8: Imagining community Flashcards
Ideas in this topic:
- issues of nation belonging
- What is a nation?
- How do they work?
Two types of answers:
- ‘primordialism’
- ‘constructivism’ or ‘modernism’
A primordialist approach to the study of nations:
- nations exist as age-old large families (have always existed)
- people’s belonging to nations is a given: can’t be wished away
- this national belonging gives rise to primordial national feelings
- nationalist movements and the states they (wish to) make are expressions of such primordial feelings
so:
nations create nationalisms
- If you would go down a road, and ask ‘what is a nation’ – most people would think of it as something that has always existed, a huge family of people, that moves through history.
- We have the world population divided up into groups, from certain characteristics, and each of them is a big family, passing through history
- Seen as having a particular slab of territory in the world that is associated with them
- In the social sciences this kind of approach is called primordalism, and a strong version of this view is held by people called nationalism
- Nationalist is seen by many in the world as the primordial (the first, the main part of peoples identity) - its seen as more important than gender, class, color of eyes, certain preferences in terms of style, more important than age etc.
- IDEA OF A WORLD ORGANISED POLITICALLY IN TERMS OF NATIONS.
- Ideology that says that every nation should have its state.
- Nation is a group of people, not a government, not a territory. A STATE AND NATION are separate. France = state French = nation
Difficulties with this primordial view?
- If you are going to divide the world population in to nations: Where do you decide to draw the boundaries between different nations? How do you know where one nation finishs and one starts? Where’s the line between the scotish nation and the English nation? Or is there a British nation?
- What about a group that my have their own religion, cutoms etc and that are not considered nations? Some of them are considered to be ethnic groups. Some of them are considered to be tribes.
- If every nation has their own state, well some of these don’t have a state and that is considered to be a problem. e.g. Palastine nation, welsh nation etc. Some do find this a problem
- Some groups are considered more worthy of being a nation than others which is a problem.
- Not because of certain cultural characteristics. Just as through history some nations became more successful in claiming and establishing them as a nation then other ones.
• These criteria that are being used, they never really work. E.g. Religion, German nation as Catholics, protestants, etc. Language = Austria have German but considered different nation. Americans and Australians also speak English but considered different nations.
‘The invention of tradition’
An argument against primordialist view that certain traditions are actually…
- ‘The invention of tradition’: these historians show in that book how certain traditions that are considered to be old and ancient show how these traditions are relatively new, made relatively recently, in order to look old, and in order to justify and legitimize certain nationalist ideology’s. E.g. Coronation ritual of British nation: symbols ritual continuity of British Nation.
- Can see how they are ‘CONSTRUCTED’ as the symbols of the British nation: this book shows that rather than coronation ceremony of the British monarch being an age old deeply rooted medieval or even pre-medieval ritual, but in fact in the 19th century there was a committee established of people who sat together that designed the ritual, that was made to look as old as possible, in order to legitimize the continuity of the British monarchy and thus the British Nation
- A CONSTRUCTURALIST VIEW IS ABOSED TO A PRIMORDIALIST VIEW.
A CONSTRUCTURALIST VIEW IS…
ABOSED TO A PRIMORDIALIST VIEW.
CONSTRUCTURALISTS SAY:
- Nations are constructed – THEY ARE MADE BY PEOPLE - they are not already out there as primordalists will say.
- Nations are constructed and made by people. Decide where the boundaries are made. People don’t do this individually. We do that in ways that we have inherited, ways we have learnt. It’s a human activity.
- Socially constructed not individually constructed. – in order to have any real significance in the world.
a constructivist / modernist approach to the study of nations:
- nationalism is an ideology, a discourse
- nationalist movements (i.e. intellectuals and politicians) work to represent nations as age-old primordial ‘families’
- this leads people to feel a sense of belonging to a socially constructed nationally imagined community (i.e. ‘nation’)
so: nationalisms create nations
- Unlike primordialists, constructivists show pretty convincingly that nations are modern.
- The people accociated with this are Benedict Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm, Bauman, etc
- Nations are not natural, not age old family like things, but they are social constructions.
• They argue that people before the modern times used to have a sense of belonging as well, but the groups that they belong to, was not defined in a national way. They didn’t think of themselves as ‘we’ the French people. They thought of themselves of in for example, local ways, ‘we’ of this particular mountain, village, lowland area.. Also in terms of religion (A larger sense of belonging). - After the enlightenment in the modern era people started to think of themselves in terms of nations – belonging to certain groups that were called nations and given certain national characteristics. Modernity was what made this possible.
- This became possible in different ways: emerging global system in which people were more and more made aware of the existence of people that were different from themselves. (through trade, missionaries etc). Therefore there was an emerging global system, and this has been key to the way in which the world is organised.
Ernest Gellner
► defines nationalism as an ideology that strives for congruence between cultural identity (national) and political organisation (state)
► Gellner’s modernism/social constructivism opposes this: he says nations are not natural necessities, or age-old facts (=primordialism), instead they are social constructs
► nationalism is intimately related to modernisation
► nationalism = a discourse of belonging that fitted the needs of a new, modern industrial society (replacing older forms of belonging)
Nations and Nationalism (1983)
¬ Very top down argument
¬ He says the idea of nations was constructed by intellectuals and politicians, in the modern era. Roughly after the French revolution
¬ He argued it became the dominant discourse, the dominant way of expressing human belonging.
¬ The reason why these intellectuals succeeded in doing this (in making it the most dominant form of human belonging) was because it fitted the needs of the modern era.
¬ What were those changes? Rise of industrial society, a mass society, very big movements of people within countries. People coming from rural lives into urban lives, industrial workers, declining role of religion and locality as a result of it, but lots of people arrived in e.g. Manchester – couldn’t maintain locality of where they came from.
¬ Need some degree of education: need a standardized language.
Need a centralized administration, certralized police force etc etc to keep works in order on a central level and a standardized level.
- He argues that were were certain social economic changes (industrilisation) that created the need for thinking about the population in a large scale sense – people belonging to a group that was on a larger scale then from localized.
- The way politicians succeeded in doing this was by constructing the idea of a nation.
- In other words, he is a very strong critic of primordialist ideas. He pins down that they didn’t exist and were constructed in this 19th century. They then retrospectively represent them as being very old, always having existed etc.
- If nations are social constructions and relatively recent in history, how come they are so important? People feel very strongly about their nation.
Imagined community
B. Anderson
Imagined community
B. Anderson – he was best known for his work on nationalism with his work called imagined communities.
He said that before, community imagined along religious lines. In pre-modern times legitimacy was based on god. This included different ways of organising: e.g. religions having a sacred language. Very often there is a hierarchy in that religion. This is different compared to nations.
He says that during modernity, community is imagined along national lines. Over time we got people that learned languages, that were associated with particular nations. This was then standardisation of languages.
Print capitalism also meant that newspapers were a way in which people could imagine themelves as part of a larger community. ‘We’ became the same for a person reading in Brighton and a person reading in Manchester.
All large scale communities are imagined according to Anderson. He argues that the only was of having a sense of belonging in a large scale community is to imagine ourselves being a member of it. We cant meet all people in a community but they could see a sense of belonging to the same community.
He defines nations as: political communities which are imagined in two ways: 1) Limited (has a boundary. There have to be at least 2 nations for it to make sense. Outside one boundary there are other nations). 2) Legitimized by people themselves: strong sense of belonging.
Michael Billig
Banal Nationalism (1995) KEY READING!!
why do ‘we’ not forget our national identity?
► answer: we are constantly reminded that we are a member of a nations
► method: ‘we need to become linguistically microscopic’: ‘we’, ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘the people’, ‘our country’, etc…
► political and media language:
‘The deixis [communication] of homeland is embedded in the very fabric of the newspapers’ (1995: 94)
He argues that daily activism of belonging to an nation, means that we do not we do not forget our national identity. ‘We’ is already itself an expression of that sense of belonging. He says that in that sense, nationalism is a neutral phenomenon. It is a sense of belonging.
He also says that very often nationalism is associated with a particular national movement. For example, in the UK when people talk about nationalists, they think of pro-iris or pro-catholic.
• All this has to be rephrased a little bit in the perspective of imagined communities – there are always different nationalisms involved in any of these given conflicts. E.g. in Spain, we shouldn’t just speak about Catalan nationalism, but also about Spanish nationalism.
