Indexicalities of class in the materiality of coffee talk

Jimenez (1995) described the transformation of coffee as a material object indexical of the American elite in the early 19th century into a fixture of the working class less than a century later. With the turn of the 20th century, coffee's status as a symbol of productivity and the American labor force endured. Recently, there has been an accumulation of evidence suggesting that coffee is again being enregistered as a material symbol of the young upper-middle-class experience in the United States. Specifically, the rise of micro-roasting and the emergence of independent coffee houses positions specialty coffee as a community-centered alternative to coffee produced by mass franchises (Roseberry 1996). Linguistic anthropologists have shown the conspicuous consumption of craft food to be a site for the construction of class-based identities (Gaudio 2003, Silverstein 2003). This paper investigates these processes through an analysis of coffee "cupping"-- coffee tasting events that constitute the backbone of the specialty coffee industry. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in specialty coffee shops throughout the Midwest and Southwestern U.S., we show how class is indexed through the production of specialty coffee discourse at cupping events. We analyze the sensory discourse of coffee, which connects the quotidian experience of coffee to exotic, rarefied ingredients and production processes. This process elevates coffee from an everyday American experience to one that indexes an emerging class-based American identity. Through this lens we argue that coffee discourse as a specific form of material consumption illuminates the wider socio-economic landscape of the United States.