Nation -work: Making tea, making Japanese

This dissertation addresses the relationship between cultural practices and nationness through an investigation of how tea ceremony is produced and sustained as distinctively Japanese. It focuses on nation-work: the social labor of people who both attribute national meanings to cultural practices and act with and through such practices to produce national meanings. Combining phenomenological, historical, institutional, and ethnographic approaches, the dissertation examines how tea spaces, objects, bodies and interactions encode Japaneseness and afford recognizably Japanese sentient experiences; how practitioners, educators, and elites transformed tea ceremony into a venue and vehicle for defining and cultivating Japaneseness around the turn of the twentieth century; how tea leaders have appealed to the Japaneseness of tea to expand their business endeavors; and how practitioners use tea ceremony to explain and cultivate Japaneseness in contemporary Japan. This project strives for a systematic analysis of the different ways in which cultural practices are used to define, explain, embody, and cultivate nationness—that is, for a praxeology of everyday cultural nationalism.