‘Guaranteed contraband’: a cultural biography of kaçak tea in Gaziantep’s Iranian bazaar

ABSTRACT

Every year, 80,000 tons of kaçak (contraband) tea, primarily of Sri Lankan and Iranian origin, makes its way to the markets of Turkey – itself the fifth-largest producer of tea in the world. While most kaçak commodities in Turkey face derision because they are understood as low-quality approximations of their formal counterparts, of dubious origins and lacking any guarantees of quality, many consumers of kaçak tea valorize it as an emblem of superior taste. Rather than being a target of derision, kaçak tea takes shape in its consumers ‘thin-waisted’ glasses as a sign of distinction. In this inverted hierarchy of values, the domestic produce is the commodity that is mocked for its weak flavor and inflated price, while the informal contraband commodity is prized. By tracing the cultural biography of kaçak tea, this essay advances a historically and geographically networked understanding of commoditization across the formal/informal divide. Studying ‘guaranteed contraband’ tea across Turkey and Iran proves productive for understanding how people negotiate and build dynamic hierarchies of taste, while transforming the confines of the formal national economy into new thresholds of conversion that draw upon formalization of informality as well as informalization of formality in market formation.

KEYWORDS:

• Commodity
• contraband
• fugitivity
• Iran
• tea
• Turkey

Acknowledgments

Research grants from Die Zeit Stiftung Bucerius Fellowship in Migration Studies, Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard’s Anthropology Department, Northwestern’s Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program and the Wenner-Gren Foundation funded my research. The Wenner-Gren Foundation’s international workshop grant afforded me further research and writing time in Turkey. All translations from Turkish, Azeri, and Persian are mine. All transliterations follow a simplified version of IJMES guidelines. For their generous comments on this essay in its various iterations, I am grateful to Ayfer Bartu Candan, Adia Benton, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Fırat Bozçalı, Ergin Bulut, Başak Can, Seçil Dağtaş, Haydar Darıcı, Darcie DeAngelo, Alireza Doostdar, Julia Elyachar, Sinan Erensü, Sarah Fredricks, Daniella Gandolfo, Ghenwa Hayek, Angie Heo, Ipek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu, Darryl Li, Elham Mireshghi, Zeynep Oğuz, Kerem Öktem, Cihan Tekay, Nazan Üstündağ. I also thank audience members at Northwestern University and Max Planck Institut für ethnologische Forschung, as well as workshop participants at Mekanda Adalet Derneği for their engagement. The generous comments of the anonymous Journal of Cultural Economy reviewers greatly strengthened my analysis. Philip Roscoe and Liz McFall generously guided the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Turkey’s Ministry of Trade statistics and archives, particularly between 2015 and 2017, show an uptick up to 130,000 tons in 2015, in the amount of contraband tea entering Turkey (2016). Some significant operations of the Customs Defense Units, confiscating as much as 16,000 tons of contraband tea, are made public on the Ministry website, whereby Gaziantep itself features prominently (2013a, 2013b, 2014) as a major hub of delivery, storage and distribution in the early 2010s (Önçirak 2019). When we read these numbers alongside those provided in the 2022 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations report titled international tea market, as I explicate in the last third of the article, domestic supply in Turkey does not meet the demand – which puts the market share of kaçak tea as a conservative estimate at 35–40%.

2 On informal economy, see Castell and Portes (1989), de Soto (1989), Hart (1987), Lindeman (2012), Lomnitz (1988).

3 All names given in this article, except for public figures, are pseudonyms, to protect interlocutors’ anonymity.

4 In these follow-up interviews during the pandemic I often found myself along with my interlocutors, trying to grasp the web of actors, companies, and informal supply chains in motion in highly politicized circuits of contraband tea in Turkey, while the leader in power is known to distribute tea to flood victims, and opposition leaders threaten to burn all the contraband tea in town squares. Following my Gaziantep interlocutors’ lead into this highly contested terrain built around buying, selling and consuming tea led me both to the idea of cultural biography conceptually, and empirically, to the Sri Lanka Tea commission advertisements.

5 Kopytoff’s choice of the term ‘cultural biography’, rather than Appadurai’s ‘social life of things’ (1986), opens up the possibility of analyzing the kaçak status of tea case in cultural rather than social terms. In this framing, to contrast the approaches of Appadurai and Kopytoff, the social life of contraband tea with its tournaments might have different and multiple cultural lives across sites of production, distribution and consumption that span cross Sri Lanka, Iran and Turkey before it meets its buyers in a Gaziantep bazaar.

6 On the concept of ‘form’ in his theory of a general economy, see Georges Bataille (1985, 31; 1988). For an erudite analysis that deploys the Bataille framework to analyze a day in the office of formalization tasked to tackle unlicensed construction and settlement in a Lima market in Peru, see Gandolfo (2013, 286). Gandolfo shows how ‘simplifying the law, in its aim to bring state regulation closer to the realities of informal vendors, produce, rather, the informalization of the legal and bureaucratic apparatus’ (296). Here, taking my cues from the inverted picture of contraband tea in Turkey, I am interested in looking at the flip side of what Gandolfo terms as informalization of bureaucracy and by extension the boundaries of a formal economy: namely both formalization of informality and informalization of formality are at play in the cultural biography of kaçak tea in Antep.

7 Following Mitchell, I understand the economy as what economists construct and perform, and in so doing reiterate the representation as if real. That construction encompasses ‘the totality of the relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region [that] arose in a mid-twentieth-century crisis of economic representation’ (1998, 82–101). For an anthropology of the national economy that grapples with the materiality of commoditization beyond market devices of an always already formal economy, see Appel (2017, 2023). Both Mitchell and Appel interrogate the premised but not analyzed scaling of that constructed ‘economy’ to the nation-state as a double movement of inclusion and exclusion. In tracing the transformation of the tea market in Turkey from monopolization, through neoliberal restructuring and privatization, here I suggest looking at the underbelly of formal supply chains, to see that marketization of tea has been a blend itself: a blend of formality and informality.

8 The broad literature on value and valuation in sociology of formal markets is beyond the scope of this ethnographic account (Beckert and Aspers 2011; Cochoy 2008; Helgesson and Kjellberg 2013). In that sociologically framed terrain, I follow Çalışkan and Callon (2010) on the mutually constitutive relationship between circulation and valuation of goods. Çalışkan and Callon (2010) write ‘things circulate because they are valued, and it is because they are valued that they become goods. Circulation consists of an essentially dual process involving continuous requalification and valuation. This explains why the materiality of things matter’ (389). And if I may add, this study of tea in Turkey, distinct cultural biographies of the very same good is part and parcel of how that materiality of things matter socio-culturally with a keen eye on power (Mintz 1986). Such a transposition that centers circulation and consumption and their socialities by way of contraband commodity trade, rather than reiterative machinations of market devices, enables me to analyze making of commodities and markets, specifically those of tea in Turkey can be analyzed in Bataille-inspired general economy, whereby traders and consumers of kaçak tea crisscross and blend formal and informal practices in those market formations.

9 Callon (1998) first identified as ‘economization’ himself, and later alongside Çalışkan elaborated on, the processual term to ‘denote the processes that constitute the behaviors, organizations, institutions and, more generally, the objects in a particular society which are tentatively and often controversially qualified, by scholars and/or lay people, as “economic”. The construction of action(-ization) into the word implies that the economy is an achievement rather than a starting point or a pre-existing reality that can simply be revealed and acted upon’ (Emphasis added, Callon and Çalışkan 2009, 370). Analytically prioritizing the study of market exchange itself and of market-forming agents is made possible by a methodological orientation that studies up the economists to understand processes that build up the economy and the realm of the economic. As Pellandini-Simányi (2016) pointed out, this ‘marketization’ research agenda leaves the allegedly non-market agendas and the broader contexts of partially financialized markets understudied (571). Here I build on Pellandini-Simanyi’s line of argument to suggest that in its study of market formation, the same economization-as-marketization program smuggles in the formality of such markets as an uninterrogated premise and cause of such formations rather than their contingent and incomplete effects. Otherwise, I suggest the action-ization runs the risk of reducing performativity of the economic to the reiteration of its theory by economists themselves.

10 For an explication of the concept of ‘invented scarcity,’ see Scheper-Hughes (2000).

11 While ‘taste’ and its social hierarchies exist in a mutually constitutive relationship with production in Bourdieu’s theory, he locates the possibility of change in this hierarchy of taste in an interactive model across production, circulation and consumption. Changes in circulation and consumption induce changes in production, and vice versa (231) and as such provide the social conditions of possibility for taste (Voß and Guggenheim 2019; Warde 2008).

12 Mazandaran is a province of Iran on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. In addition to its distinguished cuisine, most tea is cultivated in Iran comes from Mazandaran or neighboring Gilan.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Grant Number International Fieldwork Grant].