RCIN and OZwRCIN projects

Object

Title: “We Have All Lived and Breathed Tea”. Gendered Spaces of Factory Tea Production in Western Georgia

Creator:

Król, Katarzyna E.

Date issued/created:

2020

Resource type:

Text

Subtitle:

Ethnologia Polona 41 (2020)

Publisher:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences

Place of publishing:

Warsaw

Description:

ill. ; 24 cm

Type of object:

Journal/Article

Abstract:

Scholarship on Georgian food and drinking culture has been expanding in the past decades. However, scholars have focused mostly on private spaces of food preparation and consumption, as well as on domestic practices of hospitality. This paper tries to expand the scope of these studies by looking at spaces previously omitted: namely spaces of industrial food production. Building on the results of fieldwork conducted in Western Georgia (the Samegrelo region) between 2016 and 2017, as well as several short field trips in 2015, this paper focuses on gendered moral economies of tea (Camellia sinensis) production in a context of economic change in Georgia. This paper follows people who produce one commodity: tea. Although not broadly considered a legitimate part of Georgian foodways, it is imprinted in the lives of the people who both used to and still do work in tea manufacturing. The analysis focuses on one main protagonist: a tea technologist employed at a factory. In so doing, it demonstrates the moral economies in which downgrading, migration and coping strategies are embedded

References:

Allen, Patricia, and Carolyn Sachs. 2007. “Women and food chains: the gendered politics of food.” In Taking Food Public. Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole Counihan, 23–40, London and New York: Routledge
Bloch, Alexia. 2011. “Emotion work, shame, and post-Soviet women entrepreneurs: negotiating ideals of gender and labor in a global economy.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 4 (18), 317–351
Broers, Laurence. 2004. Containing the Nation, Building the State: Coping with Nationalism, Minorities and Conflict in Post-Soviet Georgia. Ph.D. diss., University of London School of Oriental and African Studies
Broers, Laurence. 2012. “‘Two sons of one mother’: nested identities and centre-periphery politics in post-Soviet Georgia.” In When the Elephant Broke Out of the Zoo: A Festschrift for Donald Rayfield, edited by Andreas Schönle, 234–267, CA: Stanford: Stanford University Press
Burawoy, Michael. 2013. “Ethnographic fallacies: reflections on labour studies in the era of market fundamentalism.” Work, Employment and Society 3 (27), 526–536
Caldwell, Melissa. 2009. “Introduction: food and everyday life after state socialism.” In Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World, edited by Melissa Caldewell, 1–27, Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press
Capalbo, Carla. 2016. Tasting Georgia: A Food and Wine Journey in the Caucasus with Over 70 Recipes. Northampton: MA
Carr, Mike K. V., ed. 2018. Advances in Tea Agronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Caucasus Research Resource Centres (CRRC). 2007. Migration and Return in Georgia: Trends, Assessments, and Potential. Report submitted to the Danish Refugee Council
Chao, Sophie. 2018. “Seed care in the palm oil sector.” Environmental Humanities 2 (10), 421–446
Charaia, Vakhtang, and Vladimer Papava. 2017. “Belt and road initiative: Implications for Georgia and China-Georgia economic relations.” China International Studies 67, 122–139
Chatterjee, Piya. 2001. A Time for Tea. Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation. Durham and London: Duke University Press
Chatwin, Mary Ellen.1997. Socio-cultural Transformation and Foodways in the Republic of Georgia 1989–1994, Tbilisi: Metsniereba Press
Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press
Curro, Constanza. 2019. “Excessive hospitality: personhood, moral boundaries and domination around the Georgian table.” Journal of Consumer Culture 2 (20), 216–234
Day, Arnab. 2018. Tea Environments and Plantation Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. London: Cornell University Press
Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2008. “Postsocialist spores: disease, bodies, and the state in the Republic of Georgia.” American Ethnologist 35 (2), 243–258
Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2016. “Humanitarianism, displacement, and the politics of nothing in postwar Georgia.” Slavic Review 2 (73), 287–306
Dragadze, Tamara. 1988. Rural Families in Soviet Georgia. New York: Routledge
Ferry, Maroussia. 2015. “Georgian migrants in Turkey: reconstruction of gender and family dynamics.” In Interdisciplinary Studies on Central and Eastern Europe Series: Security, Democracy and Development in the Southern Caucasus and the Black Sea Region, edited by Nodia Ghia, and Christoph H. Stefes, 159–182, Pieterlen: Lang A&G International Academic Publishers
Gavashelishvili, Elene. 2017. “Childless women in Georgia. Between religious restrictions and medical opportunities.” Anthropology of the Middle East 1(13), 24–42
Goldstein, Darra. 2013. The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press
Hann, Chris. 2010. “Moral economy.” In The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide, edited by Hart Keith, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani, 187–198, Cambridge: Polity Press
Herzfeld, Michael. 2009. “The cultural politics of gesture. Reflections on the embodiment of ethnographic practice.” Ethnography 2 (10), 131–152
Jegathesan, Mythri, 2019. Tea and Solidarity. Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka. Seattle: University of Washington Press
Khalvashi, Tamta. 2018. “The horizons of Medea: economies and cosmologies of dispossession in Georgia.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (24), 804–825
Kochlamazashvili, Irakli, and Nino Kakulia. 2015. The Georgian Tea Sector: A Value Chain Study. ENPARD – European Neighbourhood Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development. http://enpard.ge/en/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/TeaValueChainAnalysis_ENG.pdf (accessed 13.10.2020)
Kofti, Dimitra. 2016. “Moral economy of flexible production: fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household.” Anthropological Theory 4 (16), 433–453
Kumpf, Desirée. 2020. “Organic taste and labour on Indian tea plantations.” Social Anthropology 4, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12951
Linderman, Laura Joy. 2011. “The gendered feast: Experiencing a Georgian Supra.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 2 (29), 23–50
Lundkvist-Houndoumadi, Margharita. 2010. “Treading on the fine line between self-sacrifice and immorality: Narratives of emigrated Georgian women.” Transcience Journal 1(2), 50–70
Manning, Paul. 2007. “Socialist Supras and drinking democratically: changing images of the Georgian feast and Georgian society from socialism to post-socialism.” http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/coursManning-Supra.pdf (accessed 13.10.2020)
Manning, Paul, and Ann Uplisashvili. 2007. “‘Our Beer’: ethnographic brands in postsocialist Georgia.” American Anthropologist 4 (109), 626–641
Mincyte, Diana. 2014. “Raw milk, raw power: states of (mis)trust.” Gastronomica 4 (14), 44–51
Mroczkowska, Joanna. 2019. “Pork politics: the scales of home-made food in Eastern Poland.” Appetite, 140, 223–230
Mühlfried, Florian. 2005. “Banquets, grant-eaters and the red intelligentsia in post-Soviet Georgia.” Central Eurasian Studies Review 1 (4), 16–19
Mühlfried, Florian. 2007. “Sharing the same blood – culture and cuisine in the Republic of Georgia.” Anthropology of Food [Online], S3, (accessed 10.10.2020)
Palomera, Jaime, and Theodora Vetta. 2016. “Moral economy: Rethinking a radical concept.” Anthropological Theory 4 (16), 413–432
Paulovich, Natallia. 2016. “A breadwinner or a housewife? Agency in the everyday image of the Georgian woman.” Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia 2 (3), 24–44
Perfecto, Ivette, and M. Estelí Jiménez-Soto, John Vandermeer. 2019. “Coffee landscapes shaping the anthropocene: forced simplification on a complex agroecological landscape.” Current Anthropology, S20 (60), 236–250
Pine, Frances T. 2002. “Retreat to the household? Gendered domains in postsocialist Poland.” In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, edited by Chris Hann, 95–113, NY: Routledge
Polese, Abel. 2009. “The guest at the dining table: economic transition and the reshaping of hospitality, reflections from Batumi and Odessa.” The Anthropology of East Europe Review 1 (27), 65−77
Scott James. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
Shahnazaryan, Nona. 2005. “The virtual widows of migrant husbands in war-torn Mountainous Karabagh.” In Generations, Kinship and Care: Gendered Provisions of Social Security in Central Eastern Europe, edited by Haukanes Haldis, and Frances Pine, 231–266, Bergen: University of Bergen
Söderlind, Ulrica. 2009. “Introduction to the Foodways of Georgia.” Caucasus Journal of Social Sciences 1 (2), 71–87
Sumbadze, Nana, and Giorgi Tarkhan-Mouravi. 2003. Transition to Adulthood in Georgia: Dynamics of Generational and Gender Roles in Post-totalitarian Society. http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00002563/01/Transition_to_adulthood_in_Georgia.pdf (accessed 10.102020)
Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1971. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.”Past & Present 50, 76–136
Tsing, Anna. 2012. “Unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” Environmental Humanities 1, 141–154
Tsitsishvili, Nino. 2006. “‘A man can sing and play better than a woman’: Singing and patriarchy at the Georgian Supra feast.” Ethnomusicology 50 (3), 452–493
Tuite, Kevin. 2005. “The autocrat of the banquet table: the political and social significance of the Georgian supra.” http://www.mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/publications/Tuite-supra.pdf (accessed 10.10.2020)
Weiner, Elaine S. 2005. “No (Wo)Man’s Land: the post-socialist purgatory of Czech female factory workers.” Social Problems 4(52), 572–592
Yalçın-Heckmann, Lale. 2010. Rural property and economy in postsocialist Azerbaijan. Halle/Saale, Berlin: Lit Verlag

Relation:

Ethnologia Polona

Volume:

41

Start page:

93

End page:

111

Detailed Resource Type:

Article

Format:

application/octet-stream

Resource Identifier:

oai:rcin.org.pl:158842 ; 0137-4079 ; doi:10.23858/ethp.2020.41.2415

Source:

IAiE PAN, call no. P 366 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 367 ; IAiE PAN, call no. P 368 ; click here to follow the link

Language:

eng

Rights:

Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

Terms of use:

Copyright-protected material. [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] May be used within the scope specified in Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, full text available at: ; -

Digitizing institution:

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Original in:

Library of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Projects co-financed by:

Operational Program Digital Poland, 2014-2020, Measure 2.3: Digital accessibility and usefulness of public sector information; funds from the European Regional Development Fund and national co-financing from the state budget. ; European Union. European Regional Development Fund

Access:

Open

×

Citation

Citation style:

This page uses 'cookies'. More information