Tea Practices in Mongolia : A Field of Female Power and Gendered Meanings

Abstract

This article provides a description and analysis of tea practices in Mongolia that disclose features of female power and gendered meanings relevant in social and cultural processes. I suggest that women’s gendered experiences generate a differentiated power that they engage in social actions. Moreover, in tea practices women invoke meanings that are also differentiated by their gendered experience and the powerful position of meaning construction. Female power, female identity, and gendered meanings are distinctive in the complex whole of cultural and social processes in Mongolia. This article contributes to the understudied field of tea practices in a country that does not grow tea, yet whose inhabitants have turned this commodity into an icon of social and cultural processes in everyday life.