The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations Sarah Besky Accepted: 13 March 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract In 1999, Darjeeling tea became India’s first Geographical Indication (GI). GI has proliferated world- wide as a legal protection for foods with terroir, or ‘‘taste of place,’’ a concept most often associated with artisan foods produced by small farmers in specific regions of the Global North. GI gives market protection to terroir in an increasingly homogenous food system. This article asks how Darjeeling tea, grown in an industrial plantation sys- tem rooted in British colonialism, has become convincingly associated with artisan GIs such as Champagne, Cognac, and Roquefort. The answer lies in a conceptual dyad that frames how British colonial officials, the Indian state, and international consumers have understood Darjeeling and its signature commodity. Since the colonial era, these actors have conceived Darjeeling as both an idyllic ‘‘garden’’ space and an industrial ‘‘plantation’’ space. As I show through an analysis of GI marketing materials and inter- views with planters, pluckers, and consumers, this dyad maps in surprising ways onto labor relations. While planters’ and marketers’ discourses tend to emphasize the ‘‘garden,’’ laborers’ investment in GI lies primarily in an active—if also ambivalent—embrace of the plantation, encapsulated in the Nepali word ‘‘kama ¯n.’’ Keywords Labor Á Plantation Á Terroir Á Tourism Á Tea Á India Abbreviations AOC Appellation d’origine co ˆ ntrole ´e DTA Darjeeling Tea Association GI Geographical Indication TRIPS Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Introduction In the spring of 2009, as florescent green buds were sprouting up on the tea bushes after a winter of dormancy, in what is known as the ‘‘first flush,’’ I was sitting outside the manager’s office of a large tea plantation in Darjeeling, India, high in the Himalayan foothills. While I was waiting to interview the manager, I chatted with the office didı ¯ (literally, ‘‘older sister’’) over a cup of tea. In Darjeeling plantations, the office didı ¯ was a hybrid position of secre- tary and servant, and depending on the plantation, her role leaned to one or the other of these poles. Here, she held a more secretarial position. We joked about the state of the desk in the foyer, where she often had to work, examining random pieces of scratch paper with cryptic notes or lists of numbers without qualifiers. Managers would dump these papers and unmarked files on the desk as they passed through. A glossy piece of paper poking out from under a stack of file folders caught my eye, and I slowly pulled it towards me, trying not to disrupt the desk’s stratigraphy. It was a poster, with trails of more cryptic numbers scratched on it. I asked what it was for. She said that the sahib (manager) gave posters like this one out to visitors to the factory. These kinds of marketing materials frequently arrived from Kolkata with instructions about display or distribution. She told me to take this one home with me. An antique-looking scroll unfurled on the poster asked: S. Besky (&) Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 101 West Hall, 1085 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA e-mail: besky@umich.edu 123 Agric Hum Values DOI 10.1007/s10460-013-9452-8