‘Guaranteed contraband’: a cultural biography of kaçak tea in Gaziantep’s Iranian bazaar

Every year, 80,000 tons of kaçak (contraband) tea, primarily of Sri Lankan and Iranian origin, makes its way to the markets of Turkey–itself the fifth-largest producer of tea in the world. While most kaçak commodities in Turkey face derision because they are understood as low-quality approximations of their formal counterparts, of dubious origins and lacking any guarantees of quality, many consumers of kaçak tea valorize it as an emblem of superior taste. Rather than being a target of derision, kaçak tea takes shape in its consumers ‘thin-waisted’ glasses as a sign of distinction. In this inverted hierarchy of values, the domestic produce is the commodity that is mocked for its weak flavor and inflated price, while the informal contraband commodity is prized. By tracing the cultural biography of kaçak tea, this essay advances a historically and geographically networked understanding of commoditization across the formal/informal divide. Studying ‘guaranteed contraband’ tea across Turkey and Iran proves productive for understanding how people negotiate and build dynamic hierarchies of taste, while transforming the confines of the formal national economy into new thresholds of conversion that draw upon formalization of informality as well as informalization of formality in market formation.