When I began researching honey collecting in the Philippines, I never anticipated that making visual collections of objects and images associated with marketing honey was going to become a powerful way of stimulating discussion about my study.  But the clues were there all along. Collections are things brought together, in so many senses of the term. Such assemblages have a capacity for telling stories about how different products make their ways through the world, and into our homes, bodies and lives. Honey collecting, like other forms of forest harvesting or hunting, tends to evoke ideas about a bound type of thing moving in one direction – out of the forest and into a market (wherever that might be).  But what happens when a ‘natural forest’ honey supposedly harvested on an island in the Philippines is manufactured and sold in Manila?  And when this honey’s association with nature and forest environments is hardly natural, but needs to be made apparent by literally rendering the final product green?  How do such commodities relate to the forest honeys actually being harvested by Indigenous experts as part of their livelihoods and lifeways, and being marketed by non-government organizations?  In attempting to discuss the issues that arose from my research, I found that bringing together a range of honey products that had different, yet related, trajectories could be a wonderful prompt for talking about the social and spatial disjunctures that often occur within efforts to add value to certain types of natural resources.

Sarah Webb talking with a honey street vendor in Metro Manila

In the Philippines, Palawan[1] honey is one such ‘value-added’ forest product.  Indigenous experts[2] seasonally harvest honey mainly from Apis dorsata beehives in forested areas on Palawan Island.  For the Indigenous Tagbanua families I worked with, honey is not only a part of their livelihood but also an important source of nutrition, sweetness, medicine and cultural identity.  Within the Philippines, many people are interested in buying Palawan honey because it is a highly valued product with a reputation for purity and quality[3], particularly because of its association with Palawan’s iconic forests and ‘natural wonders’, such as the Puerto Princesa Underground River.  Local Indigenous representatives who market honey promote non-timber forest products (NTFPs) such as honey because these products support their current goals for sustainable forest livelihoods.

The notion that NTFPs, like honey, can contribute to sustainable forest livelihoods has influenced international development projects, policies and research initiatives – especially since studies began to suggest that the economic value of NTFPs might exceed that of timber.  ‘Value adding’ NTFPs often means building up markets of more highly valued forest products as an alternative to logging and mining.  The idea is to provide income for forest harvesters, while maintaining the resource base.  However, ongoing research makes apparent the need to approach the potential of NTFP commercialization for sustainability agendas with caution.  Scholars have demonstrated that merely providing more valuable resources will not necessarily address the socio-economic marginalization of forest harvesters, or the concerns of sustainable livelihoods (however these might be conceptualized).  Important research in environmental anthropology has documented how value-adding incentives can pay insufficient attention to the reasons forest harvesters do not have access to valuable forest resources – or why they no longer have such access[4].

Drawing upon this line of research, I examined how the politics of capturing value is a part of the social processes of making products valuable in the Philippines. When I began searching for Palawan honeys sold in Manila, I found that it was not only those interested in sustainable forest livelihoods who were ‘adding’ to honey in order to make it a valuable product.

Adding to Palawan Honey

The reputation of Palawan honey as ‘natural’ and ‘pure’ gives it certain market appeal, but has also inspired a burgeoning range of imitation products.  Different ‘fake’ Palawan honeys are made by adding water and sugar, the name of Palawan, and even green food coloring to honey of dubious origin.  On Palawan, campaigns have targeted adulterated honey, which is made by adding water to increase volume, and sugar or kalamansi (native lime) juice to disguise the diluted taste.  In Manila, experts on the honey trade assert that the volume of honey claimed to originate from Palawan exceeds both Palawan estimates for local production and state records of honey transported from the island. Green honey is an expensive[5] product (supposedly rare and medicinal) identified as coming from Palawan when sold across boutiques and farmers’ markets in Manila.  However, according to testing conducted by Dr. Cervancia of the University of the Philippines Los Banos, ‘green’ honey is made green by mixing yellow and blue pigments into the honey – additions which she contends change its composition in such a way that it should no longer, technically, be called honey.

A manlalbet (honey harvester) indicates the location of a hive

So what does a black market for green Palawan honey in Manila mean for Indigenous Tagbanua harvesters? Firstly, Indigenous peoples are often blamed for adulterating local honey.  Although this practice is more likely conducted by transitory middle traders[6], these rumors cause some to shy away from purchasing honey directly from Indigenous harvesters on Palawan.  Some local buyers use such rumors to negotiate a lower price for the honey they buy from Tagbanua families, claiming the honey is of a lower or ‘reject’ quality.  Secondly, my use of the term black market is somewhat facetious. While practices of ‘fake’ honeys are widely considered undesirable, and have been banned by Palawan local government, branding or labeling honey as coming from Palawan (even when it does not) is not regulated at a national level.  At the same time, honey from Palawan does not easily make its way from Indigenous harvesters to Manila.  State permits are required to transport honey, and seasonally driven, local production means that a relatively low volume of honey from Palawan enters the Manila marketplace.

As these forest products are made valuable, particularly through their association with iconic forest environments, a space has emerged for creating even more expensive ‘fake’ honey products.  Such cultural politics are part of, rather than external to, the processes of making products valuable.  Those manufacturing and purchasing such products are actively involved in creating social and economic values of not only honey, but also the ideals of nature through which consumers position their tastes and health in relation to the environments of Palawan and the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples.

Taking Away from Added Honeys: Understanding Commodity Flows and Values through Material Culture

As I investigated these politics of valuing honey, I initially collected products[7] because I was interested in the actual objects of honey marketing.  That is, not only was I interested in what people had to say about honey, or how they behaved during sales encounters, but I also wanted to know what these material objects themselves said about honey production. I was fascinated by the material transfer of honey from the large plastic gallon jugs used during harvest to smaller containers for resale, the colors or textures of the honey itself – indicative of different qualities and tastes – and, of course, the product labels that communicated both explicit and implicit messages to potential customers.  All of this material culture supplemented, furthered, or contradicted what different people told me, and it was in making sense of those relationships and tensions that I was able to understand how Palawan honey is made valuable. But during ethnographic fieldwork, I also noticed collections everywhere I looked – from displays of product samples at non-government organization (NGO) workshops, to samples of ‘fake’ honeys being tested in university laboratories, to the ways people arranged important objects in their homes.  And this made me realize that what I had collected might be of interest to others too, and so the collection became the basis of workshops conducted at the end of my fieldwork.

Sarah Webb and research assistant Mr. Rogelio Rodrigo at a honey collection workshop

For workshops with Tagbanua families, I prepared descriptive labels for honey and beeswax products that included information about the price and provenance, as well as photographs of different contexts of sale.  My research assistants and I arranged these into displays, and talked about the different products, answering any questions participants had.  After doing so, we passed the different objects around, and sampled each – trying on beeswax cosmetics, and smelling and tasting honeys.  At their request, a group of harvesters ran their own tests on the honeys we presented to determine for themselves whether they considered any ‘fake’, and to ascertain differing levels of quality.

Tagbanua families are only too familiar with what they describe as the dangers of ‘fake’ honey – particularly, they fear being blamed for the production of such ‘fakes’, and the resultant punishment by the state or low prices from buyers.  Most Tagbanua people are aware that a fraudulent ‘green honey’ is sold.  But the complex connections and distances between the existence of such commodities and their own experiences can be difficult for any of us to talk about.  When these differently sourced, made, packaged, and promoted honey products were brought together, they provided us with the means of discussing the bigger social stories surrounding the journeys of Palawan honey to the marketplace.

The fate of my collection of honey products was important to me; I hoped that it would remain together, and be able to support ongoing research engagements. To this end, I was thrilled to hand the collection over to NATRIPAL, the Indigenous peoples’ federation of Palawan, as an addition to their own display of sample products collected during their research and marketing activities. In the offices of the organization, we installed the display of honey products and conducted an additional workshop to discuss the collection’s relationship to my research and the federation’s ongoing work. Apart from their nationally and regionally awarded efforts to provide more favorable market relations for Indigenous people and to develop the brand of Palawan honey, NATRIPAL has lobbied intensively for the land and livelihood rights of Indigenous peoples across Palawan.

There are many challenges for environmental anthropologists to work through in considering how collections can be used as forms of engagement.  But there is great potential for harnessing approaches to objects, which have traditionally resided within the fields of material culture studies or museology, for research in environmental anthropology. Visual collections are not just symbolic of what we do throughout our research activities, or simply representative of the issues we are exploring.  They can also act as a means for thinking and talking through pressing social and environmental issues in ways that draw from the experiences researchers and those they work with already have.  And perhaps most thrilling, there is a possibility that such collections might have a vibrant life beyond the intentions of researchers. This is, of course, only one of many innovative pathways for collections to act as powerful tools of engagement.

Paige West during fieldwork for her new book – Florence, Italy, 2006

RG: What is the theme of your new book?

PW: One theme, and a theme that I have also explored in other work, is the connection between places that are often imagined as far from modernity to places that are imagined as the center of industry and commerce.  Coffee is a commodity that has travelled around the world for literally thousands of years.  And it’s a commodity that we tend to associate with a rather urban lifestyle.  You know, you go a café in Hamburg, you go to a café in New York City, you go to a café in Sydney, and you have a cup of coffee—it’s something that we associate with a very particular kind of lifestyle.  Coffee and its circulation are one of the things that have for hundreds of years tied Papua New Guinea, a place that is almost always configured as stuck in the past or as the last bastion of a very different kind of lifestyle, to a modern global economic system.  So one of the themes of the book is the way in which commodities tie seemingly out-of-the-way places and seemingly less-than-developed people to very urban areas and to the industrialized world.

Another theme of the book is seemingly “ethical” consumption.  I ask what it means to try and create a kind of progressive politics around consumption and whether that politics is productive for people who are growing coffee and whether it’s productive for the people who are assuming that they’re enacting ethical, political choices through the act of buying. With a lot of certified coffee, with a lot of the fair-trade or organic coffee, with a lot of this notion of ethical consumption— the people in the coffee industry who are most often discursively constructed by advertising, marketing, and other forms of representation are growers.  And there are a lot of growers in the coffee industry, and they’re a very important part of the industry.  But one of the things I do in the book is expand our notion of who’s bringing coffee from Papua New Guinea to places like Hamburg, Sydney, and New York City.  So I look at the lives of growers, of people who process the coffee, of the people who work for shipping companies, of the people who import coffee, of the people who market coffee, and I really try to flesh out the global commodity chain for coffee so that the simple portrayal of poor rural growers and wealthy western consumers gets a little more muddy for people.

RG: Beyond what you’ve already hinted at, how does your book address broader questions in environmental anthropology?

PW: One of the things that my friend, colleague, and sometimes collaborator Molly Doane and I have been talking about for years is the fact that political ecology has not taken seriously the global consumption and circulation of commodities.  So many of the environmental ravages that we see today, so much of the environmental dispossession in the places where we work, is caused by the extraction of commodities. For political ecology to have a robust understanding of environmental and social change, we have to take commodities seriously.  Now this has happened with mining and oil.  The people who look at those forms of extraction do a really wonderful job of this.  But with agricultural commodities—things like coffee, sugar cane, and oil palm—we as political ecologists and environmental anthropologists really have to take this seriously, and through that we have to take very seriously the literature on circulation and commodification.

RG: When you were doing research for your book, how did you engage with different communities of local people, of scientists, of coffee growers? 

PW: One of the interesting things about this book is that it’s a very long-term project that in earnest began many years ago.  When I was finishing up my PhD project, I asked the people I work with in rural villages in Papua New Guinea what they thought an interesting second project would be.  They all said coffee because they live in this place where everyone thinks—or used to think—that conservation was a form of development.  It’s 1998, and I’m about to leave the village – maybe forever, nobody knows – and I say to a guy named Philip and a guy named Jonah, “So what’s a good research project?”  We’re looking out over Philip’s dad’s coffee groves, and they say, “Well, really the only development we have here is coffee and Christianity.  So maybe you should look at coffee and Christianity.”  I thought about it and decided that coffee was an interesting thing to look at, so the book project itself was generated from the engagements I already had with rural people living in the Lufa district of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

The project became complicated in terms of the types of relationships I had with the people I was working with because the global commodity chain for coffee literally stretches globally.  With the rural farmers who grow the coffee that I write about, I have a long-term ethnographic relationship.  I go back to Papua New Guinea every year and spend time with them.  I speak their language, and I know a lot about local ontology and epistemology.  That kind of social relationship was very different from the kind of social relationship I had with, say, the people in Goroka, the mountain town where most of the coffee is processed.  Most of those people I knew socially because there’s a whole social world of middle-class Papua New Guineans and expatriates in Goroka, and before I ever knew I would do work on coffee, I was part of that social world.  So I had to approach people whom I already had a social relationship with and say, “Look, I’m doing this book on coffee, it would be great if I could interview you, it would be great if I could spend time at your factory.”  The initial part of the book—the rural research—was very ethnographic.  I mean ethnographic in the true sense—living in a village, spending all day everyday with people for months and years on end.  The sort of middle part of the commodity chain in Goroka and then in Lae and Port Moresby, two other urban areas in Papua New Guinea, a lot of it was ethnographic work, but also a lot of it was interview work.  I lived with people, I spent time in factories, but I also interviewed people.  And then as I moved farther away from the source of coffee, the project became much more interview based.  If you’re talking to, say, a head of one of the largest coffee importers in the world, you can’t go live with them.  You can’t really afford to spend seven months in Hamburg.  And so the part of the project that is about distribution and the international marketing of coffee, that’s much more interview-based.  I feel like I had a range of relationships with people—everything from the very traditional ethnographic to the much more interview-based style of ethnography that many people practice today.

RG: In the course of your fieldwork for this book and in your ongoing research, how has your work sparked on-the-ground engagements with projects that are meaningful to local communities?

PW: I have a couple of different projects now.  The coffee project is basically finished in terms of my research, but one of the things that came out of it is that I got connected with a lot of people in the coffee industry who do really interesting work around social justice.  One of the things I was recently able to do was bring a group of researchers from a large international coffee company to the villages in the Eastern Highlands to get them talking to the people about ways to have more money flowing into communities and less money slipping out along the commodity chain.  It has led to some really positive engagement.  One of the other things that’s come out of the coffee work is that pretty much everybody in the coffee industry in Papua New Guinea is reading the book, and I think that there’s an ongoing conversation now about ethical trade and ethical consumption and whether that’s actually benefitting people in rural areas that I have helped to generate.  And so I feel like I’ve contributed to a national conversation about coffee in Papua New Guinea in addition to connecting these rural growers with some really wonderful people in the coffee industry.

It’s interesting how, once you become an “expert” on something, you find people contacting you to ask you for advice.  Someone whom I interviewed and spent quite a bit of time with in London, and who owns five small coffee shops, recently contacted me to say, “Hey, I want to source some fair-trade, organically certified coffee from Papua New Guinea, and I want to do it from a great company.”  I was able to connect him with a locally owned company, with a company that is owned and run by Papua New Guineans, and they now have a relationship where he is sourcing all of his coffee from them.  And so in some ways I’ve been able to connect people with the rural growers whom I know so well.  And in some ways I’ve also been able to connect some of the people who get constructed as middlemen.  That’s another thing about the book that I think is important.  In the narratives that we hear in the Global North about coffee and all sorts of things, there’s this notion of the middleman as a kind of evil character who takes money away from the poor growers and who doesn’t add any value.  What I do in the book is show that the middleman in Papua New Guinea is actually a Papua New Guinean who is really trying to make a living as an ethical part of the industry and who is usually someone that has connections to growers, very intimate connections to growers, and also connections to these international houses that can buy the coffee.

In terms of other work, my first book is, in part, a critique of environmental conservation projects, and one of the things that has come out of that book is really sustained engagement with small, local NGOs.  I helped found an NGO called the Papua New Guinea Institute of Biological Research, and we work to get young Papua New Guineans who are interested in anthropology and biology into PhD and masters programs, and then help support their research.  So that’s one way that my work has led to engagement.  One of the critiques in that book is that conservation can’t always be this kind of western construct that gets put down on top of people in Papua New Guinea, so one way that I’ve tried to help move that idea along is to work with these young Papua New Guinean scientists.

My current research is in New Ireland, a province of Papua New Guinea, where I work with an NGO called Ailan Awareness.  We work with twenty small communities, and those twenty small communities all have teeny-tiny protected areas created using traditional conservation techniques.  These are communities who have decided they want to do something positive for the environment.  They want to work with some people like us, some external actors, but they want to have control over their conservation projects, and so I’ve helped a lot with that process.

RG: It’s interesting that people in the coffee industry in PNG are reading your book.  There is certainly a larger conversation to be had about the meanings of environmental-anthropology books beyond the academy.

PW: I’m an academic anthropologist.  My waged labor is to produce knowledge and teach people.  And I’m thrilled that the knowledge I’ve produced has an effect in the world and that people outside of the academy can learn from my work, benefit from my work.  But I think of myself very much as an academic, and I think that, if you’re an academic, your work can still have this much broader significance.

RG: What is the key message or key point that you hope people take away from reading your book?

PW: There are a couple of them.  One of them is that any commodity that you buy has an entire social world that lives within it.  And if you want to be an informed consumer, then you should understand that social world.  It’s more complicated than poor rural growers and evil middlemen and western consumers doing ethical politics through buying stuff.  If you really want to understand the world of commodities, you should understand the complicated nature of commodities.  Another theme in the book is a critique of the constant production of the idea of the primitive as it’s connected to Papua New Guinea—to New Guinea broadly, but to Papua New Guinea specifically.  And I end the book with a set of questions about the images used to sell coffee and their connections to ideas of pre-modernity and primitivity—how those images end up slipping from the selling of commodities into political discourse that negatively affects Papua New Guineans.  With any production of an image of others, we have to think very carefully about the life of that image after it leaves the commodity. Another key point is that when we connect images to commodities, given the rapidity of time and space in late capitalism, those images get marketed and sold very quickly.  What happens when those images are no longer valuable to marketers and thus no longer sold to the public as meaningful?  What happens when the lives of rural growers are no longer important to people buying coffee?  Do they get thrown by the wayside?  I think that’s something very important when we think about tying images of people and lifestyles to commodities.

RG: Finally, what are the broader contributions of your book to public and policy discussions about social and environmental justice?

PW: What I would hope is that my book raises questions about how we think about and talk about others.  And I hope it shows very clearly that the images that are associated with the production of coffee—while they may make money for people who sell fair trade and organic certified, while they may make money for coffee for people who sell non-certified coffee—that these images have real material effects, and we have to think about that.

In terms of public policy, I’m well connected with some people in government in Papua New Guinea, and I’ve talked with a lot of people in government in Papua New Guinea about the book.  I gave talks about the book at the U.S. Embassy and at the National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea.  And the former governor of the Eastern Highlands Province has read the book and has thought a lot about coffee production.  So I’ve had a good set of conversations with people in Papua New Guinea.  In terms of other policy, I’ve worked pretty extensively with this major, gigantic coffee company to help them understand how their work in places like New Guinea can be more ethical, how their work can take into consideration rural people in robust ways.  In terms of international policy, I’ve talked to EU people quite a bit, but it’s been really informally.  I would say that a lot of the policy-related work we do as anthropologists is through these informal social relationships that we make while we’re in the field.  You know, you meet someone who works for the EU while you’re in line at the airport in Port Moresby, and they say, “Oh, well, I’d love to read your book.”  Then you send a copy of the book, and they email you back.  So our contribution to policy doesn’t just have to be sitting at a NOAA roundtable or sitting on a NASA panel.  Our contribution to policy can be in these more informal situations where we can actually do what we do best— have sustained social interactions with people.  We help them understand the ethnographic worlds that we’re privileged to take part in.

RG: Is there anything you would like to add?

PW: I would just add that I feel really lucky to be part of a growing community of scholars that’s working on issues of global commodity circulation and political ecology.  In particular, if you are interested in coffee, Molly Doane and Sarah Lyon have done extraordinary work in Mexico and Guatemala respectively.