Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: How are taste judgments made and shared? Drawing on fieldwork among Ceylon tea brokers and buyers, the industry's de facto tea tasters, this article offers an ethnographic account of aesthetic judgment in practice. I ask, what makes a tea good? Tea tasters' unanimous response amounted to a market relativism of sorts that shifted attention away from the tasted object: “It all depends on the market.” Following my informants' contention, I show how industry actors are able to enact a tentative resolution to the fundamental paradox inherent in the judgment of taste, namely, its ostensibly subjective nature and simultaneous claim to objectivity. “The market,” invoked time and again by tea tasters, and imagined as inherently objective, affords the seamless translation of taste judgments into prices, intelligible and shareable quantities, prompting a reimagining of taste as an economic fact.
Source: Economic Anthropology
DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12330
Author: Alexios Tsigkas
Institution: Flame University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402700241