Introduction
Chris Hann is a British social anthropologist whose fieldwork and writings have shaped multiple generations of scholars working on Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Black Sea region. A founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Hann has contributed significantly to economic anthropology, the comparative study of socialism and post-socialism, and the anthropology of Eurasia. His early work in the 1980s on tea production in Rize, Turkey, culminated in the monograph Tea and the Domestication of the Turkish State (Hann Reference Hann1990), one of the first anthropological accounts to use a single commodity to explore state formation, rural modernization, and everyday life in Turkey. In this conversation, we revisit that influential study and reflect on its enduring relevance in light of ongoing debates about agriculture, identity, and political economy.
Zafer Yenal: Your 1990 monograph Tea and the Domestication of the Turkish State (Hann Reference Hann 1990 ) remains a unique and early attempt to analyze the making of modern Turkey through a single commodity. Could you share how you first became interested in tea production and in the eastern Black Sea region as a field site?
Chris Hann : After rural projects in Hungary and Poland, I wanted to undertake a comparative study in a capitalist country. My wife Ildikó Bellér-Hann graduated in 1981 in Turkish Studies in Budapest, so Turkey was an attractive option for both of us. I was a research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. In literature searches in English, I soon stumbled upon the recent introduction of tea in Rize. Despite martial law, it was not difficult to obtain a government scholarship for the academic year 1982–1983. We spent the winter in Ankara, where I was formally assigned to the Department of Agricultural Economics at the Faculty of Agriculture. Colleagues there were unfailingly helpful, but I spent more time at the Middle East Technical University where I took a class in Turkish and interacted with several sociologists working on rural society, notably Bahattin Akşit. I had an introduction to these scholars from the anthropologist Paul Stirling, whom I had met briefly at the University of Kent. Everyone agreed that a social science investigation of tea on the east Black Sea coast could make an original contribution to ongoing debates, national and international. The work of Çağlar Keyder was already influential in the peasant studies literature. My good luck continued after moving to Rize in the spring. Officials at Çaykur were supportive. After spending a month at the official guesthouse and visiting many factories, we were allowed to live for several months in Sümer köyü (village) in the ilçe (district) of Fındıklı. We revisited the village in the summer of 1988 and have kept in touch with several families in Sümer ever since.
Perhaps I could add that I had never visited Turkey before 1982. Like many ignorant foreigners at the time, I associated the country with the consumption of coffee, rather than tea. My field research provided continuous insights into the importance of this new commodity for sociality in all strata of society, among men as among women. While production in the Rize region remained my main focus, in the 1990 publication I also drew attention to the sociocultural embeddedness of tea throughout Turkey (Hann Reference Hann1990).
ZY: In retrospect, what do you see as the most enduring insights or blind spots of that work? Do you feel the metaphor of “domestication” still holds analytical value?
CH: There are certainly weaknesses. Our stay in Sümer was too brief to attempt a comprehensive ethnography. Ildikó Bellér-Hann and I attempted something more ambitious a decade later. In 1992 we returned with our two small children and lived as a family in Pazar (roughly halfway between Fındıklı and Rize). By this time, I was not following developments in the tea industry so closely. Its history is summarized briefly in Chapter 2 of the monograph we published jointly in 2000 titled Turkish Region. State, Market and Social Identities on the East Black Sea Coast (Bellér-Hann and Hann Reference Bellér-Hann and Hann2000). This was translated into Turkish as İki Buçuk Yaprak Çay. Doğu Karadeniz’de Devlet, Piyasa, Kimlik and published by İletişim in İstanbul in 2003. The publisher came up with the main title of the translation (literally Two and a Half Leaves of Tea). Turkish Region was a play on Paul Stirling’s Turkish Village of 1965, the first such study by a foreign anthropologist (Stirling Reference Stirling1965). We wanted to indicate that we were addressing the entire tea-producing region, rather than offering a localized community study. We also wanted to emphasize its Turkish character. Some readers reacted negatively to our use of the historic term Lazistan. In fact, the monograph had a chapter on ethnicity in which we emphasized the strength of Turkish national identity, even among people with non-Turkish ethnic roots and fluency in a non-Turkish language. Anyway, this book has been through several reprints and apparently it still has some resonance in the region. That is a source of satisfaction.
I doubt that many readers in Turkey are familiar with the 1990 study, with its narrower focus on tea (Hann Reference Hann1990). The domestication metaphor suggested itself when, as residents of Sümer, we observed close-up how the Çaykur ekisper in practice accepted far more than the officially prescribed two and a half leaves. The ekisper was a local man whose relations and neighbors all had tea bushes of their own (Editor’s note: “ekisper” is a local pronunciation of “expert”). His job was to control the quality of the tea leaves delivered by the growers; but to insist on hand plucking, rather than the shears (makas) readily available by 1983, would have meant far more work for less monetary reward. This was the ethnographic kernel of my argument about domesticating the state. Çaykur still had a monopoly at this time, but the strong state which had promoted the new industry to improve the economy of a relatively poor, underdeveloped region now seemed powerless to impose the original quality standard, even in a period of martial law. In the later monograph we referred to this as a process of subversion.
ZY: While your later work focused more on Central and Eastern Europe, would you say your experience in Turkey left a lasting imprint on your intellectual trajectory?
CH: My wife and I later carried out field research in another part of the Turkic-speaking world, namely the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Ildikó’s 2015 collection Negotiating Identities draws together her work in the 1990s, mainly in the Kashgar region (Bellér-Hann Reference Bellér-Hann2015). It opens with a chapter on the “peasant condition in Xinjiang.” Direct comparisons are difficult because Chinese socialist development is very different from what I investigated in Eastern Europe in the 1970s. I did once try to compare and contrast “transformations of peasantry” and the nature of exploitation in all four field settings, but the results of this exercise were not very satisfactory (Hann Reference Hann and Hann2006). Besides, studies of rural development are no longer popular in sociocultural anthropology.
Ildikó and I addressed various other topics in further Xinjiang research in the new century (see Bellér-Hann and Hann Reference Bellér-Hann and Hann2020). But the anthropologist’s life course is cumulative. So yes, the research in Rize in the last century definitely left an imprint. Short revisits in 2003, 2013, and 2023 have never ceased to surprise and to stimulate.
ZY: In the monograph and in your essays from the 1990s, you examine tea as a case of import-substitution industrialization and rural modernization. Do you still see commodity-focused ethnography as a productive way to investigate state formation and social change?
CH: Yes. I don’t claim it is the best method for all regions, but it is often an excellent point of entry. The focus on a single commodity, even when it is dominant, is insufficient if one is aiming for a more holistic understanding of social transformation in a given region. The lens of one commodity cannot possibly do justice to everything that is taking place in the rural economy at the level of the state. In responding to a common criticism of anthropological work, Paul Stirling was happy to concede that there is no such thing as a typical village. The same applies to commodities. But it is possible in both cases to shed light on more general patterns by a specific, in-depth investigation. I still think that tea in Rize is helpful in constructing an ideal type of transformations in provincial Turkey, perhaps more so than other commodities. Despite the impact of liberalization and the emergence of private tea factories after my initial research, I am struck by the resilience of state institutions in this sector. This reflects the importance of the state generally in Turkey’s hybrid capitalist economy. Çaykur has certainly retained its central position. It opened a large new factory in the valley of Sümer just a few years ago.
But alongside this quasi-Weberian methodological argument, to grasp the uneven impact of capitalism across Anatolia it is of course necessary to consider the production of other commodities, and of changes in the “agrifood regime” both nationally and globally. While not very sympathetic to neo-Marxist approaches, in these matters of political economy Paul Stirling was always open to the analyses of his political economist friend Henry Bernstein (see e.g. Bernstein Reference Bernstein2016).
ZY: You identify a form of state–society relation in Turkey that differs from dominant center–periphery models – one based on local actors treating the state not only as a dominant force but as a provider and benefactor. How has your view on this evolved, especially in light of recent authoritarian tendencies?
CH: In Rize, regional infrastructure has been transformed in recent decades. Some people say that this is because President Erdoğan’s family hails from here and therefore the region enjoys exceptional levels of state investment. Arguably, Rize has been privileged from the very start of the tea industry, which enabled smallholders to attain higher incomes than in almost any other sector of the rural economy, in addition to providing many men with seasonal factory jobs. But other regions have also prospered in recent decades, and the patterns are undoubtedly linked to macro-level political processes.
With a new airport in Pazar and ever-expanding flows of people and goods across the border at Sarp, the east Black Sea region feels much less peripheral than it did in the 1980s. Of course, there is a price to be paid for this breakneck development in terms of environmental pollution and the loss of biodiversity. Formerly accessible small beaches have been effectively closed by “improvements” to the coastal highway (see Şendeniz Reference Şendeniz2024). Rize itself is thriving. I am especially struck by the fact that the new university that bears the name of the president has grown up around one of the first tea factories!
ZY: In your comparative work on Poland and Turkey, you analyze how religion, nationalism, and civil society intersect in different ways. In Turkey, you argued that Islamic brotherhoods and moral frameworks played a role similar to Catholic social teaching in Poland. How do you interpret the rise of new conservative or religious movements in Turkey in recent decades?
CH: Yes, these intersections are fascinating, but in the case of Turkey I have only been able to follow them second-hand, mostly through publications in English. I was impressed a few years ago by Jeremy Walton’s study of Muslim civil society in İstanbul (Walton Reference Walton2017). But I find that too many scholars use the term “civil society” in rather ethnocentric ways, e.g. so as to preclude its existence in the Muslim world. As an anthropologist, I wish we could find a new vocabulary to replace this concept from preindustrial European political writing.
ZY: How would you reflect on the relationship between these movements and rural life? What do you think about the perspectives that highlight the rural support of the conservative governments?
CH: The connections are undoubtedly important. Faith gives meaning to human lives, and this may be particularly important in times of rapid social change when ordinary people reject secularizing pressure from the state and from new elites they resent. But one needs to differentiate, even within regions. For example, we found significant differences between the ilçeler of Fındıklı and Pazar that cannot be readily explained with reference to ethnicity or ecology. The pious movements are weaker in the districts nearer the border, and these differences are reflected in voting patterns. Most citizens of Fındıklı take pride in their Kemalist, CHP [Republican People’s Party; Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi] orientation. But in Rize and its immediate hinterland, economic prosperity does not seem to have impacted greatly on the strength of religious sentiment. Given the positive impact of tea on the regional economy, one might have expected more sympathy with the centralized secular state that was responsible for the initiative. But many local people prefer to give credit to the Democratic Party and its successors, rather than to the CHP. The late Mesut Yılmaz, long-serving leader of the Motherland Party founded by Turgut Özal, was committed to his mentor’s policies of liberalization. Descended from a Rize family, like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Yılmaz too was popular in the more pious districts of the region.
ZY: The notion of a “Turkish–Islamic synthesis” you described seems to have gained even more ground. Do you think ethnic groups such as the Laz or Hemşinli still experience this synthesis as inclusive, or has the dynamic shifted?
CH: The spread of Islam and of the Turkish language and ethnic identity in this region of the Black Sea coast adjoining the Caucasus are complex processes. We did not go into them in any detail, except to criticize nationalist claims that the entire region was essentially Turkish from time immemorial. Ethnic identity remains a sensitive issue in the region. It is not a topic to be broached with strangers during short visits. Among our long-term personal contacts, Muslim faith is independent of Laz or Hemşinli ethnic identity.
The future of these peoples interests us greatly, since all anthropologists are committed to cultural diversity. In the east Black Sea region, a radical break took place following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when virtually all the Greek speakers of the Pontos were effectively deported westwards to Greece. It has been difficult to sustain the old language (related to Armenian) in the case of the Hemşinli, and only slightly less in the case of Lazuri (the language of the Laz, which is related to Mingrelian and more distantly to Georgian). Some members of these groups are understandably wary of the foreigners who express an interest in the particularities of their culture.
At the level of folklore and material culture, the state is now more willing to acknowledge ethnic differences than it was at the time of our original research. But teaching Lazuri east of Pazar in the Laz-speaking communities does raise problems. Should the children of immigrant sharecroppers be obliged to learn Lazuri in primary school? What if Laz parents themselves attach greater weight to instruction in English, because that will be of more use to their children in their careers?
ZY: From the perspective of 2025, what directions do you find most promising for anthropological and interdisciplinary research on agriculture, food, and the state?
CH: I can only answer as a member of the public, rather than as an academic expert. States need to rethink nutrition and food supply chains as we currently know them, for the sake of maintaining biological diversity and planetary sustainability. But even if our food were to become less industrialized, there can be no return to the old labor-intensive practices at village level. The countryside will continue to lose population, and young people will need incentives to stay. The Rize region has experienced these problems for generations already. Ecological specificities constrain what can be feasibly produced along this narrow coastal strip. After introducing tea and overseeing its expansion into a monoculture, the state also promoted efforts to diversify, e.g. with kiwi fruit. As far as I know, these experiments have not been very successful. Diversification, whether by state factories or private enterprise, can also be envisaged within the tea sector. The expansion of organic brands could be a way forward, provided that the public is willing to pay extra for them. But if the state were to try to proscribe the use of fertilizers altogether on ecological grounds, this would probably encounter resistance – just as the ban on using the makas was subverted a generation ago. It would be impossible to enforce it without draconian repression.
Compared with many other regions, the problems in Rize may be less acute. Even with the use of shears, tea will remain a relatively labor-intensive crop. Employment in the tourism sector has already increased and may expand further. This links up with the production and consumption of traditional food products. Tourists are usually willing to pay a little more for the meat and dairy specialties of the Hemşinli and the mısır ekmeği (corn bread) that is still consumed regularly at home by both Laz and Hemşinli families. But it is probably unrealistic to imagine that these heritage products (formerly staples) can be commercially marketed across the whole of Turkey.
ZY: In academic discussions of agri-food systems, the concept of agro-exceptionalism suggests that agriculture and food production are ontologically distinct from other sectors due to their embedded barriers (ecology) to capitalist transformation and industrialization. Unlike other sectors, agricultural production is often shaped by the specific biophysical and temporal characteristics of commodities, making its industrialization path product-specific and uneven. How critical do you think it is to adopt a product-specific analytical lens to fully understand the exceptional nature of agriculture? To what extent are these ontological barriers rooted in technological and biological constraints, and to what extent are they shaped or sustained by political and institutional factors?
CH: I agree that the agricultural sector is different in important ways. But I don’t like the word “ontological,” which in anthropology is often used to assert the impossibility of understanding another culture. We can and should compare agriculture in capitalist Turkey with the functioning of capitalism in other sectors of the economy; and also with agriculture in other capitalist countries, even if the forms of embedding differ greatly. In Turkey the role of family farming is much greater than it is in my native Britain. So neither labor nor land should be treated as mere factors of production. But Britain and Turkey also differ in many other ways, e.g. in their housing markets. I don’t think it helps to call any of these differences ontological.
Perhaps comparisons with other Mediterranean countries can be more instructive. For example, Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco (Reference Fontefrancesco2024) has recently explored the potential of “short agrifood chains” in Italy as a key to emotional as well as economic viability in rural communities. But ecology, settlement patterns, and persistent cultural diversity combine to give the Rize region unique forms of embeddedness and to constrain the possibilities for change. For example, it would not be fair to pursue regional food sovereignty by restricting the inflow of cheap flour that enables Laz bakers to produce and sell the standard products consumed all over the country.
ZY: How do you see the relationship between the product-specific analytic frameworks that have been widely used by critical scholars for a few decades and the recent rise of the “multi-species” and/or “more-than-human” analytical perspectives? Would you agree that the latter offer new and unexplored aspects of non-human agency in agriculture and food studies while risk undermining the relevance of the political economic questions regarding capitalist transformations of agriculture and food systems?
CH: Different crops have different social implications. Further along the Black Sea coast, the socio-economic consequences of hazelnuts in Giresun differ from the consequences of tea bushes in Rize. The consequences of tobacco in Samsun and Bafra are different again. But I don’t think it helps to speak of “non-human agency.” Maybe the mice who visited us regularly during our first stay in Sümer were exercising agency. But I would not agree that agency was exercised by the chimney through which they entered, nor by the stock of hazelnuts which attracted them.
At the end of the day, I am a social scientist and not a philosopher; for me, the important issues lie in human social institutions. Open a modern textbook in anthropology and I think you’ll find that anthropologists have an ethical commitment to the preservation of both cultural and biological diversity (e.g. Eriksen Reference Eriksen2023). But in my case, given my training, the sociocultural (including linguistic) diversity comes first.
ZY: If you were to return to Turkey for a new fieldwork project today, what region or product would you be most curious to explore – and why?
CH: I don’t think I could manage to live anywhere other than the east Black Sea coast. I have often thought about trying somehow to include the Kaçkar Mountains in a new project. But the main priority would be to see how the tea industry is functioning nowadays, for example that new factory that I mentioned in Sümer, but also in the gardens. Who is plucking the leaves? I suspect that the trends we observed in the 1980s have continued and most of the manual work is nowadays performed by immigrants from outside Turkey as well as sharecroppers from poorer regions of Anatolia. How many newcomers from provinces such as Ordu are temporary workers or sharecroppers, and how many manage to purchase houses and tea gardens from owners who have sold up and departed permanently for the big cities? If (as I suspect) a new social structure has emerged, what are the implications for community life, politics, religion, and what Fontefrancesco (Reference Fontefrancesco2024) calls the “affective economy”?
In other words, I would carry out a re-study. It would not be confined to Rize geographically, since the migration chains would have to be integrated into the research. I think work along these lines is already planned by Özlem Şendeniz and her colleagues at GOLA, an innovative non-governmental organization based in Fındıklı which we came across during our visit in 2023. Burcu Özcan, who teaches sociology at Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Üniversitesi, also has wide-ranging research interests. These young scholars will do a much better job than I could manage.
ZY: Finally, do you think the analytical strategy of zooming in on one commodity – a tea leaf, a cherry, a hazelnut – still offers an effective way to unravel broader sociopolitical transformations?
CH: In regions where one commodity dominates, such a focus continues to make good sense. But it will never exhaust the possibilities. As I’ve explained, although it was tea that took me to Rize initially, my wife and I eventually broadened our interests and published a wide-ranging monograph in which tea did not feature very prominently. And as mentioned, the construction of an ideal type based on a study of just one commodity should not blind one to empirical variation in the rural economy.
ZY: Taken together, your reflections remind us why “Tea and the Domestication of the Turkish State” has retained its relevance for more than three decades. By grounding large questions of state formation, capitalism, and everyday life in the careful study of one region and one crop, your work opened a path that continues to inspire scholars across anthropology, sociology, and agrarian studies. The east Black Sea coast has changed profoundly since your first visit, yet many of the tensions you identified – between state power and local practice, between monoculture and ecological limits, between national identity and regional diversity – remain with us in new forms. We hope this conversation not only revisits a classic ethnography but also contributes to ongoing debates about agriculture, food, and social change in Turkey today. We are deeply grateful for your generous engagement with this interview, and for the enduring influence your work continues to have on our understanding of Turkey, tea, and the broader questions of state and society.
