During the pandemic, an anthropologist finds new meaning in the everyday ritual of preparing and drinking coffee.
When I arrived from the Philippines to the airport in the city of Gondar in northern Ethiopia early last year—before the pandemic started—I was greeted with an intensely flavorful cup of coffee. All arriving passengers were welcomed in the same way. The East African country, historically known as Abyssinia, was already living up to my expectations as the widely regarded “birthplace of coffee.”
I also went to cafés that showcased Ethiopian culture while conveying a more cosmopolitan vibe. In these shops, people were hanging out and studying—just like they do in coffee shops in other parts of the world. In Tomoca Coffee, one of the famous cafés, a paraphrased quote attributed to the French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac hung from the ceiling: “When you drink a cup of coffee, ideas come in marching like an army.
I am hardly alone in feeling the loss of my daily coffee routine during the pandemic. But, like many others, I soon learned a new ritual: I started preparing my own coffee, from grinding the beans to brewing them—something I had never done before. Some anthropologists have followed coffee’s travels to better understand wide-reaching processes of globalization. Through fine-grained ethnographies, they explore the blend of local and global influences that find their way into each cup and each café.
Surely, those of us who have sat through a boring meeting or struggled to meet a grueling deadline can relate to the character in Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “Bon Voyage, Mr. President” who asked for an espresso “strong enough to wake the dead.” Such is the association of coffee with wakefulness and productivity that some cultural historians relate the rise of coffee with the demands of modernity.
I ground the last of my Ethiopian coffee beans in June. Thankfully, by then I had discovered that it was actually possible to buy all kinds of freshly roasted beans in the Philippines—including beans from all the Ethiopian regions, albeit at three times the price I had paid during my visit.
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