DOCSLIB.ORG

Chapter 1: Imagining National Identity

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Chapter 1: Imagining National Identity Chapter 1: Imagining national identity The power and efficacy of the nation as a foundation for political, social and cultural identity has been an enduring concern of scholars throughout the twentieth century. 1 The nation’s centrality to identity formation has been accepted, but accounting for the ways in which its discursive borders are conceived and articulated remains uncertain. In this chapter I will engage some of the primary ways in which nation formation, and the nation’s endurance as a frame for identity, has been considered. In many ways the overarching theories about identity formation are prone to abstraction, and often disguise the myriad ways in which identity is determined and contested. The question of who speaks for the nation is a concern that can only really be deciphered by turning to the particular temporal and spatial sites of its enunciation. The intellectual debates of the 1950s and 60s in Japan over autonomy and modernity provide us with one such intellectual and political arena through which to consider the competing ideas that underpin the efficacy and endurance of the nation in Japan. 2 The debates reveal that the continuing resonance of the nation as a basis for identity is founded not simply on the power or hegemony of the political elite but on the stories and ideals exposed in the nation’s various imaginings. 1 See for example Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World , Verso, London, 1998; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982; Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories , Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991; Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983; Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations , Blackwell, Oxford, 1986; 2 In his book Dreams of Difference Kevin Doak turns to the notion of ‘ethnic nationalism’ as a basis for identity formation in Japan divorced from ‘official nationalism.’ It highlights the competing ways in which the nation is imagined as the basis of identity. See Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity , University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994, pp. xi-x1iii. 29 In this chapter I will explore the space that provocative intellectual and literary critic Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924-) and other intellectuals of the postwar period opened up for the formation and articulation of national identity. 3 The ideas emanating from the leftist intellectual debates during this period reveal a fervent desire to shape the foundations of postwar national identity and direct the character of political renewal. In the 1950s and 1960s the work of Maruyama Masao, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Oda Makoto and Yoshimoto Takaaki exemplified the centrality of modernity and autonomy to conceptions of the postwar national imaginary. The nation emerged as a discursive site in which visions of pluralism, agency, activism and resistance were brought to life. Who speaks for the nation? Histories of the 20th century are indelibly inscribed with the imprint of the nation and its imaginings. In Japan, the defense of nation and sovereignty led millions to their death in war; the nation’s boundaries have framed political, social and cultural institutions; and national histories have enveloped personal and communal memories. 4 While the nation’s future longevity cannot be assured its centrality to the twentieth century is in little doubt. A number of scholars have examined the continuing resonance of the nation’s political, social and cultural institutions and the way that its borders shape community and identity. They have turned to the institutions of the state in order to account for the power encased in its discursive borders. Scholars such as Weber, Hobsbawm, Gellner, and Breuilly have dislodged the nation from its 3 The humanist and ‘internationalist’ intellectuals (otherwise known as ‘progressive’) referred to people such as Tsurumi Shunsuke, Maruyama Masao, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Fujita Sh ōzō, Kuno Osamu and Hashikawa Buns ō. They were the prominent liberal intellectuals of the period.Yoshimoto Takaaki, ‘Nihon no nashonarizumu,’ in Yoshimoto Takaaki (ed.), Nashonarizumu , Gendai Nihon Shis ō Taikei, 5, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1964, pp. 7-55. 4 See for example, William Beasley, The Modern History of Japan , Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1973; John W. Hall et al (eds.) The Cambridge History of Japan , Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988-1999; Janet Hunter, The Emergence of Modern Japan: An Introductory History Since 1853 , Longman, New York, 1989; G. Sansom, History of Japan , 1958; Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan , Penguin Books, England, 1968. 30 ‘objective,’ essentialist foundations, and highlighted the contingency of its political construction. 5 Challenging the representation of the nation as a pre- modern or ‘natural’ basis for identity, these scholars have highlighted the elemental role of political leaders in fashioning and in some cases imposing the conceptual and geographic boundaries of the nation. They have illustrated the ways in which industrialization, technological development, the centralization of power, and imperialism, have facilitated the formulation and dissemination of shared values, ethnic homogeneity and unbroken kinship lines, across a clearly delineated geographic terrain. Nationalism has been deemed a crucial factor in this process. Theorists have shown that by making recourse to a shared history, a clear and traceable genealogy for the nation and its people, and a concurrent feeling of solidarity, political leaders have used nationalism in order to justify their authority, define and often extend the nation’s borders, and nurture a sense of identity in the territory over which they claim sovereignty. Nationalism operates as a tool through which a national identity is transmitted across time and space colonizing both the past and the future with identities that are in fact specific to the period in which they manifest themselves. Anthony Giddens goes so far as to suggest that through the ‘processes of allocation, delimitation, demarcation and administration’ it is the institutions of the modern state that underpin the continuing existence of the nation and its centrality to inter nation al politics (my emphasis). 6 Eric Hobsbawm accounts for the nation’s resilience as a basis for identity by highlighting the state’s ‘invention of tradition.’ Hobsbawm notes that in spite of recourse to the ‘remotest antiquity’ and ‘natural human communities’ that 5 Max Weber, ‘The concept of ethnicity: what is an ethnic group,’ in M.Guibernau & J. Rex, (eds.) The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Migration, Polity Press, Blackwell Publishers, UK, 1997; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. 6 Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism , University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985. 31 pervades representations of the nation, it is an identity established and sustained by the ‘invention of tradition.’ 7 The notion of ‘invented traditions’ refers to the way in which an ideological agenda is artificially linked to the past, and to the uses of ‘tradition’ within contemporary political discourse. Hobsbawm concurs with modernists such as Ernest Gellner stating that ‘nations as a natural god-given way of classifying men, as an inherent … political destiny are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures.’ 8 In this sense nationalism operates like a photograph or museum piece - capturing people, places and ideas at a fixed moment and displaying them as evidence of an enduring culture and identity. The ability of leaders to control the past, to write history and invent tradition, greatly enhances the efficacy of the nation as a basis for identity. One of the limitations of the term ‘invention’ is that it assumes a choice between the invention and authenticity of tradition and identity; it suggests that the nation threatens truth and that a genuine or real tradition exists and can be identified by an objective historian. Hobsbawm writes: ‘I cannot but add that no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist … nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. As Renan said: “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”’ 9 In more recent discussion on the nation scholars have embraced the notion of ‘imagined communities’ and the ‘national phantasm’ in order to expose the myths that justify political authority, and account for the nation’s endurance as 7 The ‘invention of tradition’ refers to more than simply nation formation though this is where it has often been employed. See Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984. 8 Ernest Gellner quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , 10. See also Ernst Gellner, Nations
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 4 Imagined Communities
    BENEDICTANDERSON 4 nationality as a socio-cultural concept - in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender - vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, 'Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The 'political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes, or Webers. This 'emptiness' easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension. Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that ~. there is 'no there there'. It is characteristic that even so sympathetic a student of nationalism as Tom Nairn can nonetheless write that: '''Nationalism'' is the IMAGINED COMMUNITIES pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as "neurosis" in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of help- Benedict Anderson lessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable.'2 Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostasize the existence of Nationalism-with-a-big-N (rather as one might Age-with-a-capi- tal-A) and then to classify 'it' as an ideology. (Note that if everyone has an age, Age is merely an analytical expression.) It would, I think, make things easier if INTRODUCTION one treated it as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view 'liberalism' or 'fascism'.
    [Show full text]
  • RACE and ETHNICITY Not Do
    distribute or post, copy, not CHAPTER Do RACE AND ETHNICITY5 Copyright ©2021 by SAGE Publications, Inc. This work may not be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means without express written permission of the publisher. 146 iStockphoto.com/monkeybusinessimages CHAPTER OUTLINE LEARNING OBJECTIVES Race and Ethnicity 5.1 Compare the concepts of race and ethnicity • Using Your Sociological Imagination: and how they are socially constructed. Defining and Calculating Racial Groups • Reading: “Optional Ethnicities: For 5.2 Critically examine the real consequences Whites Only?,” by Mary C. Waters of race and ethnicity in society. The Consequences of Social Constructions 5.3 Compare the various theories for how • Methods in Depth: Racial Stereotypes and Voting and why prejudice develops in society and the ways that it can be reduced. Where Does Prejudice Come From? 5.4 Explain the different routes through which Immigration immigrants come to the United States and assess • Reading: From Imagined Communities: how well the United States incorporates newcomers. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, by Benedict Anderson • Using Your Sociological Imagination: American Civics Test for Citizenship Summary Key Terms distribute For Further Reading or achel Dolezal was the president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from February 2014 until June 2015. post,The NAACP is one of the largest and Rmost well-known groups working for civil rights for African Americans in the United States. It was founded in 1909 by a group that included W. E. B. Du Bois (a well-known sociologist you will hear about later in this chapter).
    [Show full text]
  • The Three Faces of the Korean Nation
    Athens Journal of Social Sciences- Volume 2, Issue 4 – Pages 285-296 The Three Faces of the Korean Nation By Étienne Girouard This article proposes a theory on how national genetics may solve the theoretical maelstrom engulfing the study of nations in Korea. The national genetics theory is firstly presented with the concepts of national genotype, national genotypic heritage, national chromosomes, national genes and national phenotypes being defined. National genetics is then applied to the heterodox case of Korea, where three different nations are often confused due to the striking resemblance between them. The themes of imperialism and political legitimacy are seen as sociopolitical chromosomes structuring Korea's continually evolving national genotype. It will be shown that these chromosomes are part of a national genotypic heritage that has framed all three national phenotypes of Korean modern history: the republican nation, the revolutionary nation and the developmental nation. Finally, this article will demonstrate how national genetics helps resolve previous antagonistic claims made about nations, nationalism and ethnicity in Korea. Keywords: elite nationalism, genetics theory, imagined communities, imperialism, Korea A Theoretical Maelstrom There are a myriad of distinctive features that help single out the Korean Peninsula as a compelling case study in the field of nations and nationalism. On one hand, proponents of ethno-symbolism see the former state of Koryo (935-1392) as a typical but rare case of a pre-modern nation (Ozkirimli and Grosby 2007: 528, Smith 1998: 190). On the other hand, primordialists, utilizing a national history and celebrating the alleged ethnic, cultural and linguistic homogeneity of a people tightly bound to its peninsula, support the argument that only one Korean nation has existed through the ages (Duncan 1998: 198).
    [Show full text]
  • Download Download
    Anthropology of East Europe Review ‘WE ARE BESSARABIANS HERE’: IDENTITY, TRADITION AND POWER IN SOUTHERN BESSARABIA Ekaterina Anastassova Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria In the last three centuries the multiethnic101 How did these processes influence the ethnic area between the Dniester, the Prut and the Danube and religious situation in the agrarian multiethnic Rivers, formerly called Bessarabia102, has been region of Southern Bessarabia? The question is worth incorporated in different states (the Moldovan asking, bearing in mind that nationalism (or Kingdom, the Russian Empire, Romania and the ethnicisms) is shaped and directed by elites (Gellner USSR). Its peripheral location, the lack of a long- 1983). These elites, through national (or respectively lived state continuity, and the failure of policies ethnic) institutions are able to manipulate the identity directed towards uniting people under a national of the so-called ‘masses’ by using arguments of real paradigm, have undoubtedly determined the many- or mostly invented traditions (Hobsbawm, 1983). century stability of ethnic (and religious) How did the distance from the centre and the agrarian communities103 in the area. This was illustrated by nature of the area, which suggests a lack of well the fact that after the disintegration of the USSR, grounded elites who are needed for the new national when the region was divided between the two paradigm, affect the national, ethnic and religious independent countries - Moldova and Ukraine - some situation in the region? How are the identities of of these communities demonstrated their ‘otherness’ residents in the small, local multiethnic communities by seeking different ways of self-definition within the in the countryside of Southern Bessarabia modeled, national paradigm.
    [Show full text]
  • University of Nevada, Reno Return of the Pre-Colonial Environment
    University of Nevada, Reno Return of the Pre-Colonial Environment? Land Questions and the Environmental Imagination of Nationhood in Southern African Literature A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English By Frank Merksamer Dr. Jen Hill / Dissertation Advisor December, 2019 THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by Entitled be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of , Advisor , Committee Member , Comm ittee Member , Committee Member , Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School i Abstract As historical and sociological studies of land questions multiply across Southern Africa, the possibilities for thinking about the literary imagination of Southern African environments expand. Thinking about changing governmental conceptions of land ownership and land usage, sociologist Ruth Hall argues that an expansive land question is a question of “how our cities and rural areas can look different” (Interview). Her words belie analytic connections between urban migration and land discourse, linking two, often diametrically opposed spaces. Land questions form political bases and lead to paradigmatic shifts. As Southern African literature responds to land questions and their potential for widespread change, such literature participates in contests over “environment,” squaring developmental and community concepts, urging epistemic reevaluation. I argue that selected Southern
    [Show full text]
  • Exploring the Bluegrass Nation As an Imagined Community
    NOTIONS OF NATION: EXPLORING THE BLUEGRASS NATION AS AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY A Thesis by JORDAN L. LANEY Submitted to the Graduate School at Appalachian State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS May 2013 Department of Appalachian Studies NOTIONS OF NATIONS: EXPLORING THE BLUEGRASS NATION AS AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY A Thesis by JORDAN LANEY May 2013 APPROVED BY: Nancy S. Love Chairperson, Thesis Committee David Haney Member, Thesis Committee Fred Hay Member, Thesis Committee Patricia D. Beaver Director, Center for Appalachian Studies Edelma D. Huntley Dean, Cratis Williams Graduate School Copyright by Jordan L. Laney 2013 All Rights Reserved Abstract NOTIONS OF NATIONS: EXPLORING THE BLUEGRASS NATION AS AN IMAGINED COMMUNITY Jordan L. Laney B.F.A., Goddard College M.A., Appalachian State University Chairperson: Nancy S. Love While bluegrass music has been a topic of conversation within the discipline of Appalachian Studies, research concerning the emergence of the community in cyberspace is relatively rare. Appalachian music’s role as a transnational facilitator is groundbreaking in areas of social networking, and as a member of the bluegrass community, I am fascinated by the communication that results now that members of that community can connect to friends in Europe, Japan, and France as easily as to next door neighbors. Noting that music is what brings these individuals together, this study addresses ways in which the bluegrass community embodies an imagined community and uses political language to gather in cyberspace. The study is not meant to discredit the direct ties the music has to Appalachia, but rather to applaud and understand the work of enthusiasts in the field who have found ways to mobilize the music through the Internet.
    [Show full text]
  • Negotiating Roma Identity in Contemporary Urban Romania: an Ethnographic Study
    NEGOTIATING ROMA IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY URBAN ROMANIA: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY Anca N. Birzescu A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2013 Committee: Radhika Gajjala, Advisor Karen M. Kakas Graduate Faculty Representative Lara Martin Lengel Lynda Dixon © 2013 Anca Birzescu All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Radhika Gajjala, Advisor This dissertation is a critical ethnography of the Roma ethnic minority in post- communist Romania within the socio-economic and political context of the country’s post-accession to the European Union. The focus broadly is on the identity negotiation of the Roma minority in Romanian urban space. To this end, I explore Roma communicative practices in capital city of Bucharest. I examine the urban intercultural contact zones that represent Roma-non Roma relations and interactions. I draw on the productive “travelling” postcolonial theories and translate them into an examination of the Roma minority in Romanian physical space. My ethnography is informed by postcolonial theoretical frameworks that challenge the seemingly dichotomous colonizer/colonized relation. I look at discursive practices among Roma individuals suggesting alternative epistemes to allow for a nuanced understanding of the Roma-non Roma encounter. My methods include in-depth interviews, participant observation, and direct observation. The personal narratives of the 35 participants involved in this study emphasize a range of identity negotiation patterns. These reveal in turn complex, interrelated configurations of internalized oppression, passing, and hybridity that make possible both resistance and conformity to the dominant cultural production of the Gypsy Other.
    [Show full text]
  • Imagined Communities”
    DEBATS · Annual Review, 1 · 2016 — 59 / 63 ISSN 0212-0585 (print) ISSN 2530-3074 (electronic) Anderson and the Media. The strength of “imagined communities” Enric Castelló UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VirgiLI [email protected] ORCID: http: //www.researcherid.com/rid/B-2834-2012 Received: 05/03/2016 Accepted: 20/05/2016 ABSTRACT This is a brief note on Benedict Anderson’s influence and more specifically, on his concept of ‘Imagined Communities’ and its impact on the media. The author reviews the concept in relation to national construction through the media, noting key reasons why Anderson’s ideas either took hold or were passed over. The text pays tribute to Anderson’s remarkable contribution to the theory of and ideas on national identity and the sway held by culture and media in fostering this identity. Keywords: The Media, Imagined Community, Benedict Anderson, nationalism, national consciousness Corresponding author: Enric Castelló. Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Departament d’Estudis de Comunicació. Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona. Suggested citation: Castelló, E. (2016). Anderson and the Media. The strength of “imagined communities”. Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society, 1. 59-63 Benedict Anderson died in December 2015. His sad By contrast, Anderson’s work has now become a key demise prompted reflection on Anderson’s influence reference in any research on the media and their role on Media Studies. Broaching this question is a daring in national construction. enterprise given the many authors who have discussed and drawn upon Anderson’s work. Accordingly, this For scholars of national construction, 1983 was to brief paper is limited to divulgation and is in the prove a watershed, with the publication of Anderson’s nature of a collective homage by Media researchers book and two others.
    [Show full text]
  • Anderson and the Imagined Nation*
    DEBATS · Annual Review, 1 · 2016 — 65 / 69 ISSN 2530-898X (print) ISSN 2530-8262 (electronic) Anderson and the Imagined Nation* Marc Sanjaume i Calvet INSTITUT D’ESTUDIS DE L’AUTOGOVERN UNIVERSITAT OBERTA DE CATALUNYA [email protected] ORCID: ORCID: 0000-0001-8723-1618 Received: 14/04/2016 Accepted: 30/05/2016 ABSTRACT This article is a synthesis of the Theory of Nationalism in Anderson’s work and argues its applicability to ‘Stateless Nations’. The author’s point of departure is the interpretations that have been made of Anderson’s definition of nations as ‘imagined communities’. Anderson’s definition is presented as universal, realistic and capable of embracing diverse facets of nationalism — oppressive or liberating as the case may be. The paper ends with a short reflection on the complexity of The Catalan Lands from an Andersonian point of view. Keywords: nation, nationalism, Anderson, imagined, realism, community. Corresponding author: Marc Sanjaume i Calvet. Institut d’Estudis de l’Autogovern. Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de la Presidència. C/ Baixada de Sant Miquel, 8 08001 Barcelona. Suggested citations: Sanjaume, M. (2016). Anderson and the Imagined Nation. Debats. Journal on Culture, Power and Society, 1. 65–69 Benedict Anderson was not a researcher with just one In this seminal academic work, Anderson sets work to his name. A glance at his list of publications out a general theory of national identity and the reveals many remarkable contributions and a deep phenomenon of nationalism. In his view, nationalism knowledge of history and politics around the world, was born out of Capitalism, the Press, the novel and especially in the colonies.
    [Show full text]
  • The History of the History of Indian Classical Music 1980 – 2006 Published on Ethnomusicology Review (
    From Threatened by Modernity to Reinvented by Modernity: The History of the History of Indian Classical Music 1980 – 2006 Published on Ethnomusicology Review (http://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu) From Threatened by Modernity to Reinvented by Modernity: The History of the History of Indian Classical Music 1980 – 2006 By Garrett Field Winner of the James T. Koetting Prize for best student paper at the 2010 conference of the New England chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (NECSEM) Abstract In Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern, Amanda Weidman argued that ethnomusicology had ignored Indian classical music's colonial history in favor of musicological knowledge. Thus, her project's "most important aim" was to "bring Indian classical music...within the purview of anthropology" (2006: 24). Quizzically, Daniel Neuman aimed for the same twenty-six years earlier. His 1980 The Life of Music in North India, also endeavored to provide an anthropological account of modern Indian classical music culture. The fact is, both authors were firsts, since what it meant to bring this music under the purview of anthropology—or history and ethnography for that matter—had significantly changed after twenty-six years. Most notably, twenty-first century scholars no longer saw modern Indian classical music through the lens of culture and tradition. Rather, they reframed it as a product of nationalism, modernity and colonialism. Thus, whereas Neuman and Jon B. Higgins portrayed the music as an evolving ancient tradition adapting to the threat of modernity, scholars like Lakshmi Subramanian and Weidman argued that nationalism fueled a re-invention of Indian classical music in response to the legacy of colonialism.
    [Show full text]
  • The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture
    The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture Borders Contributors: Karen E. McAulay Edited by: Janet Sturman Book Title: The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture Chapter Title: "Borders" Pub. Date: 2019 Access Date: August 14, 2019 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc. City: Thousand Oaks, Print ISBN: 9781483317755 Online ISBN: 9781483317731 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483317731.n111 Print pages: 382-384 © 2019 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book. SAGE SAGE Reference © 2019 by SAGE Publications, Inc. Given the number of national and regional borders in the world, not to mention supranational alliances such as the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Arab League, and others, the subject of borders is almost limitless. Some scholars differentiate between borders and frontier zones to distinguish amicable boundaries from those where there is aggression or military action. Moreover, borders take many forms: They may be determined by physical features, such as a river, a mountain range, or a coastline, but in many other instances, a border is settled after lengthy negotiations or even warfare, perhaps physically marked by walls or security fences and a military presence. Many other boundaries are described as porous or permeable boundaries, with little to indicate where one territory ends and another begins. Social scientists have taken an increasing interest in borders since the reunification of Germany, the end of the Cold War, and conflicts in the Middle East, with anthropologists keen to examine the way borders influence communities’ and individuals’ cultural identities.
    [Show full text]
  • Limits of Imagined Community. the Role of Internal and External
    Limits of Imagined Community. The Role of Internal and External Factors in Shaping Acehnese Nationalism By Karolina Szuppe Submitted to Central European University Nationalism Studies Program In partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts Advisor: Prof. Will Kymlicka Internal Advisor: Prof. Anton Pelinka CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary June 2009 Summary Acehnese nationalism is a unique phenomenon. Despite the piety of the region, it is expressed in secular terms. The religion is an important part of Acehnese identity, but the modern Acehnese nationalism was based on ideas of the right to self-determination and sovereignty. For this reason, the thesis argue that the process of imaging a nation by the Acehnese was strengthen by the internal (domestic, within Indonesia) and external (international) factors influencing on-going conflict. The analysis of Acehnese nationalism is done using two methods. First, Benedict Anderson theory of imagined communities explains and defines what is Acehnese nationalism and nation. Secondly, this analysis is supported by an additional examination of internal and external dimension, what clarifies the process of shaping Acehnese nationalism. Moreover, the thesis formulates arguments on sub-state and separatist nationalism. Key words Aceh, the Acehnese, Acehnese nationalism, GAM, Indonesia, imagined community, religion, nationalism CEU eTD Collection Acknowledgements Last months were more than intense. They brought new concepts and theories to think about. In that sense, I would like to thank all the people – my friends, colleagues and professors – who enabled me to encounter interesting ideas and to expand my knowledge. I am very grateful to my supervisor, Professor Will Kymlicka, whose comments and suggestions were of great help and shaped this project.
    [Show full text]