Terroir products: a movable heritage feast?

Abstract

This article seeks to de-naturalise the idea of terroir by questioning the assumption that relations between product, people and place are static and durable. It asks what perspectives might be gained by focusing on instances of movement, fluidity, and instability of these three elements and of relationships between them. Whereas terroir contests the idea that anything can be made anywhere by asserting that place and context matter, and whereas anthropologists of space and place critique the essentialisation and naturalisation of place by arguing that, in the context of a globalised world, movement matters, I argue that movement is in fact a crucial element of people’s very engagement with place in many productive traditions.