Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice

"Making tea for a guest in Japan is a highly encultured act, demanding much more than a pour of hot water over powdered tea. Kristin Surak has plumbed the depths of the practice and demonstrated the enduring meanings of tea for Japanese performers of the craft."?Merry White, Boston University

"A regrettable schizophrenia characterizes the study of nationalism, with macro and micro analysts rarely engaging rival views. Hence, Kristin Surak's book is a theoretical breakthrough, showing the changing functions and social bearers of a single ritual over a long and troubled historical record. Elegantly written and extraordinarily argued."?John A. Hall, James McGill Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology, McGill University

"Kristin Surak's richly contextualized study shows in vivid detail how and why tea came to be, and remains, such a strong carrier of nation in Japan, at once performance and product. Sociologists in particular will not want to miss the fine ethnographic investigation of the tea ceremony in contemporary Japan."?Priscilla Ferguson, Columbia University

"Surak's careful ethnography and clear theoretical analysis demonstrate the historical role of the tea ceremony in constructing and defining the nation, but she also shows how it is an important part of the slightly different work of maintaining and explicating Japanese-ness. Through careful ethnographic details she shows how the tea ceremony is embodied in ways both gendered and historically contingent; how it is used to distinguish Japanese from other Asians, Asia from the West, 'good' Japanese from others who are less good; and how it is carried not only in performative bodies but in places/spaces. This often fascinating and lively study of chanoyu draws the reader through these various, and intertwined, processes over Japan's recent historical past, unpacking a rich trove of material artefacts, rituals, and texts."?Sarah Corse, University of Virginia

The tea ceremony persists as one of the most evocative symbols of Japan. Originally a pastime of elite warriors in premodern society, it was later recast as an emblem of the modern Japanese state, only to be transformed again into its current incarnation, largely the hobby of middle-class housewives. How does the cultural practice of a few come to represent a nation as a whole?

Although few non-Japanese scholars have peered behind the walls of a tea room, sociologist Kristin Surak came to know the inner workings of the tea world over the course of ten years of tea training. Here she offers the first comprehensive analysis of the practice that includes new material on its historical changes, a detailed excavation of its institutional organization, and a careful examination of what she terms "nation-work"?the labor that connects the national meanings of a cultural practice and the actual experience and enactment of it. She concludes by placing tea ceremony in comparative perspective, drawing on other expressions of nation-work, such as gymnastics and music, in Europe and Asia.

Taking readers on a rare journey into the elusive world of tea ceremony, Surak offers an insightful account of the fundamental processes of modernity?the work of making nations.

Kristin Surak is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Sociology, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the New Left Review.

Source: http://www.sup.org/rss/book_rss.cgi?id=20929

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