Paper short abstract:

Focusing on how "Ceylon Tea" brokers are trained in tea-tasting, this paper moves beyond the apprenticeship model and challenges the traditional binary opposition between expertise and skill. Rather than embodied skill, taste becomes expert knowledge, whereas the market is learned tacitly.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork among "Ceylon Tea" brokers and buyers -the Sri Lankan tea industry’s de facto tea-tasters, this paper asks what a training in tea-tasting entails. Ceylon tea is traded through an outcry auction system and tea tasting is a crucial component in the valuation of tea. Thus, tasting and price speculation go hand in hand, blurring the boundaries between aesthetic and economic knowledge and practice. During my fieldwork at one of Colombo's major Ceylon tea brokering firms, training involved the systematic and repetitive tasting of different tea samples bound for auction, as well as a ubiquitous corporate pedagogy in calculative reason: the tea market was equally –if not more– important to the tea itself, the latter treated as a material given of sorts, to be precisely learned via the act of tasting, whereas the former was imparted tacitly through the trainee's participation in the network of relationships and discourses that sustain the trade. I find this a productive reversal of the skill-expertise binary: rather than embodied skill, taste becomes a form of expertise, whereas the market is taught tacitly and relationally, akin to a craft. Paying close attention to how tea tasters are trained, I hope to move beyond the apprenticeship model of training and to transcend the binary oppositions between expertise and skill, hand and mind, knowledge and practice. In addition to aspiring tea tasters and senior stakeholders, my observations include some auto-ethnographic notes on training as a component of conducting fieldwork and participant observation.