Tasting Coffee

An Inquiry into Objectivity

Kenneth Liberman (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

510 Seiten

2022
State University of New York Press (Verlag)
978-1-4384-8896-7 (ISBN)

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Draws upon the situated work of professional coffee tasters in over a dozen countries to shed light on the methods we use to convert subjective experience into objective knowledge.

Winner of the 2023 Distinguished Book Award presented by the Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis section of the American Sociological Association

At once ethnographic and phenomenological, Tasting Coffee investigates the global chain of coffee production "from seed to cup," stopping at every stage along the way to describe the tasting practices of each stakeholder purveying coffee. The ethnomethodological care of these descriptions derives from an attunement to just how these stakeholders discover and describe the flavors of coffee and how they convert subjective experience into objective knowledge. The methods and protocols of sensory science are also examined and assessed in their lived details, making this study also a contribution to the sociology of science. Based upon a decade of research in fourteen countries, author Kenneth Liberman provides a nonessentialist ontology of coffee, its history, and its production. The world of coffee becomes a microcosm in which many realities of postmodern humanity are exposed and clarified—with the thoughts of Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Aron Gurwitsch, and Harold Garfinkel—even as these naturally occurring case studies provide fresh specifications for these thinkers' ideas.

Kenneth Liberman is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oregon. His many books include More Studies in Ethnomethodology, also published by SUNY Press.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The Story of Coffee Purveying

1. A Brief History of Coffee

2. Coffee's Chain of Production

Part II: Objectivity and Its Labors

3. Historical and Epistemological Bases of Objectivity

4. Making Contact with the Object

5. The Dynamic Nature of Coffee

Part III: Tasting and Its Labors

6. Common Practices of Tasting

7. Down on the Fincas and with the Exporters: Harvesting, Processing, Blending

8. A Palette for the Palate: Using Taste Descriptors to Find Flavor

9. Professional Tasting

10. Tasting for Excellence

11. Importers, Roasters, Myths, and Marketers

12. Some Discovered Practices of Lay Coffee Drinkers
(with Giolo Fele)

Part IV: Science and Its Labors

13. Science and Objective Practices

14. A Scientific Critique of Scientific Practices

Appendix: Sample Tasting Schedules

Bibliography
Authors Index
Subject Index

Erscheinungsdatum	21.10.2022
Zusatzinfo	Total Illustrations: 6
Verlagsort	Albany, NY
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	227 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4384-8896-3 / 1438488963
ISBN-13	978-1-4384-8896-7 / 9781438488967
Zustand	Neuware