Embedded Territorialization: Market Valuation and the Reorganization of Origin in Taiwan’s Alishan Coffee

• In Event: Political Economy of the World-System Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable Ill: Drinks, Cars, Neoliberalism, and Coloniality in the World System

Abstract

What happens when a place name becomes a market asset? This paper examines how “Alishan” coffee in Taiwan is transformed from a geographic reference into a rent-bearing origin category within global value chains (GVCs). Drawing on multi-sited ethnography (2023–2026), 28 interviews, and institutional analysis of competitions, branding initiatives, and property regimes, I analyze how valuation infrastructures—such as Cup of Excellence (COE) and the Indigenous-led Best of Cou (BoC)—stabilize origin as a calculable unit of expected future returns.

I argue that origin is not a pre-existing territory into which markets are embedded. Rather, through what I call embedded territorialization, valuation devices operate within historically sedimented land regimes and administrative scales to re-engineer property relations and boundary enforcement. Conflicts among state branding projects, Indigenous sovereignty claims, and global specialty standards generate productive friction that reorganizes territorial authority and redistributes monopoly rents.

This study advances economic sociology by reconceptualizing embeddedness as a territorial process and intervenes in GVC theory by demonstrating that origin positions are not structurally predetermined but politically negotiated through valuation practices.

Author

• Tzuyi Kao, National Tsing Hua University