Care and potentiality in high-mountain Oolong tea-making in Taiwan: co-flourishing of tea makers and tea leaves

This paper articulates an embodied approach to the concept “care,” drawing on Heidegger’s existential ontology, nature-culture co-becoming in indigenous studies, new materiality’s concern for non-human agencies, and Daoist wuwei (non-striving) awareness of agential unfolding. Instead of a transactional view of care for actors in interdependent relations, I approach care as existential mode of being, or Heidegger’s Dasein, reaching out sincerely for potentiality of one’s own as well as of things with which one interacts in the world, acting in accord with things’ own dynamic unfolding in a process of co-birthing and co-growth. These perspectives inform my analyses of oolong tea-making based on ethnographic field research in Taiwan’s Ali Mountain region. I will focus on the crucial tea-making process, tea-leaf’s withering and oxidization, which largely determines the tea’s aroma and flavor. The process involves teamakers’ careful and sustained attention to the tea leaves’ dynamic changes, their ongoing sensory engagement of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. Through care, tea makers both activate the tea-leaf’s transformative potentials in aroma and taste, as well as make meaning and transform themselves. This paper highlights the approach to nature-culture relationship as an embodied and generative process, leading to the co-flourishing in potentiality of humans and non-humans.