Seite - 68 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 03/02

68 | Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 67–69 emic and etic perspectives (Clifford Geertz, Russell T. McCutcheon) combined. readers learn that tea drinking is a way of life mirrored in the material culture and the bodily and sensational acts of social gathering and drinking, mainly from small cups. and tea drinking is also bound up with an old oral culture of sayings and local stories, which frembgen has collected. the author is conscious of spatial dimensions. he describes famous teahous- es as public and political spaces. With parallels to the German Weisswurst divide and the swiss so-called Röstigraben, the himalayan region can be socially divided into areas of tea drinking with milk and tea drinking without milk. Within a male world, the teahouse is (or was) a space of gathering outside the family home. frembgen also makes reference to women and their collective cultures of drink- ing tea, but their places are normally closed to him (one exception is seen in the illustration on page 49 with female stea-cooks in Morocco). Broadly framed, he shows a traditional lower-class or middle-class world where tea is prepared in a samovar, with spices and maybe milk added. that traditional world and its social structures have started to vanish, even in Pakistan and india. the samo- var is replaced by the Lipton teabag and tea-to-go is a trend around the globe. hence, it is all the more important that this traditional world of tea drinking is documented. De facto this book is a contribution to an elementary field of everyday cul- ture. implicitly it adopts perspectives and raises questions inherent in contem- porary research, especially research on material culture and religion that takes into account, along with the material, whole sensational sets (Birgit Meyer), habitus and imaginaries (daria Pezzoli-olgiati). But other than in a few foot- notes, frembgen does not explicitly contextualize his study with debates cur- rent in the humanities. That absence may reflect a desideratum within the Ger- man tradition, where the study of food cultures is an inhomogenous field. For the islamic world, not much analysis has been done beyond Peter heines’ works on wine and culinary cultures that appeared in the 1980s and again in 2014. the German humanities are less differentiated in their approach to food cultures than are English-speaking disciplines, where we find, for example, Sami Zubai- da and richard tappers, A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East (2000), and, in the United states, anthropological programmes in food studies. Perhaps it was this lack of a scholarly context that caused the publishing house and the author to opt for a more popular design and content (with footnotes but without separate bibliography) that might stand out on any coffee (or tea) table. That approach would appear to propel the romantic ste- reotypes at the end of the book that contradict modernity: “to drink a cup of tea means contentment and well-being. it is part of a way of life of calm- ness and serenity” (136). Nevertheless, reading the complete book is certainly