French ChocolateCrafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate. This absorbing narrative follows the craft
community of French chocolatiers-members of a tiny group experiencing intensive
international competition-as they struggle to ensure the survival of their
businesses. Susan J. Terrio moves easily among ethnography, history, theory, and
vignette, telling a story that challenges conventional views of craft work,
associational forms, and training models in late capitalism. She enters the
world of Parisian craft leaders and local artisanal families there and in
southwest France to relate how they work and how they confront the
representatives and structures of power, from taste makers, CEOs, and
advertising executives to the technocrats of Paris and Brussels.
Looking at craft culture and community from a cross-disciplinary perspective,
Terrio finds that the chocolatiers affirm their collective identity and their
place in the present by commemorating selectively their role in history. In
addition to joining a distinguished tradition of American anthropological
writing on the role of food, her study of the social production of taste in the
invention of vintage, grand cru chocolates lends specificity and weight to
theories of consumption by Pierre Bourdieu and others. The book will appeal to
anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and anyone curious about life in
contemporary France. |