Hence, a mundane practice such as tea drinking can become special when new materials along with the associated discourses of modern convenience encounter and defamiliarize a taken-for-granted practice. When there are choices, decisions to be made, the old ordinary also generates its legitimizing discourse: sensory aesthetics, hospitality, sociality – the morality of slow time. Moreover, a reflexive taking of time marks a particular break as special and sets it apart. However, the distinction between the temporalities of ordinary and special is contingent at best. These times are dialogic and constantly interrupt each other. Special times, along with their accompanying objects, punctuate and exist within and in relation to the linear flow of fast time; they sustain it by making it liveable. While both the transient Carnival and the transcendental Christmas are special times, the interaction between the two is akin to the oscillation between the special and ordinary tea times in Turkey (Miller 1994). The interplay and the movement between the ordinary and special times are more imperative than the specifics of any one of them.
Tea drinking practices in Turkey reveal some interesting insights. We see that, in addition to new things and new doings being framed by their relation to the old (Shove in this volume), old things and doings are also framed by their relation to the new. As the new is framed as the modern, clean and efficient, the old gets to be framed as the slow, experiential and special, in turn making the new rather ordinary. What was unseen, always there, and mute now becomes marked, elected and vocal, hence special. While the new makes the old visible, the old refracts through the new in multiple ways (electric double kettles, different designs of glasses) and thereby becomes visible. While the new marks and frames the old, the natural, the normal, the old marks and frames the new. Our study of tea practices in Turkey makes us realize that ‘what does the old do?’ is a question as important as ‘what does the new do?’
Secondly, we suggest that convenience technologies change the organization of time, but in multiple directions rather than one. Shove (2003) argues that convenience technologies have contributed to a flexible organization of time. For example, washing moved from ‘laundry days’ to fragmented moments of loading and unloading washing machines and thus disrupted collective rhythms. In the case of the convenient teabags, the reverse happens: tea drinking moves from any time to designated times that are consistent with the collective rhythms of leisure and work times.
Finally, akin to Eliade’s (1957) observation that profane time made sacred time possible and vice versa, we find that ordered in time tea drinking associated with teabags turned a common way of tea drinking in Turkey into a special activity, set apart in time. Perhaps, here ‘the divine’ is the Turkish culture, its values such as sociality and hospitality, its artefacts such as the ince belli, and its institutions such as the family. Furthermore, it is ‘largely the history of the devaluations and the revaluations which make up the process of the expression of the sacred’ (Eliade 1957: 25). In this case, the role of the material objects in ‘the devaluations and the revaluations’, thus in producing special and ordinary times, is of particular interest. It is the interaction of the new and the old tea drinking materials, discourses around their use, and associated time and ways of doing that afforded rediscovering and re-evaluating the now-special times in the formerly mundane.
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Güliz Ger and Olga Kravets