This 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. The author 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 crafty leaders and local artisanal families there and in south-west 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, the author 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 Bo
- ISBN10 0520221257
- ISBN13 9780520221253
- Publish Date 28 September 2000
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 November 2006
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of California Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 326
- Language English