Nationalism as fiction

Nationalism as fiction

Week 7: The new ethnos: Love it or leave it

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Monday, September 09, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/7.1

Main reading: Rytter (2010)

Other reading: Hall (2007); Hall (2017); Nyamnjoh (2022); Linke (2021); Eriksen (2015a); Eriksen (2015b)

What does the future hold?

Let’s share our ideas with each other with this Mentimeter poll.

Go to http://menti.com on your handheld phone or tablet and use the code 7346 8282.

You can also use this URL: https://www.menti.com/ala1snrzxafj

• National citizenship won’t matter to you in the year 2044.
• In the 2044, the world economy will be more integrated than today.
• Problems of “development” like poverty, disease, and hunger are things we can solve in your lifetime.

Here is a link to the results: https://www.mentimeter.com/app/presentation/n/alsaf66zt561m1hj3ijrzkz3jytc6x85/present

There is nothing neo about neoliberalism

The end of a Fordist social contract in affluent, capitalist economies is, in another light, the fantasy of 19th century bourgeois culture.

• Everyone is a Robinson Crusoe on an island making economic calculations.

But this fantasy is not actually viable as a model for a society. People will still use social ties to patch the holes in a market-based society.

Today, we can see that the triumph of the bourgeois individual has produced paradoxical, unanticipated, weird, wild side effects.

• People invest in another social fiction: A world of discrete nations.
• These fictional national communities are premised on the possibility of completeness (Nyamnjoh 2023)
• What people in the news call “populism” really isn’t popular in any sense.

By studying people’s new fiction of a complete nation, we can better see that we really all are incomplete and interdependent.

What is a nation?

Ideas like nation and ethnicity sound simple, because we hear them so often, but they carry a lot of baggage we need to unpack.

In fact, there aren’t any nations and nationalities, or ethnicities, in nature. We just act as if they exist.

Ancient Greeks saw the world of people as made up of many different ethne (singular ethnos).

• This word that can translated as nation but is similar to the word for a herd, flock, or pack of animals.
• People of an ethnos are one group because they are all the same.

This ancient idea casts a long shadow in European history. A nation is a group of people that

• have the same culture
• have the same language
• have the same traditions, and have existed for a long time

If you think that this idea of a nation sounds too simple—good! Stay skeptical of ethnic nations.

Ethnicity, nationality, and anthropology’s argument for culture as an acquired worldview

Franz Boas, an important founding figure of cultural anthropology, argued against the assumption that race, language, and culture are always linked.

• For Boas, culture is acquired, and any person can acquire any culture.

A thought experiment

What if a baby born in Finland is raised in Mongolia by parents from Mongolia?

What will that baby be like as an adult?

Nationalism is a symptom of a mass society

Historians have also cast doubt on the idea of ethnic nationalism.

Gellner (1983) argues that the idea of a nation only comes into being when societies industrialize.

• In an industrial, urban society, it becomes important to think of the whole society as a homogenous mass made up of people who are all the same.
• If there are homogenous populations, it’s only because new institutions—like a national school system—have flattened out all the differences.
  • In the transition to a mass society, everyone has to be assimilated, that is, to learn how to be French, German, Danish, etc.

Anderson (2006 [1983]) argues that nationalism is fiction created by the experience of consuming mass media. Nations are “imagined communities.”

• Reading a newspaper allows one to imagine the simultaneous witness of all the day's events along with everyone in a nation, irrespective of location or social identity.
• When reading news in a newspaper, one experiences the “homogenous, empty time” (2006 [1983], 26) of the nation. It's the same day and time for everyone in one national community.

Are there nations?

Gellner’s (and Anderson's) ideas are useful, but he doesn’t go far enough.

Think about the global context for the European model of nationalism.

• In the same era when the idea of a mass, homogenous population with one language and one culture emerges in Europe, European societies are imposing a colonial system on peoples of Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
• The absence of a homogenous nation-state in these societies was the justification for their European rule, and later nationalism was the condition for their independence (Chakrabarty 2000; Cohn 1996; Sultan 2020).

Think about how nations actually look on the ground.

• The idea of a national body—a group in which everyone is fundamentally the same—is never achieved in real life.
• Actual societies are always made up of different kinds of people, who are members of real communities (Chatterjee 1998).
• Ideas of a nation based on sameness mean that actual members of a nation-state will be marginalized (Gal 2006; Robbins 1998; Woolard 1989; Yeh 2017).

References and further reading

Anderson, Benedict Richard O’Gorman. 2006 (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1998. “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” Social Text, no. 56: 57–69. https://doi.org/10.2307/466770.

Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015a. “Ethnicity.” In Small Places, Large Issues, 4th ed., 329–44. An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (Fourth Edition). London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.21.

———. 2015b. “Nationalism and Minorities.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed., 345–66. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.8.

Gal, Susan. 2006. “Contradictions of Standard Language in Europe: Implications for the Study of Practices and Publics*.” Social Anthropology 14 (2): 163–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2006.tb00032.x.

Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. http://archive.org/details/nationsnationali0000unse.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Living with difference: Stuart Hall in conversation with Bill Schwarz.” Soundings 37 (December): 148–59. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266207820465570.

———. 2017. “Nations and Diasporas.” In The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, edited by Kobena Mercer, 125–76. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674982260-005.

Linke, Uli. 2021. “Love Politics: The Nation Form and the Affective Life of the State.” In Race, Gender, and Political Culture in the Trump Era. London: Routledge.

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2022. “Citizenship, Incompleteness and Mobility.” Citizenship Studies 26 (4-5): 592–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091243.

———. 2023. “Citizenship, Incompleteness, and Mobility: Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Complete Gentleman’ and ‘The Bush of Ghosts’.” In Incompleteness Mobility and Conviviality: Ad. E. Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 Frobenius-Institut Goethe-University, 183–222. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG.

Robbins, Joel. 1998. “On Reading `World News’: Apocalyptic Narrative, Negative Nationalism and Transnational Christianity in a Papua New Guinea Society.” Social Analysis 42 (2): 103–30.

Rytter, Mikkel. 2010. “‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics.” Ethnos 75 (3): 301–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2010.513773.

Sultan, Nazmul S. 2020. “Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India.” American Political Science Review 114 (1): 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000601.

Woolard, Kathryn A. 1989. “Sentences in the Language Prison: The Rhetorical Structuring of an American Language Policy Debate.” American Ethnologist 16 (2): 268–78. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1989.16.2.02a00050.

Yeh, Rihan. 2017. Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.