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Learning to Be a Tea Art Practitioner: An Anthropologist’s Self-Reflection
Shuenn-Der Yu
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2014.06.004
Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
Becoming a tea art practitioner, or charen (茶人), involves cultivation of body and mind. This paper attempts to document the long-term process of bodily and mindful cultivation from an anthropological, participant-observation, and self-reflective point of view. I will describe my experiences from entering the world of Taiwanese tea art through learning the great variety of teas and the techniques for making them, designing my own tea sets, and performing in tea gatherings. This learning process has gone well beyond what is required of a researcher, or a good observer, because it has not only allowed me to understand, interpret, and analyze the aesthetics and ritual of Taiwanese tea art but it has also required that I “designs” or be creative in presenting Taiwanese tea art to my own cultural members. This substantially changes my status from the objective observer my profession requires, to a dedicated performer and even a designer/creator of my own culture. My self-reflexivity in this process points to not only methodological issues but also theoretical ones, including recent academic interest in materiality, cultural performance, lifestyle, bodily discipline, and the senses. Through self-reflection, I intends to reveal connections among them.
Taiwan, tea art, bodily cultivation, self-reflexivity, sense-scape
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