From selling tea to selling Japaneseness: Symbolic power and the nationalization of cultural practices

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 case I take is of 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. The ritual offers a particularly vivid illustration of the ways in which symbolic power can not only be periodized, first through its accumulation and then its routine exercise, but can also be successively articulated, at first with the state and then with the nation.