1 Singularity and Vagueness. A Review of Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic (Jinghong Zhang. Seattle: Washington University Press, 2014, 272 pp.) Henrik Kloppenborg Møller Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick HenrikKloppenborg.Moller@warwick.ac.uk What can the intensive price fluctuations of certain types of tea in Chinese markets in the past decades teach us about the contexts in which this tea is valued, and about the tea itself? In The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai proposed that to "interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things", we must "follow the things themselves", as their meanings are inscribed in "their forms, their uses, their trajectories" (Appadurai 1986: 5). Following this call, a plethora of historical and ethnographic studies has examined circulations of material things across time and space through multi-sited, object-oriented methodologies. Jinghong Zhang's (2014) Puer Tea is a book about a particular kind of tea that is cultivated in the hills of southwest China's Yunnan Province and consumed especially by urbanites in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and eastern Mainland China. Testifying to the methodological and analytical productivity of 'following things', the book illustrates how Puer tea connects multiple actors, who negotiate its meanings, values, and authenticities with reference to cultural pasts and presents. This review essay highlights Puer Tea’s discussion of how attempts at standardising authenticity from above clash with reliance on personal knowledge and a preference for vagueness among some Chinese tea market actors. It also suggests how Zhang could expand her analysis by considering how the multiple cultural definitions, meanings, valuations, and contestations – indeed the vagueness – of Puer tea in China that she masterfully details are guided by the tea itself. From Interpretations to Performances of Things The publication of The Social Life of Things in 1986 contributed to an at that time quite dominant symbolistic-hermeneutical paradigm in the social, and human sciences, which posited material things as somewhat passive generic repositories for human signification and interpretation based on historically and culturally situated 'grammars'. As Appadurai (p. 5) argued, "things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions, and motivations endow them with." This