ABSTRACT
What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies that consume it? This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between sense and scientific sensibility in the making of knowledge about coffee. As an iconic beverage of early modern globalization, coffee belied easy categorization. Baffled drinkers of coffee—from naturalists and physicians to merchants—tried to come up with a sufficiently expansive definition of this new and ambiguous plant from the Ottoman lands. Europeans had to rely on their senses, particularly gustatory, while creating an embodied knowledge of coffee. This sensational encounter with the Turkish drink, however, brought new anxieties to occlude the fellow feeling among coffee drinkers across religions, resulting in a differentiation of the innately melancholic Turkish body. Inter-cultural encounters of the senses around coffee thus embodied the tension between alienating the self from the object of inquiry and peering into sensations as an epistemic practice.
