The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates About Ethnicity and Nationalism by Anthony D. Smith

Author:Anthony D. Smith [Smith, Anthony D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Ideologies, Social Science, General, Nationalism & Patriotism, Sociology, Political Science
ISBN: 9780745680507
Google: j5ZtAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2014-01-23T20:31:30+00:00

What all this suggests is the need for an approach that does justice to the character of different types of collective cultural identities in each epoch, while charting the overall relationship between their different kinds. These are some of the themes and issues that I hope to address when I outline an ethnosymbolic approach to the problem of the role of nations and nationalism in history.

3 Social Construction and Ethnic Genealogy

In the past two decades the idea of the nation as a text to be narrated and an artifact and construct to be deconstructed has gained wide currency. For all its relativist and postmodernist subtexts, this remains essentially a modernist perspective and one that often has a post-Marxist lineage. At the same time, it seeks to go beyond modernism to encompass an era of “postmodernity”; and because it sees nations and nationalism as phenomena intrinsic to modernity, it predicts the imminent demise of both as we move into a postmodern, global era.

The viewpoints that can be grouped under this postmodern rubric are many and varied. But they all share a fundamental belief in the socially constructed quality of the nation and nationalism. This is why I find it useful to refer to them as “constructionist” approaches or perspectives. The basic ideas of social constructionism include the following:

The assumption that nationalism created and continues to create nations, rather than the opposite

The belief that nations are recent and novel products of modernity, so far sharing the modernist view

A view of nations as social constructs and cultural artifacts deliberately engineered by elites

The idea that nationalists “invent” and “imagine” the nation by representing it to the majority through a variety of cultural media and social rituals

The belief that only in modern conditions is such invention and imagination possible and likely

A sense of the supersession of the age of nations along with that of modernity in a more globalizing epoch.

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