Urban China

Chapter 4, “Enacting Tea,” discusses these tea practitioners – unlike earlier chapters, which are largely historical in focus, Chapter 4 serves as the ethnography of this study in depicting practices, lessons, and demonstrations of tea. Various practitioners are profiled in what will be the chapter of greatest interest to most anthropologists. Surak concludes this chapter with the comment: “In the everyday activities of the hobby [of tea] . . . practitioners invoke Japaneseness both to elucidate the broader cultural significance of what they are doing and to inculcate in others . . . the higher justifications that enabled tea to weather the difficult transition from the premodern to the modern era” (p. 156) – a justification that enables tea’s survival as a cultural icon of Japaneseness. Chapter 5, “Beyond the Tea Room,” offers “a praxeology of cultural nationalism,” placing tea within the larger focus of how Japanese nationalism is inculcated through the practice of tea, and offers comparative discussions of Germany and India, among other societies. Overall, this is a well-written volume about the Japanese tea ceremony and its historical evolution. I recommend it to researchers on Japanese culture and nationalism, and to students who are interested in the anthropology of material culture. While this book is particularly about Japanese tea ceremony, in its emphasis on the inculcation of the nation through everyday practices and aesthetics, it has value for the study of diverse societies in Asia and across the globe.