Materiality is very much part of these sensual and social pleasures. The material constituents such as the glass with its shape and texture, the liquid with its hotness and colour, the kettle and the spoon with the sounds they make, and the particular blend of tea leaves with their smell and taste inaugurate particular senses as well as sociality and hospitality. They also (re)present tea drinking as a sensual experience. The materials do more than just activate the senses in the actual moment of consumption: tea drinkers encounter a quasi-corporeal dimension of the materiality of tea – an aesthetic and affective side. Embodying senses, emotions and knowledge, the materials and the qualities of those materials articulate various cultural ideal(s), such as comfort, virtue, friendship and efficiency.
In sum, in the face of the rapid cultural transformation in Turkey, the once mundane çay becomes the special demli çay. The new tea implements and the changes in practices, along with underlying discourses of modernity, prompted a fracturing and splitting of the tea drinking practice. The arrival and adoption of the new demarcated brewed tea drinking as special, with associated discourses of leisurely sensory and social pleasures, apart from the ordinary and the takenfor-granted activity. The convenient tea drinking materials turned an untemporal, mundane and background activity into a temporal, involved and dedicated one. Teabags and electric pots signify tea drinking as fast, efficient and instrumental, in contrast to the demli çay, which is slow, messy and something for leisurely pleasure. Informants said that although they use teabags at work, they generally prefer demli çay in their leisure time. Having demli çay is associated with time that is not structured and hurried, when one can enjoy a carefree, friendly conversation with family and friends, a casual game of backgammon or unhasty people watching. Made in a slow-boiling double teapot, it almost literally serves to warm the cold new modern present, making it safe and liveable (see Ger 2005). Further, when juxtaposed with the novel mugs, plastic cups, teabags and electric kettles, the well-worn tulip-shaped tea glasses, loose tea and çaydanlık came to articulate and objectify that slowness, that special time, distinguishing it from the fast, normal and new time. Then, the cultural meanings associated with tea drinking practice in Turkey, such as hospitality, sociality and sensual aesthetics, become emphasized anew through the use of the conventional implements as opposed to the new ones. For some, demli çay is the blood of social life, an affirmation of a culture being left behind, and as such it bears a sense of nostalgia. But, generally, demli çay drinking is about participating positively in Turkish culture, performing it and re-actualizing present-day Turkishness through a reliably familiar activity, which is made special through the interaction of new and old objects and doings as people negotiate the new in relation to the commonplace, moving back and forth between the two as they go about their daily lives. Thus, commonplace objects when set against new alternatives can potentially gradually become extraordinary artefacts, actualizing and materializing slow and special times. Furthermore, untemporality can become special temporality as people oscillate between various temporal logics, culminating in a continuing cycle of ways of doing, which reflect idea(l)s and moralities.
Special and Ordinary Times
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