'Life is made of courage and coffee' : an ethnography of speciality coffee in São Paulo, Brazil

This thesis explores the ways in which specialty coffee is consumed in Brazil, the world's largest coffee-producing nation and a rising consumer power. A central aim of this thesis is to address how the consumption of a globalised and modern good such as specialty coffee is experienced in a culture and context that has historically been exploited for the production of that very good, and that now finds itself unevenly positioned in the global consumer market. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with specialty coffee enthusiasts and professionals in the city of São Paulo, this thesis explores how a network of individuals that I call the 'apaixonados'-those passionate about coffee-engage individual aspirations and passions to navigate the boundaries and frictions between their local coffee consumer culture and what is discursively constructed as a 'global coffee community.' To explore how global consumer inequalities are manifest in Brazil, I begin by introducing the emic idea of 'tipo exportação,' a classificatory and experiential notion used to describe goods that are produced domestically but perceived to be of exportation (i.e., high) quality, and are typically destined for foreign consumption. Through my engagement with how tipo exportação is lived, I show how echoes of Brazil's colonial past inform contemporary structural constraints that stifle apaixonados' access both to foreign specialty and Brazil's own best coffee. I examine the ways in which apaixonados work within, through, and against these trade structures to obtain the coffees they desire, and show how the consumption of specialty coffee is used to mark specific forms of cosmopolitan aspiration and local prestige. The practical adaptations my participants make to key concepts in this 'global coffee community'-namely, authenticity and origin-in response to trade regulations that prohibit the importation of green (raw) coffee into Brazil reveal possibilities for the incorporation of more forms and spaces of labour into the wider ethical consumption discourse by taking account of the 'view from the South.' By adding a hybrid producer-consumer perspective to prevailing models of coffee consumption experiences-which have historically been centred in coffee-importing nations and drawn much of their meaning from coffee's travel from its agricultural origin and subsequent exoticism-this research contributes to anthropological debates on the politics and economics of food and consumption cultures in a globalising but unequal world.