Remaking Place: The Social Construction of a Geographical Indication for Feni

Abstract

Abstract*A range of social movements mobilise around and seek to valorise 'place-based' imageries. There is, these movements argue, vitality in place. As anthropologists remind us, people continue to construct some form of boundaries around place, however permeable and transient those boundaries might be. In the context of global agrifood, a diversity of socially generated marks indicating conditions of origin have emerged that seek to speak to a range of moral economies. Within this constellation, Geographical Indications (GIs) appears as a remarkable place-based intellectual property which the article appreciates as the juridical reification of a placed-based stabilisation of cultural norms. However, rather than idealise GIs, the paper also probes a 'politics in place' through a fieldwork-based study of a recently acquired GI for Feni, a liquor distilled from either coconut of cashew apples. Juxtaposing observations of Feni distilling with the specifications that constitute the GI, the paper explains these differences in terms of the local social relations of power. The Goa government aligned itself with the recently established Feni Association, mainly composed of large distillers with bottling operations, to acquire the GI and was successful because of the complicity of the GI Registry office.

Geographical indications and upgrading of small-scale producers in global agro-food chains: A case study of the Makó Onion Protected Designation of Origin

“…Bowen, 2010;Galtier et al, 2013), in a dynamic reminiscent of 'lead firm' manoeuvrings and industrial world conventions. Other cases of established GI systems reveal that the regulatory GI process itself can fail to redress these imbalances, for example the tendency for GI awarding authorities to adopt a 'lowest common denominator' threshold of inclusion, so that larger, more industrial firms are admitted to the producer group (Rangnekar, 2011). In these cases, smaller scale producers delivering the highest quality related to traditional skills and know-how receive no reward for their efforts (Mancini, 2013), which leads some in established systems to replace their use of the GI with a private brand to communicate quality more effectively to more knowledgeable, discerning consumers (Dentoni et al, 2012;Kizos and Vakoufaris, 2011b;Mancini, 2013;Tregear et al, 2007).…”

“…Barham, 2003;Coombe and Aylwin, 2011) and developmental perspectives (Kizos and Vakoufaris, 2011a;Profeta et al, 2010;Rangnekar, 2011), and amongst the many cases analysed, insights have been revealed into the processes of negotiation around Codes of Practice (e.g. Bowen, 2010;Mancini, 2013;Tregear et al, 2007), power relations between actors (Kizos and Vakoufaris, 2011b;Mancini, 2013;Rangnekar, 2011) and the consequences of varying actors' strategies (Bowen, 2010;Bowen and De Master, 2011;Dentoni et al, 2012).…”

“…For example, Coombe and Aylwin (2011) argue that GIs 'enable producers to circumvent mass commodity markets' by exploiting growing niche markets (p. 2029) and can further 'local farmers' dignity and autonomy ' (p. 2038) while Rangnekar (2011) writes that GIs offer 'a remarkable opportunity to resist the erasure of place and participate in social movements of place ' (p. 2057). In EU agro-food policy, GIs are regarded as fundamental to supporting 'a quality orientation' (European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, 2012) with the two most important certifications being the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).…”

Proving Provenance? Geographical Indications Certification and its Ambiguities

“…Tradition is therefore a contested analytic category. Recent research emphasizes the need to avoid a frozen or static understanding -restrictively codifying practices which then become "Disneyfied" or merely "living museums" (Bowen & De Master, 2011) -as well as being attentive to the effects of unequal power relations during the drafting process (Bowen 2010a;Rangnekar, 2011).…”

Systemic Sustainability of the French Organic Rice and PGI Einkorn Value Chains: A Preliminary Assessment Based on Network Analysis

“…This situation is due to the predominance of the conventional model making use of chemical inputs. This model is criticised by both consumers and public authorities, encouraging more environmentally friendly as well as economically and socially acceptable production models or, in other words, alternative forms of production [2,3]. The interest shown by consumers in such production models has given them increased impetus [4].…”