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 hero crop would deliver development benefits in addition to income, improving the lives of farmers and undoing the injustices of a colonial past. The hero crop narrative, however, elides a longstanding, embodied set of relationships between tea and numbers in India. Ethnographic and archival material from tea plantations and tea auctions in Northeast India shows how prices and labor costs emerge as part of colonially rooted evaluative practices. Prices are the outcome of a sensory and linguistic process in which bodies value, while labor costs are the outcome of legal and technical processes that value bodies. These evaluative processes are embodied algorithms. Tea 2030’s proposed restructuring of embodied algorithms for prices and labor costs may, however, do more harm than good.
...MoreArticle Kristoffer Whitney; Melanie A. Kiechle (2017) Introduction: Counting on Nature. Science as Culture (pp. 1-10).
Similar Citations
Chapter
Sharma, Jayeeta;
(2011)
Making Garden, Erasing Jungle: The Tea Enterprise in Colonial Assam
Book
Sarah Besky;
(2020)
Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
Book
Arnab Dey;
(2019)
Tea Environments and Plantation Culture: Imperial Disarray in Eastern India
Book
Sharma, Jayeeta;
(2011)
Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India
Book
Oldroyd, David;
(2007)
Estates, Enterprise and Investment at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution: Estate Management and Accounting in the North-East of England, c.1700--1780
Book
Sharma, Yogesh;
(2010)
Coastal Histories: Society and Ecology in Pre-Modern India
Article
Nikolay Kamenov;
(2020)
The Place of the “Cooperative” in the Agrarian History of India, c. 1900–1970
Thesis
Petrie, Ian C.;
(2004)
Village Visions: Science and Technology in the Bengal Countryside, c. 1860--1947
Book
Andrew B. Liu;
(2020)
Tea War: a history of capitalism in China and India
Article
Namrata Borkotoky;
(2021)
Locating 'Coolie' Women's Health in Tea Plantation Environments in Colonial Assam
Article
Kin Sum Li;
(2022)
A Bowl of Good Tea in the Northern Song Dynasty: Using Modern Examples to Understand the Daguan chalun 大觀茶論
Article
Voskuil, Lynn;
(2012)
Robert Fortune, Camellia sinensis, and the Nineteenth-Century Global Imagination
Book
Chris Nierstrasz;
(2015)
Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India companies
Essay Review
Matthew Mauger;
(2018)
Writing Tea’s Empire
Book
Jueming Hua;
Lisheng Feng;
(2020)
Thirty Great Inventions of China: From Millet Agriculture to Artemisinin
Article
Loconto, Allison;
(2014)
Sustaining an Enterprise, Enacting SustainabiliTea
Article
Francks, Penelope;
(2013)
Simple Pleasures: Food Consumption in Japan and the Global Comparison of Living Standards
Article
Evans, Chris;
(2012)
The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity, 1650--1850
Article
Mary Summers;
(2021)
A Dog with a Bone: A Critique of Paul Taylor’s Small-Farm Essentialism
Article
Gareth Austin;
(2014)
Vent for surplus or productivity breakthrough? The Ghanaian cocoa take-off, c. 1890–1936
Be the first to comment!