Deep Culture: Ivo Furman: Tasseography or the art of speaking the unspeakable

Anyone who has been to Balkans or Near Eastern restaurant has probably tried that little cup of caffeine often presented as Turkish, Greek, Byzantine, Serbian or Armenian coffee. The nationalistic associations aside, coffee functions as the main catalyst of conversation in the former territories of the Ottoman Empire. In these areas, coffee can be consumed at any hour and social circumstance, it functions as a soft drink or a beer would in western societies. In doing so, the coffee itself is subject to numerous traditions and ceremonies generated for centuries in these societies. Amongst these ceremonies, I would like to examine today the act of tasseography, or as it is more commonly known, the act of coffee fortune telling.

Usually coffee is consumed in a social context with more than two people present. When the coffee is completely consumed, the remnants of the brewed coffee remain at the bottom of the cup. This is often called the "mud" or the "clay" at the bottom of the mug. The act of fortune telling often begins with one person taking the role of the fortune teller and the other of the listener. These roles are mutually assumed and are performed within the enchanter/enchanted dichotomy, the "real" power relations inherit between the fortune teller and the listener are discarded under the contract of mutual fortune telling. This contract is implicit and is never mentioned, however the application of the contract often begins with the enchanter uttering something similar to "so let us take a look your kismet." From this point onwards, the ceremony of fortune telling has begun.

The enchanted performs an act (slightly different in every locality) of "enchanting" the coffee cup with a series of pre-defined motor functions and then sets the coffee to rest upside down on a saucer in front of the fortune teller. After a few minutes, the "kismet" of the enchanted is ready, the coffee cup is removed from the saucer and the fortune is revealed. What is said as fortune is very interesting, as usually taboo conversation subjects such as sexuality, relations and monetary affairs can be "discussed" under the guise of fortune telling. The private sphere of the individual can be discussed as the social power structures are cast aside in the act of tasseography. Quite often, the unspeakable is spoken in guise, for example if the fortune teller has some sort of sexual or emotional ambitions towards the enchanted, these can be uttered through phrases such as "I see someone in your near future" or "Someone in your near future will make you very happy." Or if the enchanter wants to warn the enchanter about a third party, this can also be done through this ceremony. So basically, the tasseography functions as a social contract through which both parties can comment on the private affairs of each other.

Naive sounding as it is, fortune telling still plays a huge role in both rural and urban environments. It provides a medium through which social taboos can be sidestepped through a play acting sequence. So next time someone offers to read your fortune, listen carefully to what they say. As we say in Turkish, "one cup of coffee keeps a good memory of 40 years."

Column: Deep Culture: Ivo Furman

I often find introductions difficult to write, as they must introduce a body of work that has not been written let alone defined. When Max Holtz contacted me about the possibility of writing a column for his blog, I tried to conceptualize how my vocation and my hobby would coalesce. Being a PhD researcher in the UK, I felt that I had to combine my study of sociology with the themes Max wanted to explore. I hope to do this without being too pedantic as most academicians are when it comes to writing popular articles. So, I'll try writing jargon free and using personal references suitable for an international audience.

This column will essentially deal with the sociology of food, with how food is a medium of identification. When we talk about food as a conversation topic, it often serves an indicator of our lifestyles, ethnic background and even our political identity. In doing so, food is an individualized act of consumption in which every possible combination has a particular rationality and order. On the other hand, food is universal; it is the collective act of feeding for subsistence. I will be using the latter of the two definitions for this column. Among the topics will be covering will be issues such as how societies and cultures create the "myth" of cuisine around food, how ideas of nationalism categorize food and how the fetishization of cuisine leads to a transformation from necessity to commodity in urban environments. Lastly, I will also be exploring the relation between sexuality and cuisine in national cultures.

Next week, I will be writing a short article about coffee nationalism(s) in South Eastern Europe. In this area of the world, the same cup of coffee is either a Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Greek or Turkish coffee depending on your political perspective. Therefore in a political context, coffee is a metaphor for the problematic of Balkan identity and nationalisms.

I hope that this article serves as a delineation of the issues I wish to address in this column. I will finish off this short introduction with a Korean proverb I often like to quote as a toast to the culture of food: "the deeper the culture the tastier the food."

Ivo