62 Scott Writer
more often possess the “fresh and delicate fragrance” (清香 qingxiang) typical
of the lightly oxidized oolong teas that dominate Taiwan’s domestic tea market.
Thus, the way of ecologically engaged tea making that I have characterized as
relying on heaven traces a field of practice and disputation that chimes in both
ontological and economic keys.
For my informants, as producers and sellers of Oriental Beauty, the trajectory
of each tea is one that draws together not just the ecological and technological
agencies mobilized in the tea field and factory but also those operations that invest
each tea with economic value. The products of “heaven” accrue economic value
only if their naturally endowed qualities are elicited and transformed by the hands
of the tea producer, who makes a corresponding claim for his or her technical
mastery. In turn, if each tea maker’s distinctive way of recognizing and configuring
tastes, smells, and textures accrues some sense of personalization to each tea, it
also constitutes a way of positioning tea as a product in the market. A final example
from Mr. Lin helps to clarify these relations. Speaking of autumn tea, usually
considered an inferior crop due to that season’s lower rainfall, he suggests that
If you adopt as your model lightly-fermented “competition” tea,^13 then
autumn tea will definitely be very bitter and astringent, and you won’t be able
to sell it for much, and with Taiwan’s labor costs being what they are, you
simply won’t make a profit. But if you process this tea with [a higher degree
of] fermentation, you can still produce some pretty nice tea. And if the tea is
good, then you can definitely make a profit.Here, the “ecological” contingencies of the tea’s making are transformed
using the technical procedures of the tea factory in order to address contingencies
of market relations. The production of desired qualities or traits of expression
freights the material from a purely “ontological” frame into a frame that is at least
partly “economic.” In this sense, the dynamic of materiality specific to oxidation
serves as a way to translate material qualities of raw tea such that the tea farmer
can enact a new relation between taste and value, all the while retaining, in the
sense that tea’s taste remains immanent to its ecologically conditioned materiality,
each tea’s relationship with an abstract “nature.”
The presence of particular tastes signifies to tea makers and drinkers alike both
the “ecological” singularities of particular places and the quality of the relationships
that hold between that place, the tea it produces, and the tea maker who has
produced it. In this sense, Oriental Beauty (and eco-teas more generally) serve as
indices of a productive but highly contingent affiliation between “heaven,” “earth,”
and “human” through which each achieves its form of actualization. Things are not
rendered mute (nor infinitely mutable) in the face of masterful human agency, just
as human agency is not rendered passive and inconsequential by the vitality of the
non-human world. Rather, careful processes of accommodation entangle the life of
Oriental Beauty within “ecological,” technical, and practical forms of agency, in the
process elaborating the immanent qualities of each tea and equipping it to travel in
ever-wider circulations of affective and economic exchange. When “heaven” and