Zoom Link:
https://unilu.zoom.us/j/96980410248?pwd=WUVJcVZzVTgxRWpTOWtjSWp0QnMzUT09

Meeting ID: 969 8041 0248
Passcode: 500274

“It All Depends on the Market”: Tasting and Pricing Ceylon Tea

Popular wisdom holds that “there’s no accounting for taste.” Yet taste is a slippery concept: it is a bodily sense, but also an impression; it is natural, but has social repercussions; individual, yet deeply relational in its demands for assent: therein lies the fundamental paradox inherent in the judgment of taste, namely its ostensibly subjective nature and simultaneous claim to objectivity. In this talk, based on ethnographic research across the Sri Lankan tea industry, I explore how tea professionals navigate this paradox in their practice: Ceylon tea is traded via a weekly outcry auction, prior to which, brokers and buyers meticulously taste and value various tea-lots pending sale. In the process, tea tasting translates sensory input into economic value, blurring the line between qualification and quantification and transforming the tasted object into a market entity. I examine the epistemological ramifications of this mutual production of taste standards and market rationality and argue that by invoking calculative reason, industry actors are able to enact a contingent resolution to the conundrum of taste.