| This is a study about the practice of making judgments about material things. It asks how people define, perceive, measure, and evaluate quality for American whiskey. Recognizing that assessments of quality are forever entangled in historically-contingent ideas about civility and sensation, that tastes for foods are biophysical processes constituted by cultural norms and social contexts, and that judgments cannot be divorced from collective histories and individual biographies, it refuses to draw an artificial distinction between the social and the material dimensions of taste. Rather, this research attends to the interdependence of complex systems. It asks how moral systems merge with chemical ones, how economics intersects with corporeal life, and how ideological formations blend with natural ones. In so doing, it argues for a reconceptualization of taste and aesthetics as jointly material and social projects. Five chapters explore the question of quality for American whiskey, each from a different angle. Chapter II examines four practices that together create the parameters of distinction for whiskey; Chapter III uses the cultural biography of a molecule, vanillin, to expose the evolution of taste norms; Chapter IV traces connections between early debates on whiskey regulation and a profound ambiguity about the promises of modernity; Chapter V shows how heritage productions within whiskey distilleries animate the myth of the American frontier in ways that reproduce its exclusionary tendencies; Chapter VI argues that while tasting protocols promoted by distillers and critics idealize a mode of critical distance that denigrates the body and marks pleasure as problematic, consumers of whiskey nevertheless conceive of corporeal sensation, including intoxication, as integral to the taste experience. Collectively, these chapters substantiate two broad yet provisional conclusions. First, whiskey reconfirms and derives its value from a particular construction of nature as external, transcendent, and timeless. Second, by engaging legends of the frontier, which reify a mythic white male experience, and idealizing disembodied perception, itself reflective of exclusionary ideologies, the mundane act of judging whiskey quality can be seen as a mechanism in the reproduction and renegotiation of hegemonic values and of the social hierarchies they sustain. |
