Tea Practices In Mongolia: Female Power And Gendered Meanings From Birth To Death

It is both the genius and beauty of this book that the author has chosen to focus on tea as a lens though which to view some powerful verities about Mongolian community life. Tea may be no more than the dried and more or less oxidized leaf of a type of camellia, but during the last millennium or so, it has become one of the most powerful forces on earth...Recommended for research libraries.

Professor Victor Mair, Sinologist and specialist in Buddhist popular literature

Tea Practices in Mongolia is a scholarly monograph based on years of field work in Mongolia as well as original research in Asia, Europe and North America. It is an original and detailed ethnography of tea practices, female power and gendered meaning in Mongolia. It is also a welcome addition to the field by an African scholar of distinction who is one of the few Black African researchers in Central Asia.

This work makes two major contributions to the field of Mongolian studies and anthropology. This is a first detailed ethnography of tea practices in Mongolia, a country that does not produce tea and yet is a major tea consumer. The book tells the story of what people do with tea in Mongolia. The second contribution of this work is the description of female power and gendered meanings as the experience connected to tea practices. Female power is the experience of impacting on other people s acts from a gendered position of power. Through tea practices, which are ascribed to women, women construct gendered meanings that are a contribution to the cultural system in Mongolia. For a society that is predominantly described as patriarchal, this work brings to shore the experience of a female world of meanings different from the rest and yet that stands in complementarity with it.