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Abstract
Terroir, or the taste of place, is the unique assemblage of geology, climate, and cultural practices of a region, essentialized in endemic food products and their tastes. The linkage of taste experience with a specific geography often results in place-brand toponyms (e.g. Champagne, Vidalia onions). Today, terroir may be protected as intellectual property through a series of legal instruments, or Geographical Indications (GIs) (e.g. Josling 2006, Gangjee 2012). This dissertation examines terroir as a window onto broader questions of cultural, political, and ecological change in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Broadly, it asks: How are hegemonies of taste (Yung 2014) reproduced or countered through CEE terroir wine discourse and practices? This question is answered through long-term (fourteen months) ethnography in the historic Tokaj region and Budapest, Hungary, using sensuous-ethnographic methods, policy (GI) analysis, and rchival/media analysis.I find that terroir-related policies shape material landscapes, becoming components of socioecological systems. This work thus reverses the terroir narrative that inert places cause specific taste experiences (from place to taste), arguing that acquired tastes are also political experiences with environmental outcomes (from taste to place). It describes how political/temporal boundaries (e.g. East/West, 1989) manifest as visceral experiences of everyday life in CEE. Through blood and soil narratives, terroir naturalizes more-than-human communities of natives; wine in this context is thus a currency of growing ethno-nationalist sentiment in the region. Further, this work explores terroir as more-than-human networks of labor in and outside of agricultural spaces of production, and how these non-human components are increasingly authenticated through new methodologies within a framework that prioritizes simplification, purity, and nativism. Through narratives of environmental exceptionalism, a counter-terroir emerges, which is less about anchoring (Demossier 2018), but mobility in the global age.This dissertation proposes a visceral political ecology approach to locate power in sense experiences. This approach evaluates how sense knowledge becomes action (Feld 2005), and how those actions materialize in socio-ecological systems. This position is an important new paradigm in political ecology, with implications for related fields, including sustainable food systems, biodiversity conservation, nationalism, and historical ecology.