Paper short abstract:

This paper is concerned with emptiness as gap between social and economic value in the status of tea within the local economy of a former collective farm in Georgia: from the centre of economy, to something devoid of economic value retaining social and symbolic value.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, the workers of the Nasakirali sovchoz - a collective farm in Georgia that exported tea -, were faced with the urgent need to find an alternative source of income. At first, they experimented with goat rearing. Later, conflicts among local households led to abandoning this in favor of hazelnut production. While hazelnuts epitomize globalized capitalism (see Nutella), the tea plantations were left abandoned.

The emptiness with which this paper is concerned is to do with the radical reconfiguration of the status of tea within the local economy: from the centre of economy and work, it became devoid of economic value, while retaining its social and symbolic value. At the same time as the involution of the means of production (from mechanized to manual harvesting), there was an inverse shift in tea gathering, from an activity of work to leisure. This ethnography documents the polyhedral, all-pervasive nature of tea-talk: simultaneously a thing, a beverage, a plant, and the measure of social relationships, where emptiness is the gap between social and economic value.

This points to tea's declined economic career - the perfect symbol of the fallen dreams of socialist control over man and nature, tea plantations have reverted to quasi-natural space. This paper thus interprets such apparent absences in the space of tea (as plantations in the environment, as well as idiom-beverage in individuals' lives), through a Lefebvrian recollection of what is dissimulated in them in terms of power relations.