ABSTRACT

Human geography has a history of engaging with place-based-quality products through a variety of concepts such as terroir, geographical indicators (GIs), and fictive places. While the efforts necessary to construct a “taste of place” have been explored, it remains unclear how a “taste of place” is established, and by whom. The article explores how relations between quality, products, and places are produced on the ground. More specifically, it addresses the question of what it takes to reconfigure a “taste of place.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2017 concerning a coffee producer in Burundi, the article shows how Burundian coffee was reconfigured from an inferior commodity coffee to a sought-after specialty coffee. The findings show that reconfiguring “a taste of place” requires both material and symbolic quality attributes. By underlining the importance of material quality attributes that are place-dependent, it provides a different angle to the discursive approach to “taste of place” in human geography. The author concludes that creating a “taste of place” requires taming space into a consumable representation of place through discursive and material practices.

摘要

人文地理学有着通过风土、地理指标 (GI) 和虚构地点等各种概念来研究基于地点的优质产品的历史。尽管人们已经探索了构建“地方品味”所需的努力，但“地方品味”是如何建立以及由谁建立的仍不清楚。本文探讨了质量、产品和地点之间的关系是如何在实地产生的。更具体地说，它解决了如何重新配置​​“地方品味”的问题。本文基于 2017 年对布隆迪一家咖啡生产商进行的民族志实地调查，展示了布隆迪咖啡如何从劣质商品咖啡重新配置为广受欢迎的精品咖啡。研究结果表明，重新配置“地方品味”需要物质和象征性的质量属性。通过强调与地点相关的物质质量属性的重要性，它为人文地理学中“地方品味”的话语方法提供了不同的角度。作者的结论是，创造“地方的味道”需要通过话语将空间驯服为地方的可消费表征。和物质实践。