Drinking a cup of tea, performing an identity

Take them home. Dry them up – until they become a bit dark, black. Serve with hot water, using a tea pot, or a coffee cup. Add sugar if you like. In rural area, you may want to call a friend over and share it with him, her.

Green tea is very much a piece of social interaction. It is not simply a drink. The smell, the colour, and the taste of your tea tell others who you are. Tea makes an distinction, shows an identity, and mark a status. Tea functions to glue seemingly strangers, maintain communal harmony, cement solidarity, provide a sense of being healthy. You can have a good network of friends just because you like to drink tea with them. You may use a cup of tea to show other that you belong to some class, some ethnic group, some gender, some region, and some education level. When you drink your tea, you make a performance of your identities. You negate the similarities between you and other. You play a role, like in a theatre so that you yourself and other will feel happy. You may talk about your tea drinking in a certain way, in order to convey certain meanings, conceal some information, or manage other impression of you. You drink your tea, therefore you are who you are.
So, have you had a cup of tea today?
Interested in a tea/alcohol/coffee research? Consider using identity performance framework. We drink to express, symbolically, our gender, ethnic, class identities. However, somebody may always there, who have the power to interpret, label, stigmatise our performance. We need to negotiate by repeating the performance, talking about it, explaining it. We use ‘techniques of information control’, ‘techniques of neutralization’, and perhaps strategy of mitigation as well, if we feel like what we ‘ve just said is ‘politically incorrect’! (I am not racist, but his practice is very backward!)
Look at Goffman (1959) for a definition of ‘performance’
Look at Butler (1989) for a definition of gender performance
Look at Connell (1987) for a definition of negation (reduce similarities)
Look at Room (2005) for a piece on ethnic performance