Author(s)

Christopher Elliott

Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, USA.

Scholars contend actor network theory (ANT) could be an effective framework for analyzing the reproduction of social systems where the agency of material objects plays a role. By puzzling established explanations for “craft” beer’s emergence, this paper seeks to develop such a framework. Craft beer offers a compelling case, since theories such as population ecology and neolocalism only partially explain its emergence. Following ANT, this paper considers the development of systems producing beer across three stages of civilizations. First, agricultural beer is embedded in communities, then becomes disembedded by the specialized systems of industrial production. The craft beer movement “swings back” this pendulum. The material properties in beer court human actors seek to embody and re-embed its production and/or consumption, enabling human networks to reclaim commodity systems from corporate control. This analysis contributes to ANT’s potential for comparatively examining power dynamics between human and non-human objects interacting to produce social systems.

Actor Network Theory, Population Ecology, Neolocalism, New Materialism, Craft Beer

Elliott, C. (2022) Beyond Cultural Accounts: The Durable Connections between Humans and Beer. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 10, 117-144. doi: 10.4236/jss.2022.1013011.