“Relying on Heaven” 53animated the work of scholars such as Sarah Whatmore, whose concern for how
plants and animals are “routinely caught up within multiple networks of social
life,” (2002, p. 9) is reflected by my account of tea production and especially
my interest in how the products of “natural farming” are transformed by the tea-
manufacturing process.
On the other hand, my interest in how ecological specificities influence the
afterlife of tea in its guise as a material and commodity links this chapter to debates
in cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology that have been gathered under
the banner of “new materialism” (Braun and Whatmore 2010; Coole and Frost
2010; Bolt and Barrett 2012) or united by a concern with “materiality” as a field of
inquiry (for example, Miller 2005; Ingold 2007; Holbraad 2011). From this work,
as well as that of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I derive an analytical orientation
towards the way that the expressivity of particular materials influences social
practices, aesthetic strategies, and political subjectivities. Crucial here are the
ways in which tea production depends on the tea maker’s enmeshment within the
scales and temporalities immanent to each tea as a material, such that an account
of the production process is necessarily also an account of a corporeal and affective
encounter between humans and materials. Finally, I share with Jensen and Blok
(2013) the view that the theoretical issues animating these fields of inquiry can be
placed in a fruitful dialogue with ontological and epistemological orders different
from those of the Euro-American societies from whence these debates issue. In this
light, let us return to the tea fields to see in more detail how the tea farmers of Beipu
take up questions of non-human agency and materiality in practice.
The tea field as “ecosystem”
As the seasons turn over into summer, Mr. Zhang visits his fields with increasing
frequency. Walking up and down each row, he checks not only the health of
his plants but also looks to confirm the arrival of an important, if not entirely
reliable, visitor to his fields: the “small green leaf hopper” (小綠葉蟬 xiao lü ye
chan; Jacobiasca Formosana Paoli, sometimes rendered in English as the “tea
jassid”). These cicadas, measuring just a few millimeters long, thrive in Taiwan’s
tea fields, their populations peaking in the early summer and again to a lesser
extent in late autumn (Tan 2009, pp. 149–50). Tea farmers often refer to them
as 浮塵子 fuchenzi—“floating dust”—a name indicative of both their size and
also their pervasiveness when their population is at its peak. Small green leaf
hoppers feed on tea plants, which is why in many parts of Taiwan they are treated
as a pest best eradicated (Lai 2005, p. 159). Producers of Oriental Beauty tea in
Beipu and neighboring tea-growing regions across Hsinchu, Miaoli, and Taoyuan
counties, however, count these insects as a crucial ally. The reason for this is
that the damage done to leaves that have suffered fuchenzi infestation results
in their producing tea with a radically different taste and fragrance than would
otherwise be obtained. Although research continues into the exact mechanism by
which this occurs, recent biochemical studies indicate that the damage induced
by the cicada’s feeding results in a defensive stress response on the part of the tea