What is the role of the nation in everyday life?  How do elements of culture come to symbolize a nation and its diversity? And why does it matter in a globalizing world?  The book Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice (Stanford University Press 2013) addresses these persistent questions about the relationship between culture and nationalism by analyzing tea ceremonies, past and present.  Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic work, the book provides the first full account of how this aesthetic pleasure of ruling men that once stood at the center of power politics in Japan, became a hobby of housewives as it came to embrace not merely the elite few, but represent the nation as a whole.

Named the Outstanding Book of the Year in 2014 by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Asia, the monograph makes several academic contributions. Methodologically, it offers a way to integrate phenomenological, historical, institutional, and ethnographic approaches to study social phenomena from multiple perspectives. Theoretically, it engages long-standing debates on nation-formation to show that material composition, institutional structures, and socio-political context determine the extent to which actors are able to use cultural practices to crystallize the essence of a nation.

The book has been widely praised in sociology, history, area studies journals, and the popular press, including Contemporary Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Monumenta Nipponica, Social History, Journal of Japanese Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Metropolis.  It has also been featured in a program on National Public Radio (NPR). 

• Japanese translation under contract with Ohsumi Publishers 
  
•  Featured on NPR news, “In the Japanese Tea Ceremony, Politics are Served with Every Cup” (June 23, 2015)

Erik Essselstrom, Social History  

"Deftly crossing disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, sociology, and history, Making Tea, Making Japan is a well-crafted and interpretively provocative book that anyone with an interest in Japanese society and the theoretical dynamics of nationalism will find fascinating."

Eric Rath, Journal of Japanese Studies

"Making Tea, Making Japan... is one of the most
astute studies of the ceremony to appear in decades. Beyond tea aficionados, Surak’s book should be read by scholars and students of culture and
nationalism because Surak’s main contribution is showing how these two fields of embodied culture and nationalism are so deeply intermeshed in the
practice of tea."

Christena Turner, Contemporary Sociology

"Interested in bridging the sociology of nations with practices that ‘sustain the social world,’ Surak takes us from tearoom to nation as she undertakes an ambitious and methodologically complex task of connecting
the making of tea to the making of Japan. Beautifully written, this is at once history, ethnography,
and a case study of tea practices as cultural nationalism or 'nation-work'.’’

Nancy Stalker, Monumenta Nipponica

"[T]his well-informed and eloquent work is an outstanding example
of the interdisciplinary scholarship on nationalism. [It] will be of great interest not only to Japan specialists, but also to all students and
scholars of cultural nationalism and critical heritage studies."