--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: null library_document_id: "1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e" source_sha256: "a712c991e55c22829443a892128496c9497b5f722006d9dafadc200c93da70e2" pdf_physical_page_count: 236 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 180 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e?start=180&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e.md?start=180&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e.md?start=170&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e.md?start=190&limit=10" --- # Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=180 | PRINTED_PAGE=181 on a special tray made of white cedar wood that is also used to make offerings to the deities at temples and shrines. In the home these offerings are placed either on the god shelf or, more commonly, in the decorative alcove, as was the case in the Kuwaharas’ home. At the end of the New Year’s period (around 7 January) the pounded rice cakes have to be broken up and shared among either the community (when offered at religious institutions) or family members (in the home). As Yanagita (1951) highlighted in his definition of annual events, the sharing of food offerings is a key element of Japanese rituals of regeneration. Inside the Kuwaharas’ home some pieces of the kagamimochi were warmed up and eaten with soya sauce; others were integrated either in soups or in other everyday dishes. Some pieces were wrapped in foil and taken home by Mrs Kuwahara’s unmarried sister; others were given to an elderly neighbour who lives on her own. The fact that these offerings need to be consumed completely is rather problematic in contemporary Japan because family size continues to shrink, single-person households are on the increase, and neighbourhood networks through which surplus food was formerly shared have become weakened (Daniels in press). Moreover, even the larger families in my sample told me that they were not that keen about having to eat mochi for a considerable time after the New Year. While, some of the younger mothers, meanwhile, complained that their children did not like their taste or their texture. Seasonal and Commercial Rhythms 181 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=181 | PRINTED_PAGE=182 Despite these changes, kagami-mochi continue to be popular. During the last week of December 2002 large quantities were sold in a variety of sizes in department shops, supermarkets and local stores in the Kansai region. However, a particular kagami-mochi produced by the Sato Company, advertised in all leaflets collected, demonstrates how Japanese businesses actively create new ‘festive products’ in tune with changing consumer practices. Although at first glance this product looked identical to the offering I described above, it actually is a plastic replica. The genius of the product lies in the fact it is sold with a smaller edible rice cake that can be placed inside the mock-up. This enables consumers to display an elaborate offering without actually having to eat the large rice cakes. The price varies according to the size of the real rice cake inside: the smallest cake weighs only 132 gramme and costs 498 yen (about £2.50), while the largest 1980 gramme cake sells for 3.888 yen (about £18). An additional design feature is that the product is wrapped in a large box that can be transformed into the shape of a traditional serving tray for offerings, while additional pieces of paper can be draped over the box in order to re-create some of the auspicious elements of the original display. Commercial Rhythms of Domestic Consumption [S]easonal change forms a rhythm which is continually articulated and actively staged on the market, rather than one to which the market merely responds. Moeran and Skov 1997: 199 The above discussion about the Japanese New Year discloses how Japanese businesses have adapted to social and economic factors that have had a major effect on the yearly ritual cycle. However, the examples also demonstrate that the market actively articulates and stages seasonal consumption rhythms. This is evident in the creation of innovative products but also in the fact that businesses have been the driving force behind the invention of a number of new ‘annual events’. Famous examples are Christmas and Valentine’s Day, so-called ‘Western’ traditions that were re-invented by Japanese sweet companies. In Japan Christmas is associated with giving presents to small children, but even more so with love and romance between unmarried couples (see Moeran and Skov 1993). Christmas Day 2002 was spend by those in my sample in their late teens and twenties with boy/girlfriends, while families, many of whom had decorated the entrance to their home with a Christmas wreath, celebrated with consuming a Christmas Keiki, a strawberry sponge cake covered with whipped cream. Kimura reveals that these cakes were first produced by the Japanese sweet company Fujiya during the 1910s, but their consumption only became widespread during the 1960s (Kimura 2001: 104–140). 182 Inge Daniels ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=182 | PRINTED_PAGE=183 Another type of ‘festive food’ invented during the 1970s by Japanese companies producing Western-style sweets are Valentine’s Day chocolates (Ito 1995: 113–114). At first ‘love chocolates’ were given by women to men they were potentially interested in, but soon they turned into what most of my female informants dismissively called ‘obligation chocolates’. In other words, women ranging from Office Ladies to female students felt obliged to give chocolates to men in positions of power whom they were indebted to. On Valentine’s Day 2003, some women in my sample bought ‘obligation chocolates’, but many decided to make their own batch at home. The ubiquity of shop displays promoting key ingredients to make chocolates during the first two weeks of February highlights the popularity of this new practice. Some home-made chocolates were given to a special person, but most were consumed with the whole family at home. The changing practices surrounding Valentine’s chocolates illustrate how consumers might actively appropriate and transform ‘annual events’. Some aspects might become obsolete, while others might be (re)produced in different forms. Many new ‘festive foods’ such as cakes or chocolates resemble ‘traditional’ food offerings because they can be easily employed in the creation of domestic sociality either by dividing them up or because they already consist of a number of parts. However, the durability of old and new types of festive foods differs significantly. Christmas cakes covered with whipped cream and chocolates perish relatively quickly, while foods such as pounded rice cakes remain edible for a very long time. Preservation enabled women to take a deserved break from cooking during the festive period when shops were closed. Conclusion In previous studies, I have challenged the assumption that commercialization negates spiritual power by arguing that the commodification of Japanese religious forms enables democratic access as well as personal interaction with the Divine in the home (Daniels 2003). In this chapter, I have expanded on this argument by demonstrating how commerce might actually be an active force in facilitating but also invigorating a variety of spiritual practices. My ethnography reveals that in contemporary Japan the spiritual continues to be part of all domains of life.5 In times of need, most Japanese visit temples and shrines to ask deities for assistance, whether to recover from illness, pass exams or become prosperous in business. Seasonal and Commercial Rhythms 183 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=183 | PRINTED_PAGE=184 Moreover, most of my informants, of all ages, were aware that in order to avoid calamities they needed to engage in ritual practices at specific times of their life cycle, but also at particular times of the year during so-called ‘annual events’. In this chapter I have focused on the latter types of celebrations, which are linked with a ‘native’ notion of seasonality. Although the scale and intensity of the ritual calendar in contemporary Japan might be surprising to non-Japanese, participants in this study, like most Japanese, were aware that in order to have a happy, fulfilled life it is necessary to regularly create and re-create connections with other human as well as non-human entities. Importantly, although the New Year is celebrated by all, the number of other ‘annual events’ in which a particular family might actively participate depends on their specific circumstances. For those without deceased in their immediate family group, and more and more those without children, the annual cycle of events is far less dense. The overall decrease in family size, the scarcity of informal networks through which food and other goods can be redistributed, and, more broadly, the occurrence of blockages in the disposal of festive goods has also resulted in a decline in opportunities for social and spiritual sociality at the base of the ritual system of regeneration. Still, this chapter also hints at the development of innovative practices that enable new forms of sociality. The market plays a key role in this process. The focus of ‘annual events’ used to be on invigorating the local neighbourhood, but as school and work networks have gained in significance in peoples’ everyday lives, practices that celebrate the welfare of children, the celebration of intimate family life inside the home and business prosperity (Ito 1995) have taken centrestage. Ritual knowledge pertaining to specific ‘annual events’, once transferred through local communities and the extended families within, is now primarily managed by commercial businesses such as funeral and wedding companies as well as producers and distributors of advice literature. Moreover, through resourceful commodity promotion and innovation, local businesses have been able not only to adapt to and align themselves with, but also successfully to steer domestic rhythms of consumption. In the home the life cycles of commodities become closely connected with the embodied temporal and spatial rhythms of the inhabitants, whose biographies are thought to be directly influenced by larger cosmological principles. Notes 1. The majority of dwellings studied were inhabited by families, but the sample also includes university students, recently married couples and elderly people living alone. Like some 90 per cent of the country’s population (Taira 1993: 169), all considered themselves to belong to an undifferentiated Japanese middle class. However, in Japan, as elsewhere, social distinctions are constructed around consumption. This research was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science and the British Academy. Special thanks goes to my Japanese mentor Prof. Senda Minoru and all those who opened up their homes for me, but especially the family Kagemori, Kadonaga, Kuwahara, Matsui, Nakao, Nishiki, Sakai and Takahashi. 184 • Inge Daniels ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=184 | PRINTED_PAGE=185 2. Daruma are hollow, round wish dolls with no arms or legs, modeled after Bodhidharma, the founder and first patriarch of Zen. 3. Of the fifteen married women over 45 years old in my sample, eight became full-time housewives when they married, while only three continued to work throughout their married lives. The eight married women in their thirties and early forties who participated in my study continued to work after they married. In both cases, Japanese men continue to be largely absent in the home and are unlikely to share any domestic shores or play a role in childrearing 4. This included sending seasonal gifts to people one was indebted to as well as literally paying off credit card debts. 5. The Japanese religious landscape is diverse, but I am primarily concerned with the amalgamation of Shinto and sectarian Buddhism grounded in practice. References Seasonal and Commercial Rhythms 185 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=185 | PRINTED_PAGE=186 186 • Inge Daniels ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=186 | PRINTED_PAGE=187 Seasonal and Commercial Rhythms 187 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=187 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=188 | PRINTED_PAGE=12– / 189 Special and Ordinary Times Tea in Motion Güliz Ger and Olga Kravets Introduction A group of students accompanied us on a trip to Mardin, a historical city they had never seen before, and had a long day visiting numerous historical sites and climbing uphill. While taken by the beauty of the architecture and the scenery, everyone was reaching total fatigue, getting cold and wet on this rainy day and still trying to stick to a tight tour schedule. Suddenly, the tour guide appeared with a tray full of freshly brewed hot tea in small tulip-shaped glasses. All the faces shined, smiles appeared, hands wrapped around the glasses warmed and tired bodies were reinvigorated. A trip to an extraordinary place had turned into ordinary tourist fatigue in the course of six hours and the mundane tea returned the magic in a second. Even while on vacation, we count and calculate time. The special weekend to the ancient city of Mardin in Mesopotamia, an escape from routine class schedules, turned into a series of intentions, plans and to-do lists queued on a time line that we tried to follow despite the rain, the mud and the hills. By timing our activities and rushing, trying to keep to a schedule, we converted this special weekend time into a relatively ordinary one. Then we rediscovered a special time, a magical time while drinking tea and watching Mesopotamia stretching below us from the mountain top. In this case, the mundane tea interrupted the ordinary fast-paced life of that special day. The tea had not been planned; it was the spur-of-the moment thoughtfulness and hospitality of the guide. By drinking tea, we experienced a special time, purposeful, valid and enjoyable in and of itself, as well as feeling re-energized for the remaining activities of the day. How can a mundane practice such as tea drinking engender a special time and itself become an object of such a time? In this chapter we discuss how tea drinking objects and practices in Turkey bring us into particular relationships with time and how ordinary and special times are made and facilitated by tea drinking. We consider how the introduction of various objects of convenience changes the temporality of the tea drinking practice. We explore the micro-practices, routines and material implements of making and serving tea, as well as the material aspects of the tea itself. Through interviews and observations, we interrogate how materials in different contexts call upon particular sensibilities. We aim to understand how materials, idea(l)s and competences afford and/or impede different temporalities – ordinary and special times – in the tea drinking practice. In Turkey, tea used to be and sometimes still is drunk continuously ‘like water’ or even ‘instead of water’, and unlike the popular imagery of the Japanese or the British tea ceremony, it is an informal activity. It is this quality of being continuous or the untemporality of the ‘traditional’ tea drinking practice that we argue is critical in understanding how forms of convenience introduce changes into this practice. 12– 189 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=189 | PRINTED_PAGE=190 A special time can be defined or marked by extraordinariness, ceremonial rituals, magic and enchantment (Durkheim 1995 [1912]; Gronow and Warde 2001; Kozinets 2001), slowness as opposed to fastness (Petrini 2003), a process of warming (Ger 2005), a healing power (Belk et al. 1989) or an orientation to leisure, pleasure and contemplation (Petrini 2003; Stevens et al. 2003). Special times seem as if separate from the ordinary, largely taken-for-granted, therefore barely noticeable time. They are distinguished from ordinary times through particular discourses, sensibilities and objects. Objects not only serve as symbolic marks of particular times, but also bring us into particular relationships with time. Consider objects such as handmade laces that serve to warm the cold present of modern electronics (Ger 2005) or background music that ‘moves’ time-stilled boredom into a time of joy (Anderson 2004). In this way objects partake in the process of making ordinary and special times. Notably, unlike Durkheimian special time, which is objectified with extraordinary things and rituals, we argue that special times can also be objectified with mundane consumption, as in slow food, slow tea, hobbies, watching favourite sports games, reading a magazine, playing cards, lighting a cigarette, drinking alcoholic beverages, listening to music, watching television or doing Tai Chi (e.g. Jalas 2006 and in this volume; Nowotny 1994; Petrini 2003; Slater in this volume; Stevens et al. 2003). Tea Culture in Turkey: Untemporality and Unspatiality Turkey is more known for its coffee than tea. Yet, Turkish people drink more tea than coffee. Fifty-two per cent of their non-alcoholic beverage consumption is tea. Turkey tops the charts in per capita tea consumption (2.5 kg compared to the UK’s 2.1 kg in 2004).This high rate is due to the availability of places to consume tea, social practices and norms, and domestic production along the Black Sea coast. Turkey is the second largest tea market in the world (after India), with a total tea volume of about 180,000 tonnes in 2004. Indeed, tea is served anytime – for breakfast, before and after meals – and everywhere – offices, hospitals, buses, trains, cafés, restaurants and homes. In the streets, one can see a çaycl (tea-waiter) making his continuous tea delivery rounds, carrying tea-filled tulip-shaped glasses on saucers with tiny teaspoons and cubes of sugar on a silver platter that hangs from silver chains. In airports, representations of such ‘Turkish tea’ welcome international guests, who may well be served teabag teas in mugs in the upscale establishments of the airport (see Figure 12.1). In many workplaces, there is often a person whose official duty is to make hot tea available to employees at all times. In many homes, a çaydanlık (double teapot) is continuously boiling, so that some steaming hot tea is ready all the time. Our informants noted that tea drinking is ‘a natural part of daily life’, ‘any time is a good time for tea’ and ‘you can get tea everywhere, in all places’. 190 Güliz Ger and Olga Kravets 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e.md?start=190&limit=10)