Brewing Identity: Fair-Trade Coffee, Image, Style and Consumerism in Late Capitalism

Abstract

Since the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 the production of coffee has been in crisis. Small holders struggle to survive at even a subsistence level following the deregulation of the coffee industry and the subsequent increased control of the value-chain by buyers and roasters. Fair Trade is seen as one way of increasing the amount small producers are paid for their product. The recent explosion of ``relationship coffees`` has helped a number of small producers, but is increasingly now used as a marketing and branding device for Fair Trade and traditional coffee companies alike. The symbolic nature of Fair Trade coffee has been used to differentiate coffees, as well as extract greater value from the raw product. The strategies used to market Fair Trade coffee are increasingly visual in nature, and use producers’ lives and surrounding landscapes as semiotic lifestyle signifiers for first world consumers. In this way consumption is privileged and producers’ lives are deemed knowable, and thus become part of economic exchange. The visual, semiotic nature of consumption often distorts the reality of most small coffee producers, while at the same time re-enforcing the hegemony of consumerism in consuming countries. In this way Fair Trade coffee is an excellent example of symbolic exchange built on a material base: a most salient feature of the late-capitalist order. Using the social constructivist approach and semiotic textual analysis, this thesis explores how meaning is created through this process, and the propensity for people to buy products imbued with symbolic cultural capital in late capitalism. Consumers now purchase signs and symbols that signify membership in a certain group. In order to uncover mechanisms that allow for the commoditization of caring, ethics, or environmentalism, with reference to Fair Trade coffee, images are analyzed using semiotic textual analysis. This is accompanied by an overview of consumption and production in this current regime of accumulation. Deconstruction of images allows for semiotic connections to be made between the production of coffee and the identity building symbolic nature of late-capitalist consumption. This analysis of photographic images used to market Fair Trade coffee it is discovered that meaning making is a highly complex process in late-capitalism, and increasingly relies on detached visual signifiers in widely disseminated images in advertising. These mechanisms have ramifications for politics in the broadest sense, as individual acts of consumption come to replace actual political debate, engagement, and policy.