UC Riverside

Vietnam is the largest exporter of Robusta coffee beans in the world, making the industry a pillar of Vietnam's post 1980's market transformation and two-decades of remarkable economic growth. Yet Robusta coffee production is also a primary conduit of risk and uncertainty for the Vietnamese economy generally and acutely so for individual producers, collectors, and traders. Meanwhile, though Vietnamese coffee is starkly visible as a global commodity, it remains invisible in global consumption markets. Through the lens of these contradictions, this dissertation offers an ethnography of the Vietnamese coffee industry, framed as a transnational site of knowledge production constituted through risk, uncertainty, and value. Grounded in twenty-four months of ethnographic research in the central highlands coffee growing region, it offers an analysis of the modes of power through which knowledge about global industrial commodity markets is accessed and exchanged. The coffee market, I contend, is constituted through both real and imagined, local and global spaces of encounter. As such, I take certification schemes, quality control and auditing procedures, and geographical indexing rights related to branding and trademarks as my key sites of ethnographic engagement. Here the economic logic that guides international and domestic investors commingles with local knowledge, historical experience, and ambiguity, at once defining and redefining the industrial coffee market itself. As Vietnam's remarkable economic growth stagnates, the economic landscape of the market-socialist state reveals the tendencies of local, state, and transnational actors to engage with this market. I explicate how, in the wake of the 2001-02 coffee crisis and as global coffee producers move beyond it, Vietnamese farmers and traders directly engage with the economic logic and language of crisis, though they do so, again, with the label of "culprit" looming ever-present.