![]() ![]() The touching point? All of us belong to equally interesting and worth knowing cultural contexts. Some of us carefully brew our coffees and then read the future in the sediments, some of us prefer the steam to go mercilessly through the grains, straight to the cup. ![]() That counts as the abyss between Chinese and European thinking celebrated by François Jullien in De l’Être au Vivre, or the fact that some of us write from left to right, and others do from right to left. That is the same to say that no cultural manifestations are perfect (or “complete”): they are all different, and they will all provide diverse angles of facing reality. And yes, I always pull the rope to that side.įor me, all coffee-making methods have advantages and disadvantages, as do all the research methods I’ll be exposing to my second years throughout this term. Intolerance - an “unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behaviour that differ from one’s own” - starts essentially at that moment when it is easier to say “that’s too different”, and just rejecting it, rather than trying to at least understand it. So more than a privileged place to observe the cultural difference, coffee is also one of the easiest cultural sites to observe how intolerance is formed. It is true that methods of brewing coffee are a privileged spot to observe cultural meaning in different countries and communities: from simple instant coffee - a commonplace in big cities where people are busy and time is money, not allowing a lot of time for “fancy” coffee - to the most ritualistic variations - such as the traditional Turkish coffee, where the drinking a cup is part of ceremony that ends with someone reading your future in the coffee sediments - making a coffee and drinking it is a metonymic (a part that counts as the whole) manifestation of a particular culture.īut the thing starts to get real crazy when you see the parts involved in a discussion to get personal about their coffee - and that also serves the purpose to show that, in research (as in the real thing we’re actually talking about), people also go crazy about which coffee is the best, the qualitative or quantitative one… I normally ask the students to explain how coffee is done in their culture, and their reactions to the different ways of making coffee usually are “but that’s complicated!” or “but that makes bad coffee!!” It was during those workshops - and the passionate discussions it rouses every single time - that I came to realise the coffee issue is a more complex one than I have accounted. (This is a very biassed explanation, designed to show that by doing research using a methodology you can achieve fancier results *wink*). I present it to my students that the different ways of brewing coffee - from the classic-loud-explosive mocha, to the crazy egg coffee in the video - are methods: established chains of steps used to achieve something while, if you take a recipe that needs more than just a shot of coffee, such as a Frappuccino, you’re actually resorting to a methodology: a combination of different methods used to achieve something. That is the reason why, when I have to give a difficult class in my courses, the one that involves clearing the difference between method and methodology, I resort to this wonderful, globally diffused beverage. But everyone, at the very least, knows what that is. Call me a racist - every person seriously studying cultural meaning dances in the edge of that abyss - but I couldn’t help remarking: “That was such an Italian way of making coffee.” He smiled and nodded.Įveryone drinks coffee. I was doing my dishes while the scientific experiment took place and, not exactly to my surprise, you know the coffee is ready when you hear a sort of bubbly loud explosion, which was celebrated with clapping and some loud “woooaaa!”. Since I saw this video in 2014, it caused me sleepless nights asking myself the question: what do the ways of making coffee reveal about the people who’ll drink it?Īctually, the reason I dig that video from oblivion - and with it, the question - was an adventure in my kitchen: watching my Italian housemate executing a meticulous task of making his newly purchased mocha to work. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |