National and Folk Cultures

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Lecture 2

• National and Folk Cultures

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Nationalism

• Overview of arguments
• Where did nationalism come from?
• Examples
• USA
• England
• Scotland

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Background debates

• Benedict Anderson (1983) Imagined Communities
  reflections on the origen and spread of
  nationalism
• Ernest Gellner (1983) Nations and Nationalism

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Gellner

• Nation and politics
• Nationalism is primarily a political principle,
  which holds that the political and the national
  unit should be congruent
• Nations and economic transformations
• Social dislocation of industrialisation

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Anderson

• People only know or meet a small number of people
  with whom they share nationality but imagine they
  are part of a much larger group.
• Share cultural traits, ideas, information,
  allegiances etc.
• Nation imagined as a shared community.
• HOW?

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Print Capitalism

• news media
• novels and film
• poetry
• music

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The Royal family
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The nation

• Romantically imagined
• Landscape
• Blood
• Language

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Nations

• constructed
• invented

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Two cultures

• Rural
• Urban

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USA

• The Patriot Act
• Shailer Matthews
• George Bush

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Patriotism

• Imagined through
• Government and media rhetoric
• Education in the class room
• Religious politics
• Militarism
• Creation of a public holiday
• Wearing a lapel pin

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Nations under Threat

• Distinct identity threatened by risk of
  incorporation into a greater whole, or when
  ethnic boundaries contradict state-nation
  boundaries.
• Euskadi and Spain
• Former Yugoslavia
• Scotland and England