by Paige West, Associate Professor of Anthropology In this vivid
ethnography, Paige West tracks coffee as it moves from producers
in Papua New Guinea to consumers around the world. She
illuminates the social lives of the people who produce coffee,
and those who process, distribute, market, and consume it. The
Gimi peoples, who grow coffee in Papua New Guinea's highlands,
are eager to expand their business and social relationships with
the buyers who come to their highland villages, as well as with
the people working in Goroka, where much of Papua New Guinea's
coffee is processed; at the port of Lae, where it is exported;
and in Hamburg, Sydney, and London, where it is distributed and
consumed. This rich social world is disrupted by neoliberal
development strategies, which impose prescriptive regimes of
governmentality that are often at odds with Melanesian ways of
being in, and relating to, the world. The Gimi are
misrepresented in the specialty coffee market, which relies on
images of primitivity and poverty