How do mundane cultural practices come to -- and continue to -- support national imaginings, giving meaning and concrete expression to something as abstract as "the nation"?  This line of research examines the Japanese tea ceremony as a productive site for unravelling the multiplex relations among culture, ethnicity, and nationalism.  In several articles and chapters, I assess the variability of ethnicity in structure and salience across time and space. Within diasporas, I reveal the how cultural practices that may be seen as national at home become ethnic abroad as a result of tensions produced as actors naturalize some behaviors while questioning the authenticity of others.  In further work, I show how diaspora members use representations of cultural heritage to produce ethnic boundaries and identities on some – but not all – occasions. I develop this line by advancing a praxeology of actions – what I term “nation-work” – through which cultural practices are given national meaning. To dissect the antecedents that enable nation-work in the first instance, I also show how the symbolic power that designates practices as representative of a nation is accumulated and then articulated first through the state and then the nation. My research on the tea ceremony continues in new in-progress work on iemoto systems of knowledge transmission that focuses on structures of authority, embodied knowledge, and outlaw practices. 

Cultural Practices and Nationalism

Surak, Kristin. 2012. “Nation-Work: A Praxeology of Making and Maintaining Nations.”  European Journal of Sociology. 53(2): 171-204.

• Editors’ highlight article for 2012

This article bridges the literatures on nationalist projects and everyday nationhood by elucidating a repertoire of actions shared by both. The analysis shows that such “nation-work,” in both its linguistic and embodied forms, plays an important role not only during the foundational phases of nation-building, but also in the more mundane routines of nation-maintenance thereafter, and demonstrate how it operates in the case of the tea ceremony in Japan.  The article also contributes to recent debates in ethnicity studies by showing that ethnic and national categorization operates though three modalities. In addition to "othering" across boundaries and the intersectionality of categories, it shows that degrees of membership – questions of being a good or bad member – can be used to create ethnic and national groups as well. Thus, while nationalism may project an image of a homogeneous “we,” the workings of internal heterogeneity are useful in refining the experience and performance of membership in the nation.


Surak, Kristin. 2011. “From Selling Tea to Selling Japaneseness: Symbolic Power and the  Nationalization of Cultural Practices.”  European Journal of Sociology. 52(2): 175-208

• Lead article

This article investigates how institutions of cultural production become invested in the national meanings of their products and employ these associations for their own reproduction and expansion. The analysis demonstrates how symbolic power can  be periodized, first through its accumulation and then its routine exercise, as well as successively articulated, at first with the state and then with the nation.  As empirical evidence, the investigation examines the tea ceremony in Japan, from its pre-modern origins, through its capture by the organizational form of the iemoto
system, and to its contemporary projection as a quintessence of Japaneseness.


Surak, Kristin. 2010. “The Business of Belonging.”  New Left Review (63): 151- 9.

•  Translated into Spanish (“El Negocio de la Pertenencia,” NLR Secunda Época, (63) 2010: 149-58.)

In this extended review essay of John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff's book Ethnicity, Inc., I explore the ways in which culture is commodified in the twenty-first century.

Phenomenology of Nationalism / Ethnicity

Surak, Kristin.  Forthcoming. “Engaging Objects: A Phenomenology of the Tea Ceremony and Japaneseness.” In National Matters: Materiality, Culture, and Nationalism. Genevieve Zubrzycki, editor. Stanford: Stanford University Press.   

Nations are made real not only through concrete symbols, icons, and institutions, but also through lived experiences.  Yet the production and reproduction of nations at a phenomenological level remains little explored.  This chapter examines how cultural practices engage objects to sense, enact, and even embody the nation. To explore these processes, it takes up the tea ceremony as a site that facilitates a concentrated experience of Japaneseness within Japan.  It examines how the material components and practices of the tea ceremony bear both similarities to, but yet are fundamentally different from, mundane counterparts in everyday life.  This disjuncture, as the tea ceremony transforms the ordinary into the extra-ordinary, demands an attentiveness that sustains what many practitioners call a “Japanese experience.” 


Surak, Kristin. Forthcoming. “Tea Flows: A Praxeological Perspective on Rituals.” In (Extra-)Ordinary Presence:  Social Configurations and Cultural Repertoires, Heike Paul, Kay Kirchmann, and Markus Gottwald, editors.  Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag. 
                        
How can simply observing the preparation of tea transform the beverage into something that is, by necessity, delicious?  And why would it seem to a contemporary high school student like a scene – constructed and projected, perhaps even a bit idealized – from a Japanese movie?  The questions engage two spheres rarely taken together: aisthesis and national iconicity. Yet an answer embracing both may be explored if one examines the operation of the extra-ordinary within the ordinary. For while tea drinking and socializing is unquestionably mundane, the tea ceremony hones these actions into rarefied form, retooling the body and transforming perceptual awareness. In so doing it recasts the unreflexive patterns of ordinary existence as an objectified expression of “Japanese tradition.”  It is through an oscillation between parallels to and contrasts with everyday lifeways in Japan that the tea ceremony condenses and crystallizes the nation as an extra-ordinary version of the ordinary.   

Immigration and
Ethnicity

Surak, Kristin. 2006. “‘Ethnic Practices’ in Translation: Tea in Japan and the US.”  Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(5): 828-54.

Focusing on diasporas, this article specifies the dynamics shaping migrant ‘‘ethnic practices’’ by comparing the ways that the tea ceremony is constructed as distinctively Japanese in both Japan and the US. I first elucidate how tea is seen as quintessentially Japanese in Japan through cultural objectification, a process that disassociates it from everyday experiences and enables practitioners to re-internalize what is deemed quintessentially Japanese
yet distant and difficult. Then I explore how implications of tea as a Japanese practice shift when recreated in the US, where -- in contrast to Japan -- the practice is projected as natural for Japanese as . But alongside such naturalization also emerges a suspicion of authenticity. Consequently, practitioners attempt to recreate Japan as they recreate tea rather than following its precepts promoting integration with the surrounding environment.


Surak, Kristin. 2010. “Making Tea Japanese.” In Making Japanese Heritage, Rupert Cox and Christoph Brumann, editors. London: Routledge. 21-30.