Photo: Rodanthi Tzanelli, Leeds
Coffee
reading’s folk origins
I never thought that my childhood’s
magic would be stolen by a coffee machine. Like many other modern people with
little time to waste and much accumulated taste for conspicuous consumption of
technology, I tend to start my day with latte or cappuccino produced out of
cachet-measured portions of milk and coffee. Nostalgia or decades of cultivated
taste do nevertheless dictate the occasional return to cups of Turkish coffee (corrected
to ‘Greek’ or even ‘Cypriot coffee’ by the ardent culinary nationalist who
refuses to acknowledge that such nominations do not correspond to the produce’s
hazy Arabic origins). Humorously, sentiment brings back sediment – and this
allows space for a return to the disreputable rituals of fortune telling
disowned by the Orthodox Church a long time ago.
In closed communities such as that
in which I born (a not so ‘closed’ or ‘open’ one in the current conditions of
cultural globalisation, bilateral economic migration and technological
transnationalism), fortune telling was habitually entrusted to ‘readers’ of
one’s destiny who were older and more experienced than younger generations.
These readers are today replaced by machines. To put this in appropriate
scholarly jargon, a techne (= art)
born amidst feminine kitchenalia
(coffee prepared, drank and read in household kitchens) is replaced by
inanimate technology. Still coffee reading necessitated technical components
and processes (‘rituals’): it could not be performed without coffee sediment
and a ‘knowledgeable’ fortune teller; it could not be done at any time of the
week (some days were not appropriate, especially for the religious reader who
had somehow managed to merge sorcery with Christian rules); nor could it be
transmitted to a stranger.
Photo: Rodanthi Tzanelli, Viyan (Roundhay), Leeds
Pop
hermeneutics: Soothsayer’s hype sociality
My latte gets cold now that we get
to the hot aspects of fortune telling – for, letting a reader look into your
destiny presupposed trust. Friends
met and shared secrets and household worries; gossiped over other people’s
affairs; and read the coffee. In the same context readers could set up their
own ‘masterclass’ for apprentice readers (I too became initiated in coffee
symbolism by my grandmother on such an occasion).
Trust was the front prerequisite
for the techne of coffee reading:
visitors had to trust, readers would be entrusted with their affairs. In
today’s globalised environments of the circus (complete with a card-reader’s
Orientalia and crystal balls) and the Internet (reading is offered to web
surfers for a fee), trust is replaced with credit(able) CVs (readers post their
credentials on their respective website to attract customers). For
non-believers, there is no question of trust, only credulity and stupidity on
the part of the customer, who is conned into parting with their money. But this
is an issue I reserve for future analysis. Suffice to mention here that
traditional and (post-) modern readers share a flair for hermeneutics: it is
vital to both facilitate trust and interpretation of their interlocutor’s
circumstances. But coffee readers in particular used to read their visitor’s
fortune out of a repository of knowledge about local gossip and personal
affairs as much as they would draw upon cues provided by the visitor’s current
emotional state. If one wanted to be a successful and reputed fortune teller
they had to be either a good gossip, or a psychoanalytical interpreter or
(preferably) both. Either way, a soothsayer had to display a propensity to
constant socialisation in the community.
Orientalist discourse is embedded
in this background by a particular sociological hermeneutics. So, in Merton and
Barber’s (2006) study of serendipity we learn that Victorians first discussed
the term’s etymology by reference to the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose
heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of
things they were not in quest of" (pp. 2-3). The word ironically
reiterates coffee reading’s ambiguous Oriental journey, passing though Arad
traders’ inflections of as diverse country mythologies as those of India
(Kerala or Cheranadu) and Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Not only does such an etymological
journey reveal hermeneutics as gendered but also racialises them ‘along the
way’, as it were.
Coincidence,
contingency, serendipity
I stopped reading coffee in my
Master’s years when international friends and classmates began to take my
credentials seriously. About the same time a friend experienced personal
grievance wrongly connected to my ‘successful forecasting’ of a terrible event.
Moreover, I had already begun to declare God and demons dead. Magic had
decisively and irrevocably transformed into an object of scientific study. My
fascination with custom was now an attraction to scientific paradigm in the purest
Kuhnian terms (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 13 August 2004), without
it ever becoming detached from the custom of household reciprocities
nevertheless (Polanyi 1944): humans – mostly women – read destinies for reasons
I am yet to fully comprehend.
What makes perfectly reasonable
people turn to sorcery to learn about their future? Is it madness propelled by
grief and social pressure? More importantly, however, why do people constantly
interpret events a posteriori in ways
that give credit to someone else’s hobby (or these days, shadowy business)? A rather disconcerting, but fascinating, link
to science and technology is readily available in anthropological studies of
magic and sociological theorisation of serendipity. Whereas the former (magic)
is constitutive of the reproduction or consolidation of social order
(Evans-Pritchard 1940, 1956), the latter (serendipity) works as a mechanism of
moderating interpretation, controlling how this is done plausibly so as not to
implode. Simply put, you read coffee out of current events to survey society’s
particular state – e.g. who does what and why and under whose jurisdiction
(human for things such as, say, arguments or divorce, Godly for life or death).
Here I concur with the pop repository of Wikipedia (2013),
which explains that
The original definition of
serendipity, often missed in modern discussions of the word, is the need for an
individual to be "sagacious" enough to link together apparently
innocuous facts in order to come to a valuable conclusion. Indeed, the
scientific method, and the scientists themselves, can be prepared in many other
ways to harness luck and make discoveries.
This discourse suggests that
forecasting social events always walks a fine line between natural phenomena –
hence their phenomenological descriptors – and technological invention – hence
human intervention on the natural course of things. I suspect fortune telling
is a serendipitous activity that modulates social chaos, pronouncing that there
is middle ground between natural positivism and human interpretation that
claims poetic licence and ‘messes social things’ up.
PS: Any connection to medical research is unwelcome.
REFERENCES
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1940) The
Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E.(1956) Nuer
Religion. Oxford: Clarendon.
Merton, R.K. and Barber, E. (2006) The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological
Semantics and the Sociology of Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Polanyi, K. (1944) The
Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (13 August 2004)‘Thomas
Kuhn’. Available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/
