.

From the coffee producers and pickers who tend the plantations in tropical nations, to the middlemen and processors, to the consumers who drink coffee without ever having to think about how the drink reached their hands, here is a commodity that ties the world together. This is a great little book that helps students apply anthropological concepts and theories to their everyday lives, learn how historical events and processes have shaped the modern world and the contexts of their lives, and how consumption decisions carry ramifications for our health, the environment, the reproduction of social inequality, and the possibility of supporting equity, sustainability and social justice.

Catherine M. Tucker is a sociocultural and ecological anthropologist at Indiana University

Part One: Coffee Culture, Social Life and Global History 1. Culture, Caffeine, and Coffee Shops 2. Theories of Food and Social Meanings of Coffee 3. Coffee Culture, History, and Media in Coca-Cola Land 4. Tracing Coffee Connections 5. Coffee and the Rise of the World System 6. Coffee, the Industrial Revolution, and Body Discipline Part Two: Accolades and Antipathies: Coffee Controversies through Time 7. Coffee Controversies and Threats to Social Order 8. National Identities and Cultural Relevance 9. Hot and Bothered: Coffee and Caffeine Humor 10. Is Coffee Good or Bad for You? Debates over Physical and Mental Health Effects Part Three: Coffee Production and Processing 11. Planting and Caring for Coffee 12. Harvesting, Processing, and Inequality 13. Environmental Sustainability of Coffee Production 14. Environmental Conundrums of Coffee Processing Part Four: Markets and the Modern World System 15. Market Volatility and Social Calamity 16. Efforts to Mitigate the Coffee Cycle and the Distribution of Power 17. A Brief History of Fair Trade 18. Conundrums of Fair Trade Coffee: Building Equity or Reinventing Subjugation?