The stated aim is “This is the first book-length comparative ethnographic treatment of Fair Trade from a postcolonial transnational feminist framework”. Frankly I did not have the academic ethnographic background to read and appreciate the book and the extensive time she spent both in the tea Darjeeling plantations and in the small farms producing “illegal tea”. In times for me, I got lost in her language, and would have appreciated more anecdotal stories comparing the day of a woman in the tea plantation to those in the farm.. For example “Women workers and farmers were simultaneously the targets of both valorization and exploitation by a patriarchal village structure and a male-dominated plantation bureaucracy … In this book I engage Fair Trade from a transnational feminist and postcolonial feminist frame deeply concerned with the neo-imperialist tone of current activism around women’s empowerment” More background on the geography of the area and tea growing and production regime would have also helped
The book deals with the tensions between Nepali and Bengalie, between unemployed men and working women in a household, between the older and younger who perhaps want to make a living driving in America. She is frank that “Being a Bengali and discussing politics with Nepalis was tricky”. The book outlines the meaning of fair trade in that system. I would have appreciated more about differences in environmental impacts, but perhaps outside the scope of this book, but there is a note “Production falls by 30 percent when plantations abandon chemically induced production”.
I will never look on the smiling faces of women on fair trade advertisements quite the same.
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- Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2023
