Browsing by Author "Eklund, Rilla"

Tea came to Finland almost 400 years ago, but the historical pathways towards the situation of tea in the country in recent years were not straightforward. Finland is still a country of coffee drinkers, one of the biggest per-capita consumers of coffee globally. In that light the consumption of relatively luxurious tea qualities is something significant worth studying sociologically. The aims of this study are to see what kind of meanings tea has in tea enthusiasts´ narratives and to analyze the larger themes that are derived from the data gathered. The research questions in this study are: How do tea professionals and enthusiasts narrate their identities in relation to tea? What kind of meanings do tea professionals and tea enthusiasts in the Helsinki tea scene give to tea drinking? The methodological approach to the research was designed to allow gathered drive the developing theory. I interviewed eight central people in the Helsinki tea scene, all of them tea-related and some of them tea shop owners. The research process was inductive, meaning that theory is driven from the data and the phenomenological aspects of tea were the main focus of the study The data showed that tea is first and foremost a sensorial pleasure for these interviewees. Semi-structured interviews were my main method of data-collection. The interviews were ethnographical, as many of them were collected in the field. Narrative analysis was to bring out the significance of the data. The main finding of this study was that spirituality is strongly linked to tea drinking. The motives to drink tea were explained through embodied rituals that have the capacity to carry the everyday-life. The rituals of tea drinking are important because tea is a whole culture with individual meanings that might have been passed on in childhood or learned in adulthood. Another significant observation is the perceived elitism surrounding tea drinkers and how taste differences were downplayed by interviewees to seem open and tolerant towards all tastes. The narratives also implied that there is hierarchy among tea drinkers and that image is upheld by both tea people and coffee drinkers.