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The Moral in the Money: Artisanal Wine in Turkey
Abstract
In a world where food production is overwhelmingly run by companies and institutions with transnational ties, artisanal food production remains a conceptual and empirical terrain requiring scholarly elaboration. Unlike identical and mass production, this post-industrial, locally sourced, and less-mechanized way of producing develops a holistic approach from the cultivation of the main ingredients until the completion of the final product. In chocolate, it is from tree to bar; in wine, from vineyard to glass. With the rise in artisanal, which can be read as the quality turn, cultivation and production became more connected than ever. Hence, the scholars working on artisanal, the movement that highlights the necessity of producing high-quality products that reflect their unique tastes, structures, and values, focus on who produces food, how current producers relate to the land, and how they articulate economic, political, and moral bonds via their food production. With the quality turn in Turkey’s wine industry in the early 2000s, the number of post-industrial entrepreneurs who share similar traits—secular, globally-connected, well-educated, and upper(middle)-class—started establishing wineries primarily in the country’s West. In their narratives, they transcend the capitalist definition of “investment” that primarily forefronts economic gain by claiming to participate in the common good with their mode of production and form of investment. Stating to revive/augment the production in rural areas, they form their sentiments and economic gain on the socioeconomic well-being of people from various social strata. Stemming from my 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in which I worked as a cellar worker in a small-scale and quality-oriented winery in Turkey’s Northwest, I question artisanal production's role and artisans' effect in determining the social, economic, and political changes in cultivation and production. Focusing on Turkey’s first wine tourism trail, I uncover how the market for quality wine in Turkey has emerged through the country’s developmental and secular aspirations, despite various bureaucratic and legislative complications. In this presentation, by mainly focusing on the labor configuration within a winery and who gets to be called an artisan, I will discuss how artisanal products are commodified and thus express capitalist relations regarding value, accumulation, and market. To this end, along with explaining what it means to produce wine in Turkey, my goal is to analyze the “common good” narrative that wine producers construct and show the novel moral configurations of alternative markets within/under capitalism.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None