Nationalism (Anthropology)

Introduction

The erstwhile concentration of anthropologists on small, bounded communities often appeared to occlude such encompassing phenomena as nationalism. The anthropological predilection for marginality, however, underscores and reaffirms the utility of ethnographically grounded perspectives for a critical purchase on the role of the ideologically centralizing nation-state in citizens’ lives. Ethnographic approaches offer not only a necessary corrective to the top-down generalizations of other social science disciplines, but they also reveal the crucial significance to nationalistic projects of attitudes and dispositions that superficially contradict the ideological claims of nationalist leaders and intellectuals but that, at the same time, secure citizen solidarity and loyalty. Moreover, all nationalistic ideologies rely heavily on metaphors of kinship and blood, and thus they engage a reciprocal relationship with everyday social organization. Ethnography explores this complex articulation, illuminating the attraction of an ideology that, viewed locally, often appears extremely abstract, predominantly bourgeois, and historically Eurocentric, yet that appears, globally, to exercise an almost universally irresistible appeal. The anthropological perspective dissects assumptions of primordial “essences” shared by all citizens. Studying such diverse topics as refugee migration, the emergence of new ethnic movements through performance, the revival of folklore as a national treasure and the celebration of heritage as a shared validation of collective identity, and the complex dynamics of linguistic nationalism reveals the mechanics of nationalistic truth construction, which appear with particular clarity in models of “repatriation” (a suggestively gendered and familial term) in the case of self-identified Jews “returning” to Israel, German-language speakers “returning home,” and Greeks “returning to the fatherland.” More broadly, essentialism attributes a set of immutable characteristics, and irredentism an equally immutable geographical location, to a particular people, grounding a social ontology in claims to timeless antiquity and rewriting historical teleology as irrevocably leading to the emergence of common cultural origins. Even nationalisms that celebrate a duality (e.g., France, Greece) or a plurality (e.g., the United States) of origins emphasize transcendent unity. Rare indeed are countries—Italy stands out as one in Europe—in which national integration remains suspect or even the object of humor. More commonly, the monumentalization of “unity in diversity” —from China’s “fifty-six ethnic groups” to the “Ancient City” park in Thailand (a collection of replicas of ancient temples mapping the entire territory claimed by the Thai state) to Indonesia’s self-miniaturization as a park displaying its various constituent ethnicities to the United States motto E pluribus unum— both acknowledges processes of mythical construction and thereby seeks to control and naturalize them. Museums of “national” culture startle by their transnational similarity, suggesting that global power dynamics have leveled differences among those nationalisms that have proved successful in leading to the actual creation of nation-states.

General Overviews

Although Ernest Gellner was perhaps the first anthropologist to broach the topic of nationalism in a systematic way (Gellner 1983), his Eurocentric universalism has discouraged imitation, although it also fails to explain key aspects of European nationalism (see Brubaker 2005); the account in Chatterjee 1993 offers a healthy counterargument to such Eurocentrism. A similarly Eurocentric streak is found in the otherwise far more influential work of political scientist Benedict Anderson (Anderson 1991), who asked why people so willingly followed and even sacrificed their lives for so extraneous and abstract an ideal. Billig 1995, through the use of common objects, and Herzfeld 2005, through the model of cultural intimacy (see also Shryock 2004), approach this conundrum more from the perspective of everyday social experience. One key problem concerns the relationship between ethnicity, long studied at the local level by field anthropologists, and the larger project of nation-building (see Eriksen 1993). Greenfeld 1992 follows Gellner’s European focus and emphasis on the reactive character of nationalism but distinguishes divergences in type and direction among its European variants.

Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
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Anderson, a political scientist, here exercises a major influence on anthropological thinking. Arguing that individuals achieve immortality through their self-sacrifice for a shared community whose members share diagnostic characteristics that distinguish them from outsiders, he associates nationalism’s rapid development and diffusion to the dissemination of news media and novels (“print capitalism”). Originally published in 1983.
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Billig, Michael. Banal nationalism. 1995. London: SAGE.
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Billig, although not an anthropologist, brings an ethnographic sensibility to the topic by emphasizing how small but common objects that signal national identity, such as flags, serve as constant and subliminal reminders of the sense of solidarity.
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Brubaker, Rogers. 2005. Nationalism reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the new Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Another nonanthropological work influential in the discipline, this sociological study emphasizes the shifting grounds of nationalistic ontology and specifically the impact of post–Cold War reorganization on the emergence of new, often violent nationalisms in Europe.
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Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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This study argues for distinctively non-Western, although often, especially in India, bourgeois, sources of colonialism. While the idea of a distinctively spiritual as opposed to material modality may reflect and respond to Western political and philosophical models, Chatterjee’s argument offers an important antidote to those accounts that treat nationalism as an exclusively Western-derived ideology.
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Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 1993. Ethnicity and nationalism: Anthropological perspectives. London: Pluto.
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This comprehensive but compact volume aims to provide an overview of the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. Eriksen is careful to maintain a sense of the liability of both terms, especially ethnicity, which, he argues in the final chapter, should be jettisoned at the point at which it becomes a conceptual straightjacket.
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Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Arguing that nationalisms undifferentiatedly follow a European, bourgeois model, Gellner treats them as constructions that occlude the more flexible identities underlying their claims. While thus paradoxically reproducing the false consciousness argument of the Marxism he abjured as well as some of the essentialism that he correctly attributes to nationalistic ideologies, he usefully shows that nationalism translates contingent face-to-face social relationships into shared cultural identities.
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Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five roads to modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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Arguing that the earliest type of nationalism (English and Tudor) was both civic and individualistic, and that the French version was more collectivist, Greenfeld then adds a further three varieties marking divergent paths to modernity. She particularly attributes Romantic nationalism to the collective ressentiment —a concept also invoked in Gellner 1983—induced by preceding collective repression.
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Herzfeld, Michael. 2005. Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state. New York: Routledge.
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Nation-states secure citizen loyalty by tolerating practices and attitudes that contradict official ideology. Working beyond collective self-display (official nationalism), ethnographic analysis offers unique access to the rueful self-recognition, or cultural intimacy, that marshals this counterintuitive social support for nationalist projects (especially in crypto-colonial states). Individual performances reshape collective resemblance (“iconicity”), thereby creatively exploring and creating synergy between personal attitudes and national identity. Originally published in 1997.
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Shryock, Andrew, ed. 2004. Off stage/on display: Intimacy and ethnography in the age of public culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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In the age of mass communication and vibrant public culture, even highly authoritarian regimes cannot easily conceal the embarrassments of cultural traits that defy official values. In this collection, the several authors address the theme of cultural intimacy (see Herzfeld 2005) and its implications for understanding nationalism and its tactics in spaces where media representation encounters the skepticism of knowing local audiences.
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Electronic Reference Resources

The Nationalism Project offers a useful bibliography (starting, strategically, in 1980) as well as a blog and a collection of reviews and notices. It is loosely affiliated with the Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Americas (ARENA), an international, informal association focused on nationalism in the Americas. Although no anthropologists currently serve on its board, some will find in it a rich source of interdisciplinary linkages. An excellent overview of anthropological work on nationalism can be found in Italian in Vereni 2006–2007.

Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Americas (ARENA).
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This resource, based at the Richard Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina, particularly addresses nationalism in the Americas. The site provides links to discussion groups, information, and conferences, and it has an international reach.
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The Nationalism Project.
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This site is a rich English-language source of reviews, abstracts, citations, blogs, links to conferences and other sites, bibliographies, new book announcements, and current information on nationalism studies around the world.
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Vereni, Piero. 2006–2007. Dal punto di vista dei nazionalisti: L’antropologia e lo studio del nazionalismo.
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Vereni explores nationalism from within, as the institutional expression of collective belonging. He traces the roots of this idea in anthropology, as well as its influence on the discipline’s treatment of local cultures, in terms of how cultural features come to be represented as natural. This module also contains a useful survey of philosophical sources.
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Journals

Most anthropological articles on nationalism appear in the mainstream journals of the profession, and some anthropology journals have focused sets of articles on the topic (notably Anthropologie et Sociétés). A few multidisciplinary journals with a strong focus on nationalism are also strongly anthropological, at least in part, in their emphasis and orientation (notably Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, Nations and Nationalism, and Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism). At least one archaeology journal (Journal of Social Archaeology) often deals with the impact of nationalism on disciplinary practice.

Anthropologie et Sociétés.
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With its headquarters in Quebec City, this journal is an important sounding board for anthropological ideas about nationalism, especially as they affect local dynamics. Élise Dubuc and Laurier Turgeon guest edited a special issue in 2004, Musées et premières nations, (28.2: 7–209) on museums and First Nations.
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Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism.
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This influential periodical, which ran from 1973 until 2004, closed operations with the death of its founder, Thomas Spira.
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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
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This interdisciplinary journal has a frequent emphasis on nationalism, especially as it translates into intolerance.
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Journal of Social Archaeology.
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Articles that address the impact of nationalism on heritage management in archaeology often appear in this journal, which focuses more specifically on both the social interpretation of the archaeological record and the social context of current archaeological practice—the latter an especially fertile context for discussing the impact of nationalism.
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Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity.
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This specialist periodical has been relatively hospitable to the discipline of social and cultural anthropology; it has a heavy emphasis on Europe and the former USSR.
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Nations and Nationalism.
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This journal is the interdisciplinary quarterly of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism.
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Nationalism under Construction

Because anthropologists generally focus on local issues and study them ethnographically, their view tends to be a “bottom-up” critique of the homogenizing and totalizing claims of nationalist ideologies. In this section, we examine the processes whereby these “self-evident truths” have come into being. These processes nevertheless produce internal divisions representing differentiated understandings of past history and present politics (Shryock 1997) and painfully contrasted diasporic experiences (Danforth 1995). Even when the nation-state is officially inclusive, social practice may recall memories of more divided and violent times (Mandel 2008) or invoke the models of kinship and other forms of social organization that preceded the creation of encompassing national solidarities (e.g., Delaney 1995, Light 2011). After a nation-state has come into being, its unity is sometimes represented materially through the creation of miniature parks organizing the material heritage of the nation in a visually accessible form that suppresses territorial and ethnic differences by portraying them as essential components of national convergence (Errington 1998, Türeli 2010). That unity is also deliberately enhanced, as in the cases of Greece and Israel, by selective recognitions of overseas populations as diasporic migrants who, it is claimed, have a legal and moral right of “return” (Voutira 2003).

Danforth, Loring M. 1995. The Macedonian conflict: Ethnic nationalism in a transnational world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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This controversial study addresses the historical contingency whereby bearers of particularly national identities—here Greek and Macedonian—suppress their common origins in order to pursue nationalist goals. Exploring the battle over national identity among migrants in Australia, Danforth shows how even siblings may find themselves belonging to different national groups.
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Delaney, Carol. 1995. Father state, motherland, and the birth of Turkey. In Naturalizing power: Essays in feminist cultural analysis. Edited by Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, 177–199. New York: Routledge.
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An exemplary study of how the language of kinship, and more generally the idea of a natural basis for collective cultural and political identity, was transformed—while maintaining important continuities—in the transition from Ottoman Empire to republican Turkish nation-state.
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Errington, Shelly. 1998. The death of the authentic primitive art and other tales of progress. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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This work is a useful account of the visual representation of the nation through a geographical simulacrum of what are upheld as its major heritage components.
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Light, Nathan. 2011. Genealogy, history, nation. Nationalities Papers 39:33–53.
DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2010.534776Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Light argues that various forms of performance conceal the often intimate and complicated processes by which the representation of social identities as natural are naturalized.
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Mandel, Ruth. 2008. Cosmopolitan anxieties: Turkish challenges to citizenship and belonging in Germany. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Mandel’s book critically explores modern German national identity through a juxtaposition of the status and treatment of Muslim citizens, especially those of Turkish origin, with reflections on her own family’s German-Jewish past.
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Shryock, Andrew. 1997. Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: Oral history and textual authority in tribal Jordan. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Shryock documents the engagement of oral history with official historiography. Local leaders relativize historical “truth” in terms of a segmentary social structure; genealogical pedigree is the key to legitimacy. The Jordanian Bedouin, the cultural and social base of the monarchy, claim greater authenticity than that of “intrusive” others (especially Palestinians); their idiom therefore remains a powerful force in official symbolism (see also Layne 1994 cited under Heritage).
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Türeli, İpek. 2010. Modeling citizenship in Turkey’s miniature park. In Orienting Istanbul: Cultural capital of Europe. Edited by Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal, and İpek Türeli, 104–125. London: Routledge.
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This analysis of Miniaturk (a nationalist theme park of miniaturized monuments) from the perspective of architectural critique examines how the representation of Turkey as a culturally homogenous nation-state with “flattened” histories and geographies enunciates a bourgeois vision of society and gives a central role to Istanbul in the context of current processes of globalization.
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Voutira, Effie. 2003. Refugees: Whose term is it anyway? Emic and etic constructions of “refugees” in modern Greek. In The refugee convention at fifty: A view from forced migration studies. Edited by Joanne van Selm, Khoti Kamanga, John Morrison, Aninia Nadig, Sanja Spoljar Vrzina, and Loes van Willigen, 65–80. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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In a study that addresses how particular groups are claimed for a “homeland” with which they may have historically tenuous links, Voutira addresses the complex relations among national identity, political ideologies and alliances, migration, and a presumed legal right of return.
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Nationalisms in Conflict

Anthropology’s characteristically comparative approach sheds light on conflicts within a technically single but collapsing nation-state (Halpern and Kideckel 2000, Tambiah 1986, Tambiah 1989, Tambiah 1992), in some cases leading to the emergence of new national entities strikingly similar to each other in rhetoric and constitutional claims (Hayden 1996). Studies of contested social space (e.g., Bahloul 1996, Slyomovics 1998) underscore the zero-sum game aspect of political contests over habitat and heritage and their often tragic consequences for ordinary people’s lives and the erasure of more complex memories. Some of these cases show that nationalistic discourse may produce surprising parallels as well as divergences (Bryant 2004, Papadakis 1998).

Bahloul, Joëlle. 1996. The architecture of memory: A Jewish-Muslim household in colonial Algeria, 1937–1962. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This exploration of the different reconstructions of a mixed Muslim-Jewish habitation in Algeria by its former Jewish residents (now living in France and the United States) and by its current Muslim inhabitants adroitly documents the impact of nationalism on the material dimensions of ethnic coexistence and the role of memory in both restoring and rewriting the realities of the past. Originally published as La maison de mémoire: Ethnologie d’une demeure judéo-arabe en Algérie, 1937–1961 (Paris: Métaillé, 1992).
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Bryant, Rebecca. 2004. Imagining the modern: The cultures of nationalism in Cyprus. London: I. B. Tauris.
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A compelling account of both nationalisms on the divided island of Cyprus, this book offers forays into the impact of educational policies on the development of the two nationalisms and the impact of partially shared codes of blood, violence, and honor. It is nicely complemented by Papadakis 1998, a similarly evenhanded article cited below.
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Halpern, Joel M., and David A. Kideckel, eds. 2000. Neighbors at war: Anthropological perspectives on Yugoslav ethnicity, culture, and history. University Park: State Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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In this useful collection, the authors explore the collapse of a federated nation into nationalist entities composed of hitherto “ethnic” or “minority” groups. Addressing the various fragments of the former Yugoslav Federation, the authors provide local observation of collapse and reemergence in process.
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Hayden, Robert M. 1996. Imagined communities and real victims: Self-determination and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. American Ethnologist 23:783–801.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1996.23.4.02a00060Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Offers a critical analysis of the proliferation of increasingly similar national constitutions as various nation-states emerged from the wreckage of the Yugoslav Federation, all grounded in the language of victimization and blood and all seeking to define themselves in terms of rights based on shared ancestry.
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Papadakis, Yannis. 1998. Greek Cypriot narratives of history and collective identity: Nationalism as a contested process. American Ethnologist 25:149–165.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1998.25.2.149Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Papadakis examines two museums of “national” struggle on divided Cyprus to draw out similarities and differences between the two communities and their respective aspirations and uses of memory.
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Slyomovics, Susan. 1998. The object of memory: Arab and Jew narrate the Palestinian village. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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The war that followed the declaration of Israeli independence and the emergence of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan created enormous population displacements and replacements. Slyomovics documents the affective and historical claims made by Jews and Palestinians on a shared, long-inhabited space that experienced these wrenching disruptions.
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Tambiah, Stanley J. 1986. Sri Lanka: Ethnic fratricide and the dismantling of democracy. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This prescient volume documents the early unraveling of the multiethnic state and the emergence of powerful, and competing, majority Buddist Sinhala and minority Hindu Tamil nationalisms. Allowing his personal nostalgia to recapture a time when Hindus and Buddhists worshiped at each other’s shrines, Tambiah points to inequalities and ideological manipulations of the past as more credible sources of understanding than religious difference.
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Tambiah, Stanley J. 1989. Ethnic conflict in the world today. American Ethnologist 16:335–349.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1989.16.2.02a00090Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A classic—and critical—analysis of the role of “ethnonationalism” in the genesis of conflict.
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Tambiah, Stanley J. 1992. Buddhism betrayed? Religion, politics, and violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Here Tambiah develops the theme of a political expropriation of militant Buddhism and its engagement of monks as emergent from religiously inflected attacks on British colonial rule as a betrayal of Buddhism. In this regard, Tambiah provides a useful complement to Kapferer 1988 (cited under Defending the Status Quo), which entails a similar preoccupation with the paradox of a Buddhism that lends itself to acts of extreme violence.
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Defending the Status Quo

Whether as cultural (Befu 2001) or as political (Bowie 1997) conformism, nationalist ideologies are usually intolerant of critique or exceptions (Stolcke 1995), and these ideologies entail erasing the evidence of recent differences (Karakasidou 1997) and suppressing minority interests in the name of ostensibly benign discourses of liberation (Kapferer 1988; for a similar effect at the international level, see Askew 2010). The discourse itself, which defends its taxonomic character in public rituals (Handelman 2004), may also invoke material objects and visual symbols as the basis of claims to transcendent unity and similarity (Foster 2000, Schwimmer 1990).

Askew, Marc. 2010. The magic list of global status: UNESCO, World Heritage and the agendas of states. In Heritage and globalization. Edited by Sophia Labadi and Colin Long, 19–44. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
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Askew here offers a frontal critique of the ways in which the creation of a prestigious list of World Heritage sites, while grounded in ostensibly benign intentions, reinforces the most exclusionary of nationalistic policies (in this sense paralleling the critique of nationalism at the level of international institutions in Kapferer 1988 (cited below).
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Befu, Harumi. 2001. Hegemony of homogeneity: An anthropological analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne, Australia: Trans Pacific Press.
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Befu argues that Japan does not possess a coherent body of material national symbols. Instead, it has generated a discourse (Nihonjinron) that mobilizes national sentiment. Since World War II, the role of the emperor has largely disappeared, but new and stronger versions are emerging, possibly in response to a perceived geopolitical threat from China. Nihonjinron has consistently served as a civil religion.
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Bowie, Katherine. 1997. Rituals of national loyalty: An anthropology of the state and the village scout movement in Thailand. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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Bowie documents how monarchist-nationalist elements in the army and police orchestrated a mass movement to involve rural Thais in the persecution of suspected communists, while more generally inculcating into the populace a very streamlined historiography of the nation-state.
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Foster, Robert J. 2000. Materializing the nation: Commodities, consumption, and media in Papua New Guinea. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
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An engaging account of the mass-mediated material symbolism through which a newly emergent nationhood manifests itself, this volume should be consulted in conjunction with Schwimmer 1990 on the material culture of Maori nationalism.
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Handelman, Don. 2004. Nationalism and the Israeli state: Bureaucratic logic in public events. Oxford: Berg.
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Handelman explores public events and commemorative monuments and displays that erase the presence of minority identities and social class distinctions while seeking to consolidate equivalence between Jewish and Israeli essences, especially as a response to the Holocaust. He shows how such public performance renders bureaucratic logic as a form of incontrovertible common sense. Handelman’s book should be read in tandem with Abu El-Haj 2001 (cited under Archaeology and National Culture).
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Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of people, myths of state: Violence, intolerance, and political culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
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Kapferer offers a compelling comparison between a European-derived and an Asian nationalism. The ostensibly inclusive features of both Australian egalitarianism and Sri Lankan Buddhist pacifism morph into violent intolerance via celebrations of male heroism in Australia and rituals of exorcism in Sri Lanka. Invoking Louis Dumont’s concept of “encompassment” to explain this apparent paradox, Kapferer argues that extreme violence can thus nest within ideologies of inclusion and tolerance.
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Karakasidou, Anastasia. 1997. Fields of wheat, hills of blood: Passages to nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870–1990. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This work, highly controversial when first published, uses archival and ethnographic research to show how Greek Macedonia was progressively Hellenized by church authorities and state agents as well as by the rising bourgeois merchant class with its pretensions of a Hellenic rather than an Orthodox Christian collective identity. The furor surrounding its publication itself illustrates how nationalism cultivates collective rage and resentment.
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Schwimmer, Eric. 1990. La genèse du discours nationaliste chez les Maori. Culture 10:23–24.
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An important demonstration that, while nationalism may (for historically contingent reasons) involve imitating European models, it also allows a great deal of play to creative reformulation. By explicitly attributing agency and creativity to the Maori, Schwimmer may have avoided the opprobrium incurred by Hanson 1989 (cited under Emergent Nationalism).
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Stolcke, Verena. 1995. Talking culture: New boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe. Current Anthropology 36:1–24.
DOI: 10.1086/204339Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Although not strictly about nationalism as such, this article provides a timely warning about the implicit, and often realized, relations among nationalism, localism, and racism (and other forms of intolerance).
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Emergent Nationalisms

Sometimes it is possible to track attempts to generate a sense of collective ethnic identity as they clash with encompassing national structures and attempt to create a distinctive space for themselves. While most anthropological accounts of such efforts have been sympathetic and even proactively defensive of such efforts (e.g., De Cesari 2010, Jackson 1995), commentators who have analyzed the processes of identity construction have sometimes been charged with denying the reality of such identities (e.g., Hanson 1989)—a charge that ignores the anthropological insistence on the constructedness of all ethnic and national identities. The nation-state figures prominently in that critical perspective, and these case studies show clearly how minorities seeking to establish their own right to a national entity often adopt the reifying and essentialist tactics of the encompassing powers against which they are struggling for recognition.

De Cesari, Chiara. 2010. Creative heritage: Palestinian heritage NGOs and defiant arts of government. American Anthropologist 112:625–637.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01280.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examining the recent Palestinian art biennales (biennials), de Cesari explores heritage-informed art as a platform for performing the imagined future Palestinian nation-state. This art complicates the usual heritage–creativity dichotomy, revealing the agency that inspires, and inheres in, representational practices.
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Hanson, F. Allan. 1989. The making of the Maori: Cultural invention and its logic. American Anthropologist 91:890–899.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1989.91.4.02a00050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This constructivist essay, which was benignly intended as an attempt to document national emergence in a nonjudgmental way, provoked a deeply hostile response from Maori activists concerned that such analyses might imply that their identity had been faked. See Jackson 1995 for a different approach in a different context.
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Jackson, Jean E. 1995. Culture, genuine and spurious: The politics of Indianness in the Vaupés, Colombia. American Ethnologist 22.1: 3–27.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1995.22.1.02a00010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A salutary warning that studies that seek to deconstruct emergent forms of collective cultural identity, useful in thinking about the emergence of nation-states in today’s world, can threaten the survival of small ethnic groups whose only recourse is to that same discursive practice.
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Archaeology and National Culture

Grahame Clark (see Clark 1939) was an early critic of the ideological use of archaeology for propaganda purposes, in this case by the Nazis. In a case of reverse nationalism, David L. Clarke (see Clarke 1962) thought that British archaeologists hesitated to recognize artistic innovation in the archaeological record because of their stereotypically British embarrassment at the very idea of artistic originality. Some archaeology, like folklore, was associated with attempts to blend multiple origins into single modern identities (e.g., Dietler 1994). But the fiercest struggles have usually come with the association of archaeology with territorial claims, as in Israel/Palestine (e.g., Abu El-Haj 2001) and Greece (Hamilakis 2007), where the continuing struggle over museum representation also signifies larger geopolitical questions of whose political interests nationalist archaeology serves (e.g., Plantzos 2011). Archaeology, through a practical realization of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, appeared, quite literally, to materialize the earlier presence of “the same” people as those now represented by nationalistic as well as colonial (or crypto-colonial) discourse.

Abu El-Haj, Nadia. 2001. Facts on the ground: Archaeological practice and territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Israeli archaeologists and guides impose a selective reading, grounded in biblical history and resistant to Islamic cultural presences in particular, on Jerusalem’s urban landscape. The controversy this has aroused, including calls to deny the author tenure at Columbia University, parallels the controversy surrounding the publication of Karakasidou 1997, a book on Macedonia (cited under Defending the Status Quo).
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Clark, Grahame. 1939. Archaeology and society. London: Methuen.
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Clark’s magisterial work includes a stern denunciation of the Nazis’ ideological use—and distortion—of archaeological knowledge in support of their racial theories and claims to world domination, and was thus a very early forerunner of current dissections of the political uses of archaeology (e.g., Abu El-Haj 2001, Kohl and Fawcett 1995).
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Clarke, David L. 1962. Matrix analysis and archaeology with particular reference to British beaker pottery. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, n.s. 28:371–383.
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Clarke surmised that the British reluctance to acknowledge local origins for some cultural innovations in the archaeological record was due to a stereotypical embarrassment at being credited with artistic originality.
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Dietler, Michael. 1994. “Our ancestors the Gauls”: Archaeology, ethnic nationalism, and the manipulation of Celtic identity in modern Europe. American Anthropologist 96:584–605.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00090Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An elegant demonstration of how archaeologists contributed to the emphasis on a unified Gaulish past in a France said to have derived its more recent ancestry from a dual background combining Germanic (Frankish) and Roman (Latin) elements.
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Hamilakis, Yannis. 2007. The nation and its ruins: Antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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Addressing a country where the Archaeological Service has been a powerful political presence, Hamilakis critically assesses the relationship among archaeological practice, local and academic politics, and nationalism. A particularly perceptive chapter addresses the standing of Manolis Andronikos, controversial excavator of the Vergina tomb attributed by him to Philip of Macedon and thus a key player in the “Macedonian question.”
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Kohl, Philip L., and Clare Fawcett, eds. 1995. Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This collection may well provide the most useful overall account of the involvement of archaeologists in promoting and “justifying” nationalist projects. The volume centers on a set of well-described case studies.
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Plantzos, Dimitris. 2011. Behold the raking geison: The new Acropolis Museum and its context-free archaeologies. Antiquity 85:613–630.
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This avant-garde Greek archaeologist’s controversial attack on the nationalistic and Eurocentric underpinnings of an important new museum represents a radical departure for the internal self-critique of Greek archaeology.
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Folklore and National Culture

Despite the radical split between folklore studies and social and cultural anthropology, folklore studies prompted much early anthropological analysis of nationalism (Herzfeld 1982, Wilson 1976). Social anthropologists have, during the past thirty years, focused on cultural and social factors influencing the production of nationalistic texts and practices. In the process, they have critically examined the impact of various cultural disciplines (including anthropology) on nationalist thought and action and the consequent ways in which nationalists have sought to harness such knowledge for their own ends. Folklore’s emphasis on texts allowed for the reconstruction of “original versions” (Urtexte) of “national poems” that metonymically stood for the nation and its origins. Influenced in varying degrees by the writings of Herder and Vico, early folklorists sought spiritual continuities between ancient and present cultures as the justification for modern national consolidation—a project that could also lead to historical distortion in the name of national unity (see Wills 1978). The folklorists’ work was closely allied to that of historical linguists, as in the work of the brothers Grimm. Conceptually reproducing for the rural hinterlands what their contemporaries in social anthropology did for the colonized non-European peoples, they wrote a master narrative intended to justify hierarchical arrangements placing political and cultural elites at the moral and intellectual apex; as in archaeology, this narrative reached a peak of distortion in Nazi Germany (Kamenetsky 1977), where, as an instrument of world domination, it drew on the selective recasting of ancient texts that already contained elements of modern configurations of race, blood, and nation, and where it was also brought into line with persistent associations of urban life with corruption, decay, sexual perversion, and foreign contamination (see Linke 1985, Mosse 1988). Close examination of locally produced folklore texts often reveals fissures not readily admitted by the formal ideology of the nation-state that nevertheless frame such gaps and provide the idiom in which they are presented (Herzfeld 2003).

Herzfeld, Michael. 1982. Ours once more: Folklore, ideology, and the making of modern Greece. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.
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A study of the role of folklore in the construction of modern nationalism and the nation-state, illustrating the role of intellectuals and academics in selectively exploring linkages with the ancient past within a largely foreign-derived and Eurocentric model of cultural continuity.
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Herzfeld, Michael. 2003. Localism and the logic of nationalistic folklore: Cretan reflections. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43:281–310.
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A comparison of folklore and localism in the contexts of a highly successful nationalist project (Greece) and one that continues to bemoan its incompleteness (Italy), with the major emphasis on the former and on the limiting case of Crete, which boasts of its distinctive place within Greek culture without usually reverting to the separatism that bedevils Italian localism.
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Kamenetsky, Christa. 1977. Folktale and ideology in the Third Reich. Journal of American Folklore 90:168–178.
DOI: 10.2307/539697Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Nazi propaganda achieved a pernicious reshaping of even the most innocent-seeming aspects of German folklore, once the source and object of some of the philologically most careful and detailed European research, as a means of projecting the imagined collective destiny of the so-called Aryan peoples onto the Nazis’ goal of German world domination.
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Linke, Uli. 1985. Blood as metaphor in proto-Indo-European. Journal of Indo-European Studies 13:333–376.
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Linke’s valuable exploration of the etymological, historical, and ideological roots of metaphors of blood in the Indo-European world provides chronologically deep and intellectually critical purchase on the naturalizing claims of European nationalisms.
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Mosse, George L. 1988. Nationalism and sexuality: Middle-class morality and sexual norms in modern Europe. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
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George Mosse, a historian, traces the links between ideas about sexuality and claims to moral and racial purity that reached their apogee in the rise of Nazi Germany but have deep roots in European history. Originally published in 1985.
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Oinas, Felix, ed. 1978. Folklore, nationalism, and politics. Columbus, OH: Slavica.
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This useful and early collection of essays deals with the role of folklore in the consolidation of national identities, principally in eastern Europe.
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Wills, Garry. 1978. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
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This historical work offers a useful example for anthropologists interested in understanding, in comparative perspective, the processes and forms of agency through which a sense of unified emergence is created out of chaotic and disparate events.
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Wilson, William. 1976. Folklore and nationalism in modern Finland. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
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Wilson explores the role of folklore in defining a nation that, while resisting the rule of the “un-European” Russians, nonetheless felt itself to be on the very margins of Europe. He pays particular attention to the role of Elias Lönrott in creating a “national epic” (the Kalevala) out of fragments of oral tradition and the centrality of this epic to the creation of a sense of nationhood.
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Language and Discourse

Language is a crucial factor in the emergence of national identities and their attendant ideologies; language revival and formalization plays a key role in the consolidation of national identities, as the cases of modern Greek in Greece and Hebrew in Israel demonstrate. It can also serve as the basis for minority resistance to an encompassing nation-state. Nationalism can thus be treated as sometimes resting on language standardization, whether this leads to the creation of a nation-state or to some lesser collective entity (e.g., Fishman 1972, Woolard 1989). It may also be regarded as itself most usefully treated as a form of discourse (Özkırımlı 2005). (Discussion of language is so pervasive in studies of nationalism that the topic spills over into several other subcategories of this entry.)

Fishman, Joshua. 1972. Language and nationalism: Two integrative essays. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
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A unique contribution from the perspective of socio-linguistics; the author shows how language not only serves as the basis for national mobilization, but is also affected by the creation of national boundaries buttressed by exclusive views of national identity.
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Özkırımlı, Umut. 2005. Contemporary debates on nationalism: A critical engagement. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
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A Turkish political scientist who draws productively on anthropological literature, Özkırımlı treats nationalism as discourse, arguing that other approaches uncritically endorse its essentialism and claims of distinctiveness from similar formations such as religion. Remarking that globalization has not erased the state so much as changed its functions, he nevertheless sees globalization as hastening a decline in national sentiment, with concomitantly increased interest in cultural hybridity.
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Woolard, Kathryn A. 1989. Double talk: Bilingualism and the politics of ethnicity in Catalonia. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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This exemplary study details the complexity of a diglossic language situation out of which nationalists were able to forge, not an independent nation-state, but an autonomous region.
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Heritage

The theme of national “heritage” displays suggestive affinities with the long-studied anthropological staple of “inheritance,” the two terms etymological cognates in English and other European languages. Handler, who argued that European-derived nationalism represented the projection of property-owning individualism onto a collective project (Handler 1985a, Handler 1985b), produced an early field study of cultural politics in Quebec (Handler 1988). Others have subsequently examined the idea of heritage and its impact on the relationship between state and citizenry and especially on the reorganization of habitation to suit the new political realities (e.g., Askew 1996, Herzfeld 1991). A particularly interesting case is represented by the Jordanian adoption of nomadism—often at odds with state structures—as a romanticized heritage for the new nation (Layne 1994, Maffi 2004). Sometimes internal differences and complex origins (including tensions between the descendants of, respectively, colonizers and colonized) can pit different forms of nationalism against each other, especially when it comes to defining the ownership and public representation of shared spaces (e.g., Silverman 2006). Curiously, globalization appears to have reinforced some of the more obviously nationalistic dimensions of heritage preservation and promotion. Notably, UNESCO’s role often emphasizes one-sided nationalistic interpretations while also favoring those that fit a Western-dominated narrative (Askew 2010, cited under Defending the Status Quo; de Cesari 2010). Against such closure, local practices often reveal suppressed, but active, alternative modes of national representation.

Askew, Marc. 1996. The rise of Moradok and the decline of the Yarn: Heritage and cultural construction in urban Bangkok. Sojourn 11.2: 183–210.
DOI: 10.1355/SJ11-2ASave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Askew shows how state and municipal policy in Bangkok are rapidly undermining the social cohesion of the neighborhood in an attempt to absorb lived spaces into a reified image of national heritage.
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de Cesari, Chiara. 2010. World Heritage and mosaic universalism: A view from Palestine. Journal of Social Archaeology 10: 299–324.
DOI: 10.1177/1469605310378336Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Multiculturalism, benignly intended (as Askew 2010, cited under Defending the Status Quo, also argues for UNESCO policies), has actually solidified lines of cultural difference and privileged elite perspectives. De Cesari uses a series of workshops in Jerusalem and Ramallah to show how local historic conservation practices are occluded by the World Heritage apparatus.
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Handler, Richard. 1985a. On dialogue and destructive analysis: Problems in narrating nationalism and ethnicity. Journal of Anthropological Research 41.2: 171–182.
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Handler here applies historian C. B. Macpherson’s model of “possessive individualism” to European-derived forms of nationalism, arguing that these project the idea of the property ownership central to early modern European ideas of personhood onto the possession of a reified culture as much as onto a territory.
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Handler, Richard. 1985b. On having a culture: Nationalism and the preservation of Quebec’s Patrimoine. In Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture. Edited by George Stocking, 192–217. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
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In this article, Handler develops his argument about “possessive individualism” with specific reference to the Quebec case.
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Handler, Richard. 1988. Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
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This book-length study of a specific and so far unsuccessful nationalist movement explores the ways in which patrimoine (heritage) becomes a key element in the search for national redemption. Examining the role of the Roman Catholic Church and of local language politics, Handler offers an exemplary study of the translation of early modern “possessive individualism” into territorial and cultural claims.
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Herzfeld, Michael. 1991. A place in history: Social and monumental time in a Cretan town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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An ethnographic study of how architectural fabric becomes caught up in the struggle over competing interpretations of familial, local, and national history and identity. In the context of a clash between Eurocentric classicism and the recuperation of more recent and “oriental” pasts, monumentalization suppresses social aspects of temporality that are often more meaningful to residents, who nevertheless often find—and even seek—economic relief in adapting to the official discourse and practices of the conservation authorities.
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Layne, Linda L. 1994. Home and homeland: The dialogics of tribal and national identities in Jordan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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This study focuses particularly on the idea of “Bedouin” (nomadic) identity as paradoxically underlying the unitary needs of the Jordanian nation-state project, particularly as these enter into conflict with other, competing claims, notably those of the country’s Palestinian residents.
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Maffi, Irène. 2004. Pratiques du patrimoine et politiques de la mémoire en Jordanie: Entre histoire dynastique et récits communautaires? Lausanne, Switzerland: Payot.
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Maffi, like Layne, examines the role of material objects in the creation of national identity linked directly to the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan, a relatively new country, showing that, as Shryock 1997 (cited under Nationalism under Construction) had similarly indicated, divergent narratives underlie the unitary representation of a shared culture.
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Silverman, Helaine. 2006. The historic district of Cusco as an open-air site museum. In Archaeological site museums in Latin America. Edited by Helaine Silverman, 159–183. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida.
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Nation-state ideology and its material representations in planning and architecture often mask competing ideas about the composition of the nation itself. In this example from Peru, we follow the conflict between Hispanic and indigenous interpretations of the cultural past and present as these are foregrounded in the context of intense tourism and UNESCO World Heritage and World City designations.
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Performance

Performance art serves as a powerful source of nationalism, both because of its capacity to excite sentiment and because of its potential as a unifying medium. It also permits a remarkable degree of unspoken and potentially ambiguous exploration of alternatives to the official view of national identity (Askew 2002). This dimension sometimes excites deep suspicion among the representatives of an ethnic majority because it suggests the risk of emergent new, local nationalisms from within the relatively impenetrable spaces of cultural intimacy (Light 2008). Performance, especially in such broadly based media as television and radio, can also inculcate models of national identity while opening them up to exploration at the local level, especially when those models reflect locally rooted notions of gender and kinship (Mankekar 1999).

Askew, Kelly. 2002. Performing the nation: Swahili music and cultural politics in Tanzania. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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This ethnomusicological study connects national politics with interpersonal power dynamics in Zanzibar, an island with a strong history of autonomy from the nation-state to which it nevertheless belongs. Askew, who participated in performances herself, explores how people negotiate and reformulate their understandings of citizenship through performance—not only on the stage, but also through self-presentation during such events.
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Light, Nathan. 2008. Intimate heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam song in Xinjiang. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
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Light explores the ethnomusicology of song performance to show how nationalist sentiment is mobilized in a minority that faces, at best, deep suspicion on the part of the ruling Han majority in China.
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Mankekar, Purnima. 1999. Screening culture, viewing politics: An ethnography of television, womanhood, and nation in postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Mankekar explores the mutual influence of nationalist Hindu ideology and local kinship and other social arrangements in urban India through the production and viewing of dramas based on ancient epics. She discusses the current representation of these highly gendered dramas as vindications of a national imaginary, while also documenting the impact of gender on their reception in intimate home spaces.
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Eugenics, Genetics, Genealogy

Genetic nationalism is one of the most recent areas of study, but its roots are very old, lying in the concept of the patriline, or genos, that underlays much of the modeling of social organization that Western scholars attributed to the ancient Greeks, as it did many of the genealogical models that we find informing nationalism itself (see Linke 1985, cited under Folklore and National Culture). Racial purity had to be balanced against the risk of incest, a weighty sin in many religions (Kahn 2000). The 19th-century insistence on transcendent similarity and the frequent conflation of “racial” (or genetic) with cultural traits, as well as the folklorists’ search for cultural continuities with the ancient past and the assumption that racial identity could be equated with the spiritual inheritance of a people, prepared the way, in an age easily seduced by the idea of genetic “explanations” of everything from gendered behavior to the medical proclivities attributed to particular ethnic groups (see Fullwiley 2008), for the search for common genetic “origins” that would justify proclamations of national unity. Pálsson and Rabinow 1999 addresses uses of the genome by particular nations, while Simpson 2000 provides a handy overview. This is a very recent development of the anthropology of nationalism, and, at present, this article can serve only as a tentative sampling of probable insights to come.

Fullwiley, Duana. 2008. The biologistical construction of race: “Admixture” technology and the new genetic medicine. Social Studies of Science 38.5: 695–735.
DOI: 10.1177/0306312708090796Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Advocates for medical interventions assisting particular groups have looked to recent advances in genetics as a source of legitimate (and legitimizing) insight into the bases of medical intervention. Their arguments depend on assuming that Old World populations were, in genetic terms, relatively “pure” and working from that assumption toward collective approaches to New World ethnic groups’ medical issues.
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Kahn, Susan Martha. 2000. Reproducing Jews: A cultural account of assisted conception in Israel. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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A very different view of the nationalist imperative in Israel, Kahn’s study addresses the impact of religion, attitudes toward incest, and the balance between the fear of inadvertent incest, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fear of miscegenation on government policies toward, and people’s practice of, reproductive technologies.
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Pálsson, Gísli, and Paul Rabinow. 1999. Iceland: The case of a national human genome project. Anthropology Today 15.5: 14–18.
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The authors take the development of an Icelandic genome project as the starting point for a critical thinking of the ethics of anthropological engagement. While this essay is not strictly about nationalism, it provides an important text for the discussion in Simpson 2000, and it is recommended that the two papers be read in tandem.
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Simpson, Bob. 2000. Imagined genetic communities: Ethnicity and essentialism in the twenty-first century. Anthropology Today 16.3: 3–6.
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8322.00023Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Suggesting that DNA today plays the popular role formerly occupied by blood in thinking about nationhood, Simpson worries that the current prominence of genetics as a metaphor for national identity could pave the way for a resurgence of the use of eugenics for the nefarious purposes to which the latter was put in the 20th century.