SEMINAR: ANTHROPOLOGY / SOCIOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES, SEMESTER 1, 2017

Cerveceros Piratas – or Pirate Brewers have emerged as an important feature within a broader counter-cultural landscape within Cataluña. Loosely defined, these brewers produce and distribute beer illegally, directing profits towards non-state, subversive infrastructure, services and projects. In the past, these breweries formed a loose allegiance with one another. Increasingly, they represent a sustained and organized form of resistance against the dominance of corporate breweries within the region. In this presentation, I reflect on what it means to describe this movement as piratical. Notions of piracy help shed light on how contests to state sovereignty become intertwined within the distribution of rights and resources in some informal entrepreneurial practices. Catalan pirate brewers participate in creating and reinforcing alternative circuits for the flow of goods, services and ideas. At the same time, brewers’ pirate status denies them access to state resources designed to ensure standards of public health and quality, highlighting tensions between the objectives of these collectives and their precarious legal status.