اخلاق پنیر: پارادوکس موضع گیری دفاعی در یک اقتصاد فرهنگی فراملی

The extension of consumption under contemporary capitalism is aided by a capacity to qualify products as cultural, with the ability to reproduce nature, community and tradition. In this paper, I consider this ‘economy of quality’ as dependant on the work of mediators that circulate models of consumption and articulate production practices with those models through practices of qualification that attach consumers to those products. Qualification requires an institutional and organizational structure responsible for attributing, stabilizing and objectifying qualities. Slow Food International provides just such a structure. I use the case of cheese (the product) and Cheese! (a biennial Slow Food festival) to: (1) identify practices of qualification that characterize cheese as a moral good; (2) describe the institutional mechanisms of Slow Food that articulate qualification with models of consumption grounded in a new politics of distribution and recognition; and (3) analyze the ways in which qualification not only configures (and is configured by) practices of consumption but demands the reorganization of practices and locales of production in order to meet the multiple and often contradictory demands of actors brought into relation by the transnational circulation of cheese. The paper highlights the ways in which a diversity of actors actively configures material and symbolic resources across space to produce and circulates new discourses and prescriptive models of consumption grounded in cultural practice by attending to invocations of culture, configurations of power, and the way in which the production and defense of “the local” and “local” commodities is tied to translocal networks.