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Consider the following questions when writing your journal entry. You do not need to answer all questions, but you should address at least one of the questions. Your answer should be in paragraph form with proofread, clear prose, 500 words.What is nationalism?What does the term mean?Is nationalism related to national identity and, if so, how?How is nationalism used?
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Nationalism
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations
where they do not exist.
Ernest Gellner (1964: 169)
—But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
—Yes, says Bloom.
—What is it? says John Wyse.
—A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
—By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the
same place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
—Or also living in different places.
—That covers my case, says Joe.
James Joyce (1984: 329–30)
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THE RACE TO NATION1
For years, social anthropological studies of ethnicity concentrated
on relationships between groups which were of such a size that
they could be studied through traditional field methods: participant
observation, personal interviews and surveys. The empirical focus
of anthropological studies was almost by default a local community.
If the state was given consideration, it would usually be as a part
of the wider context, for instance as an external agent influencing
local conditions. Besides, anthropology was traditionally biased
towards the study of ‘remote others’. As argued earlier, the general
shift in terminology from ‘tribe’ to ‘ethnic group’ relativises such an
Us/Them dichotomy, since ethnic groups, unlike ‘tribes’, obviously
exist among ‘ourselves’ as well as among the ‘others’. The boundary
mechanisms that keep ethnic groups more or less discrete have
the same formal characteristics in a London suburb as in the New
Guinea highlands, and the development of ethnic identity can be
1. The pun is stolen from Brackette Williams’ essay ‘A class act: anthropology and
the race to nation across ethnic terrain’ (1989).
117
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118 ethnicity and nationalism
studied with largely the same conceptual tools in New Zealand as
in Central Europe – although the empirical contexts are distinctive
and ultimately unique. This has today been acknowledged in social
anthropology, where a majority of researchers now study complex
‘unbounded’ systems rather than supposedly isolated communities.
Nationalism is a relatively recent topic for anthropology. The
study of nationalism – the ideology of the modern nation-state
– was for many years left to political scientists, sociologists
and historians. Nations and nationalist ideologies are modern
large-scale phenomena par excellence. However, although the study
of nationalism raises methodological problems relating to scale
and the impossibility of isolating the unit of study, these problems
inevitably arise in relation to other empirical foci as well. Since the
beginning of modern fieldwork, social changes have taken place in
the heartlands of anthropological research, integrating millions of
people into markets and states. Like ourselves, our informants are
citizens (while formerly they might have been colonial subjects).
Further, ‘primitive societies’ probably never were as isolated as was
formerly held, and they were no more ‘pristine’ and ‘original’ than
our own societies (Wolf, 1982). Indeed, as Adam Kuper (2005) has
shown, the very idea of primitive society was a European invention
which emerged under particular historical circumstances.
An early, but largely neglected, venture into the anthropological study of nation-states, was Lloyd Fallers’ (1974) research in
Uganda and Turkey, where he explicitly tried to link data from both
micro and macro levels in his analyses (cf. also Gluckman, 1961;
Grønhaug, 1974; for a later, influential work, see Scott, 1998).
However, the study of nationalism truly became a topic within
anthropology only during the 1980s.
In the classic terminology of social anthropology, the term
‘nation’ was used in an inaccurate way to designate large categories
of people or societies with more or less uniform culture. In his
introductory textbook, I.M. Lewis (1985: 287) states: ‘By the term
nation, following the best anthropological authority we understand,
of course, a culture-unit.’ Later, Lewis makes it clear that he sees
no reason for distinguishing between ‘tribes’, ‘ethnic groups’ and
‘nations’, since the difference appears to be one of size, not of
structural composition or functioning. Comparing groups of several
million with smaller segments, he asks: ‘Are these smaller segments
significantly different? My answer is that they are not: that they
are simply smaller units of the same kind …’ (Lewis, 1985: 358).
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In this chapter, I shall argue that it can indeed be worthwhile
to distinguish nations from ethnic categories, largely because of
their relationship to a modern state. It will also be shown that an
anthropological perspective is essential for a full understanding of
nationalism. An analytical and empirical focus on nationalism can
further be illuminating in research on modernisation and social
change, as well as being highly relevant for the wider fields of
political anthropology and the study of social identification.
WHAT IS NATIONALISM?
Ernest Gellner begins his highly influential book on nationalism by
defining the concept like this:
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Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that
the political and the national unit should be congruent.
Nationalism as a sentiment, or as a movement, can best be
defined in terms of this principle. Nationalist sentiment is the
feeling of anger aroused by the violation of the principle, or
the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfilment. A nationalist
movement is one actuated by sentiment of this kind. (Gellner,
1983: 1; cf. Gellner, 1978: 134)
While this definition at first glance may seem a straightforward one,
it turns out to be circular. For what is the ‘national unit’? Gellner
goes on to explain that he sees it as synonymous with an ethnic group
– or at least an ethnic group which the nationalists claim exists: ‘In
brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires
that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’ (Gellner,
1983: 1; cf. also Gellner, 1997). In other words, nationalism, the
way the term is used by Gellner and other contemporary social
scientists, explicitly or implicitly refers to a peculiar link between
ethnicity and the state. Nationalisms are, according to this view,
ethnic ideologies which hold that their group should dominate a
state. A nation-state, therefore, is a state dominated by an ethnic
group, whose markers of identity (such as language or religion)
are frequently embedded in its official symbolism and legislation.
There is a drive towards the integration and assimilation of citizens,
although Gellner concedes that nations may contain ‘non-meltable’
people, what he calls entropy-resistant groups. More of them later.
In another important theoretical study of nationalism, the
South-East Asianist and political theorist Benedict Anderson
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120 ethnicity and nationalism
proposes the following definition of the nation: ‘it is an imagined
political community – and imagined as both inherently limited
and sovereign’ (1991 [1983]: 6). By ‘imagined’, he does not
mean ‘imaginary’, but rather that people who define themselves
as members of a nation ‘will never know most of their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion’ (1991 [1983]: 6). Unlike
Gellner and many others, who concentrate on the political aspects
of nationalism, Anderson is concerned to understand the force and
persistence of national identification and sentiment. The fact that
people are willing to die for their nation, he notes, indicates its
extraordinary force.
Despite these differences in emphasis, Anderson’s perspective
is largely compatible with Gellner’s. Both stress that nations are
ideological constructions seeking to forge a link between (selfdefined) cultural group and state, and that they create abstract
communities of a different order from those dynastic states or
kinship-based communities which pre-dated them.
The main task Anderson sets himself is to provide an explanation
for what he calls the ‘anomaly of nationalism’. According to both
Marxist and liberal social theories of modernisation, nationalism
should not have been viable in an individualist post-Enlightenment
world, referring as it does to ‘primordial loyalties’ and solidarity
based on common origins and culture (see Nimni, 1991). In
particular, Anderson notes with a certain puzzlement that socialist
states tend to be nationalist in character. ‘The reality is quite plain,’
he writes, ‘the “end of the era of nationalism”, so long prophesied,
is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally
legitimate value in the political life of our time’ (1991 [1983]: 3).
Anthropological research on ethnic boundaries and identity
processes could help to illuminate Anderson’s problématique.
Anderson does not himself discuss ethnicity, and some of his main
examples – the Philippines and Indonesia – are indeed polyethnic
countries fraught with internal tensions and separatist movements
based on both ethnic identity and religion. Research on ethnic
identity formation and boundary maintenance has indicated that
ethnic identities tend to attain their greatest importance in situations
of flux, change, resource competition and threats against boundaries.
It is not surprising, therefore, that political movements based on
cultural identity are strong in societies undergoing modernisation,
although this does not account for the fact that these movements
become nationalist movements.
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The remarkable congruence between theories of nationalism and
anthropological theories of ethnicity seems unrecognised (or at least
unacknowledged) by Gellner and Anderson. Since the two bodies of
theory have largely developed independently of each other, I shall
point out the main parallels.
Both studies of ethnicity at the local community level and studies
of nationalism at the state level stress that ethnic or national
identities are constructions; they are not ‘natural’. Moreover,
the link between a particular identity and the ‘culture’ it seeks to
reify is not a one-to-one relationship. Widespread assumptions of
congruence between ethnicity and ‘objective culture’ are in both
cases shown to be cultural constructions themselves. Talk about
culture and culture can here, perhaps, be distinguished in roughly
the same way as one distinguishes between the menu and the food.
They are social facts of different orders, but the former is no less
real than the latter.
When we look at nationalism, the link between ethnic organisation
and ethnic identity discussed earlier becomes crystal clear. According
to most nationalist ideologies, the political organisation should be
ethnic in character in that it represents the interests of a particular
ethnic group. Conversely, the nation-state draws an important
aspect of its political legitimacy from convincing the popular masses
that it really does represent them as a cultural unit.
An emphasis on the duality of meaning and politics, common
in ethnicity studies as well as research on nationalism, can also be
related to anthropological theory on ritual symbols. In his work
on the Ndembu, Victor Turner (1967, 1969) has showed that
these symbols are multivocal and that they have an ‘instrumental’
and a ‘sensory’ (or meaningful) pole. In a remarkably parallel
way, Anderson argues that nationalism derives its force from its
combination of political legitimation and emotional power. Abner
Cohen (1974b) has argued along similar lines when he states that
politics cannot be purely instrumental, but must always involve
symbols which have the power of creating loyalty and a feeling
of belonging. More recently, studies of national flags (Eriksen and
Jenkins, 2007) show how these symbols of nationality can both
divide populations (if substantial numbers feel no loyalty towards
the state and see the flag as a symbol of oppression) and unite them,
precisely by being multivocal symbols that are amenable to different
interpretations, thereby giving people who otherwise see each other
as different a sense of unity.
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122 ethnicity and nationalism
Anthropologists who have written about nationalism have
generally seen it as a variant of ethnicity. I shall also do this at
the outset; later on, however, I shall raise the question of whether
non-ethnic nationalisms are imaginable.
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THE NATION AS A CULTURAL COMMUNITY
Both Gellner and Anderson emphasise that although nations tend
to imagine themselves as old, they are modern. Nationalist ideology
was first developed in Europe and in European diaspora (particularly
in the New World; see Anderson, 1991 [1983]; Handler and Segal,
1992) in the period around the French Revolution. Here we must
distinguish between tradition and traditionalism. Nationalism,
which is frequently a traditionalistic ideology, may glorify and
re-codify an ostensibly ancient tradition shared by the ancestors of
the members of the nation, but it does not thereby re-create that
tradition. It reifies it in the same way that the Hurons reified their
supposed tradition (see chapter 4).
Since nationalism is a modern phenomenon which has unfolded in
the full light of recorded history, the ‘ethnogenesis’ of nations lends
itself more easily to investigation than the history of non-modern
peoples. Thus, the creation of Norwegian national identity took
place throughout the nineteenth century, which was a period of
modernisation and urbanisation. The country peacefully moved to
full independence, leaving the union with Sweden, in 1905.
Early Norwegian nationalism mainly derived its support from
the urban middle classes. Members of the city bourgeoisie travelled
to remote valleys in search of ‘authentic Norwegian culture’,
brought elements from it back to the city and presented them as
the authentic expression of Norwegianness. Folk costumes, painted
floral patterns (rosemaling), traditional music and peasant food
became national symbols even to people who had not grown
up with such customs. Actually it was the city dwellers, not the
peasants, who decided that reified aspects of peasant culture should
be ‘the national culture’. A national heroic history was established.
The creation of ‘national arts’, which were markers of uniqueness
and sophistication, was also an important part of the nationalist
project in Norway as elsewhere. Typical representatives of this
project were the composer Edvard Grieg, who incorporated local
folk tunes into his Romantic scores, and the author Bjørnstjerne
Bjørnson (who, unlike Henrik Ibsen, was awarded a Nobel Prize),
whose peasant tales were widely read.
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Nationalism
123
Certain aspects of peasant culture were thus reinterpreted and
placed into an urban political context as evidence that Norwegian
culture was distinctive, that Norwegians were a people on a par
with other European peoples, and that they therefore ought to have
their own state. This national symbolism was efficient in raising
ethnic boundaries between them and the culturally similar Swedes
and Danes, and simultaneously it emphasised that urban and
rural Norwegians belonged to the same culture and had shared
political interests. This idea of urban–rural solidarity, characteristic of nationalism, was, as Gellner has pointed out, a political
innovation. Before the age of nationalism, the ruling classes
were usually cosmopolitan in character. Anderson writes with a
certain glee (1991 [1983]: 83n) that up to the First World War no
‘English’ dynasty had ruled England since the mid-eleventh century.
Furthermore, the idea that the aristocracy belonged to the same
culture as the peasants must have seemed abominable to the former
and incomprehensible to the latter before nationalism.
Nationalism stresses solidarity between the poor and the
rich, between the propertyless and the capitalists. According to
nationalist ideology, the sole principle of political exclusion and
inclusion follows the boundaries of the nation – that category of
people defined as members of the same culture.
Large-scale processes such as industrialisation, the Enlightenment
and its Romantic counter-reactions, standardised educational
systems and the growth of bourgeois elite culture are often
mentioned in connection with the development of nationalism. It
may therefore be relevant to mention that the nation is not just
reproduced through state social engineering and major upheavals
such as war, but also through everyday practices. For one thing,
sport is a ubiquitous presence in most contemporary societies, and it
often has a nationalist focus. Moreover, as Michael Billig (1995) has
shown, ‘small words, rather than grand memorable phrases’, make
up the stuff of national belonging for a great number of people:
coins, stamps, turns of phrase, unwaved flags, televised weather
forecasts; in brief, the banal nationalism continuously strengthens
and reproduces people’s sense of national belonging.
THE POLITICAL USE OF CULTURAL SYMBOLS
The example of Norwegian nationalism is suggestive of the
‘inventedness’ of the nation. Until the late nineteenth century,
Norway’s main written language had been Danish. It was partly
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124 ethnicity and nationalism
replaced by a new literary language, Nynorsk or ‘New Norwegian’,
based on Norwegian dialects. Vernacularisation is an important
aspect of many nationalist movements, since a shared language can
be a powerful symbol of cultural unity as well as a convenient tool
in the administration of a nation-state. When it comes to culture,
it could be argued that urban Norwegians in Christiania (today’s
Oslo) and Bergen had more in common with urban Swedes and
Danes than with rural Norwegians. Indeed, the spoken language in
these cities is still, in the 1990s, closer to standard Danish than to
some rural dialects. Further, the selection of symbols to be used in
the nation’s representation of itself was highly politically motivated.
In many cases, the so-called ancient, typically Norwegian customs,
folk tales, handicrafts and so on were neither ancient, nor typical,
nor Norwegian. The painted floral patterns depict grapevines
from the Mediterranean. The Hardanger fiddle music and most
of the folk tales had their origin in Central Europe, and many of
the ‘typical folk costumes’ which are worn at public celebrations
such as Constitution Day were designed by nationalists early in
the twentieth century (and have, incidentally, grown hugely in
popularity during the era of globalisation, see Eriksen, 2004a).
Most of the customs depicted as typical came from specific mountain
valleys in southern Norway.
When such practices are reified as symbols and transferred to a
nationalist discourse, their meaning changes. The use of presumedly
typical ethnic symbols in nationalism is intended to stimulate
reflection on one’s own cultural distinctiveness and thereby to
create a feeling of nationhood. Nationalism reifies culture in the
sense that it enables people to talk about their culture as though it
were a constant. In Richard Handler’s accurate phrase, nationalist
discourses are ‘attempts to construct bounded cultural objects’
(1988: 27). The ethnic boundary mechanisms discussed earlier are
evident here, as well as inventive uses of history which create an
impression of continuity. When Norway became independent, its
first king was Prince Carl from the Danish royal family. He was
nevertheless rebaptised Haakon VII as a way of creating a sense of
continuity with the dynasty of kings that ruled Norway before the
collapse of the medieval Norwegian state around 1350.
The discrepancy between national ideology (comprising symbols,
stereotypes and the like) and social practice is no less apparent in the
case of nations than with respect to other ethnic groups. However, as
Anderson diplomatically remarks, every community based on wider
links than face-to-face contact is imagined, and nations are neither
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more nor less ‘fraudulent’ than other communities. We have earlier
seen similar identity processes in discussions of other ethnic groups;
what is peculiar to nationalism is its relationship to the state. With
the help of the powers of the nation-state, nations can be invented
where they do not exist, to paraphrase Gellner (1964). Standardisation of language, the creation of national labour markets based
on individual labour contracts and compulsory schooling, which
presuppose the prior existence of a nation-state, gradually forge
nations out of diverse human material. Thus, while it would have
been impossible 150 years ago to state exactly where Norwegian
dialects merged into Swedish dialects, this linguistic boundary is
now more clear-cut and follows the political one. As is sometimes
said: a language is a dialect backed by an army.2
The earlier, dynastic states in Europe placed few demands on the
majority of their citizens (Birch, 1989), and they did not require
cultural uniformity in society. It did not matter that the serfs spoke
a different language from that of the rulers, or that the serfs in one
region spoke a different language from those in another region.
Why is the standardisation of culture so important in modern
nation-states?
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NATIONALISM AND INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
Gellner, Grillo (1980) and others have argued that nationalist
ideology emerged as a reaction to industrialisation and the uprooting
of people from their local communities. Industrialisation entailed
great geographic mobility, and a vast number of people became
participants in the same economic (and later the same political)
system. Kinship ideology, feudalism and religion were no longer
capable of organising people efficiently.
In addition, the new industrial system of production required the
facility to replace workers on a large scale. Thus workers had to have
many of the same skills and capabilities. Industrialisation implied
the need for a standardisation of skills, a kind of process which can
also be described as ‘cultural homogenisation’. Mass education is
instrumental in this homogenising process. By introducing national
2. Swedish, Danish and the two varieties of Norwegian are closely related languages.
We owe to nationalism the fact that they are considered three or four distinctive
ones and not variants of a shared Scandinavian language – a fact still bemoaned
by small but dedicated groups of Scandinavianists.
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126 ethnicity and nationalism
consciousness to every nook and cranny of the country, it turns
‘peasants into Frenchmen’ (Weber, 1976).
In this historical context, a need arises for a new kind of ideology
capable of creating cohesion and loyalty among individuals
participating in social systems on a huge scale. Nationalism was
able to satisfy these requirements. It postulated the existence of
an imagined community based on shared culture and embedded in
the state, where people’s loyalty and attachment should be directed
towards the state and the legislative system rather than towards
members of their kin group or village. In this way, nationalist
ideology is functional for the state. At the same time, it must be
remarked, the drive to homogenisation also creates stigmatised
others; the external boundaries towards foreigners become frozen,
and ‘unmeltable’ minorities within the country (Jews, Gypsies –
but also, say, Bretons, Occitans and immigrants in the case of
France) are made to stand out through their ‘Otherness’ and
thereby confirm the integrity of the nation through contrast. In a
period such as the present, when claims to cultural rights challenge
hegemonies, this means trouble (see chapters 7–8). There is no
inclusion without exclusion.
Its political effectiveness is one condition for nationalist ideology
to be viable; it must refer to a nation which can be embodied in a
nation-state and effectively ruled. An additional condition is popular
support. What, then, does nationalism have to offer? As some of
the examples below will suggest, nationalism offers security and
perceived stability at a time when life-worlds are fragmented and
people are being uprooted. An important aim of nationalist ideology
is thus to re-create a sentiment of wholeness and continuity with
the past; to transcend that alienation or rupture between individual
and society that modernity has brought about.
At the level of personal identification, nationhood is a matter
of belief. The nation, that is the Volk imagined by nationalists, is
a product of nationalist ideology; it is not the other way around.
A nation exists from the moment a handful of influential people
decide that it should be so, and it starts, in most cases, as an urban
elite phenomenon. In order to be an efficient political tool, it must
nevertheless eventually achieve mass appeal.
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY AND NATIONHOOD
One important difference between nations and other kinds of
community, including many ethnic communities, concerns scale.
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Nationalism
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With a few exceptions (notably mini-states in the Caribbean and
the Pacific), nation-states are social systems operating on a vast
scale. Tribal societies and other local communities could to a great
extent rely on kinship networks and face-to-face interaction for
their maintenance as systems and for the loyalty of their members.
Even in the great dynastic states, most of the subjects were locally
integrated; they were first and foremost members of families and
villages. Socialisation and social control were largely handled locally.
Armies tended to be professional, unlike in nationalist societies,
where it is considered the moral duty of all to fight for their country.
Nations are communities where the citizens are expected to be
integrated in respect to culture and self-identity in an abstract,
anonymous manner. One of Anderson’s most telling illustrations
of this abstract character of the moral community of the nation is the
tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Usually these tombs are deliberately
left empty; they signify the universal, abstract character of the
nation. ‘Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or
immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national
imaginings’ (Anderson, 1991 [1983]: 9).
What are the conditions for such an abstract ideology? I have
described the economic and political concomitants of nationalism,
and here we shall add a technological prerequisite for it, namely
communications technology facilitating the standardisation of
knowledge or representations (see chapter 5). Anderson strongly
emphasises print-capitalism as an important condition for
nationalism. Through the spread of the printed word in cheap
editions, potentially unlimited numbers of persons have access to
identical information without direct contact with the originator.
More recently, newspapers, television and radio have played
– and still play – a crucial part in standardising representations
and language. These media also play an important part in the
reproduction and strengthening of nationalist sentiments. During
the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982, for example, the British media
depicted the war quite consistently as a ‘simple opposition between
good and evil’ (J. Taylor, 1992: 30), whereas the Argentinian media
depicted it as a struggle against colonialism (Caistor, 1992). Later
commentary on the media’s role in connection with the Gulf War
(Walsh, 1995) and the war in Afghanistan (Chomsky, 2001) arrive
at similar conclusions.
Studies of the role of the Internet in influencing identities, language
and public discourse are also highly relevant in research on ethnicity
and nationalism. By now it is clear that, contrary to some early
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128 ethnicity and nationalism
expectations, the Internet has not contributed to a global cultural
homogenisation. Although roughly half of the contents on the web
are in English, this nevertheless means that there is an enormous
number of web sites in other languages. Just as most Norwegians
continue to watch Norwegian TV channels today, as they did
before they got cable television with an almost unlimited choice, the
Internet is used at least as much to confirm and strengthen existing
identities as to transcend them. Long-distance nationalism involving
diasporic groups, secessionists and others has become widespread
on the Internet, forging bonds between people who would otherwise
have been isolated from each other. Websites devoted to the Kurdish
nation, the Tamil nation and so on proliferate and are important
both at the level of identity and as political tools. Recently, the
Chilean government has even designated a ‘fourteenth region’ in
the country, called the region of el exterior or el reencuentro (the
reunion), consisting of Chileans abroad. The main tool for creating
