About the Book
Since its inception over two millennia ago, the spice trade has connected and transformed the environments, politics, cultures, and cuisines of vastly different societies around the world. The 'magical' qualities of spices mean they offer more than a mere food flavouring, often evoking memories of childhood events or specific festivals. Although spices are frequently found in our kitchen cupboards, how they get there has something of a mythical allure.
In this ethnographically rich and insightful study, the authors embark on a journey of demystification that starts in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands with three spices star anise, black cardamom, and cassia (cinnamon) and ends on dining tables across the globe. This book foregrounds the experiences of ethnic minority farmers cultivating these spices, highlighting nuanced entanglements among livelihoods, environment, ethnic identity, and external pressures, as well as other factors at play. It then investigates the complex commodity chains that move and transform these spices from upland smallholdings and forests in this frontier to global markets, mapping the flows of spices, identifying the numerous actors involved, and teasing out critical power imbalances.
Finally, it focuses on value-creation and the commoditization of these spices across a spectrum of people and places. This rich and carefully integrated volume offers new insights into upland frontier livelihoods and the ongoing implications of the contemporary agrarian transition. Moreover, it bridges the gap in our knowledge regarding how these specific spices, cultivated for centuries in the mountainous Sino-Vietnamese uplands, become everyday ingredients in Global North food, cosmetics, and medicines. Links to online resources, including story maps, provide further insights and visual highlights.
About the Author :
Sarah Turner is Professor of Geography at McGill University. She is a development geographer specializing in ethnic minority livelihoods, agrarian change, and everyday resistance in upland northern Vietnam and southwest China. She also works with street vendors and other members of the mobile informal economy, as well as small-scale entrepreneurs in urban Southeast Asia. Widely published, she is also an editor of the journals Geoforum and Journal of Vietnamese Studies.
Annuska Derks is an associate professor and departmental co-director at the University of Zurich. She is a social anthropologist interested in social transformation processes in Southeast Asia, in particular in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Also widely published, her research focuses on migration, labor, gender, as well as the social lives of things, and interrogates discourses of development and innovation.
Jean-Francois Rousseau is an associate professor at the University of Ottawa. He is a development geographer with research focusing on the relationships between agrarian change, infrastructure development especially hydropower dams and sand-mining – and ethnic minority livelihood diversification in Southwest China.
Review :
"The editors do a very good job of introducing to the reader the concepts and issues that are necessary for understanding this topic. Each chapter also covers any theoretical or methodological issues that are needed to comprehend the analysis in the chapter. Further, all of this is presented in a clear and engaging manner. Finally, the case studies are all much more complex and detailed than I have the space to discuss here. Taken together they provide a detailed overview of numerous aspects of spice production in the Sino-Vietnamese border region. And while many of the authors finish their chapters by indicating that there is a need for more research, this volume has already established a very solid foundation for anyone who wishes to do so."-- "Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia"
"As the book journeys through the commodity chains of these three key spices across unique ethnographic contexts in Vietnam and China, the chapters help to demystify the multiple and complex entanglements that spices and the communities that grow them find themselves in as they are encroached on by state and capitalist market forces. The uniqueness of the spices themselves, the diverse comparative approach, and inclusion of more-than-textual modalities add greater depth to existing research on commodity chain analysis. The book's inclusion of StoryMaps for star anise, black cardamom, and 'cinnamon', for example, further illuminates the journeys of these spices, their complicated commodity networks, and the entanglements they result in through visual representation. This will be enlightening for many readers who are unfamiliar with the origins and multiple forms of these spices that exist both before and outside of the bottled versions most will have encountered."-- "Asian Studies Review"
"By following the journey of three spices along its commercial networks, the authors of this original, fascinating, visual (photos and video links) and almost fragrant work invite us to understand from the point of view of all its actors the relatively functioning undisciplined of this specific sector of border markets, its dilemmas and the inconsistencies it faces."-- "Moussons"
"The volume makes a significant contribution to the social scientific and humanities literature on commodity cultivation in Asia and farmer livelihood strategies in the face of perpetual vulnerability.... [The visually rich 'story maps'] are good teasers for an edited volume that appeals to a wide audience: undergraduate students across a variety of discipline-specific courses that address and confront commodity chains, area studies, or critical food studies; scholars seeking to further their knowledge of state tensions, ethnic minority communities, agriculture, and farmer livelihood in the shadow of agrarian change; and anyone who wants to make sense of the spices in their own home."-- "The Journal of Vietnamese Studies"
