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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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Think about how nations actually look on the ground.

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.