Hi Martin and everybody--
Thanks a lot for such a thoughtful and elaborate response and for the
reference. I need to think about what you wrote. I agree with you that
social construction of nationalism and its consequences is a complex
phenomenon.
You touched upon another interesting phenomenon by putting in quotation
marks terms like "colony" and "empire" (although you did use the term
"empire" for "Soviet empire" without quotation marks). The quotation marks
sometimes indicate that these are somebody else's words that you are not
ready to author by yourself (in the given context, of course). Is it the
case here? If so, can you elaborate why you do not feel fully comfortable to
use the terms like colonization applied to, let's say, Quebec but feel
comfortable to use "Soviet empire"? (By the way, my own quotation marks do
not indicate disagreement with you -- I feel very comfortable to name the
Soviet Union as empire in its relations to its own minorities and
republics). Is it because it is difficult to believe that "long-established
Western democracies" cannot generate the empire-colony relations? Or is it
because for a colony to be a colony it should belong to "Third World" (I
guess, meaning to a traditional society)? Or are there some other reasons?
Also, I want to comment about "ethnonationalism." Benedict Anderson seems
to show that ideology of construction of ethnicity is always beyond of
nationalism. If you just look on political map of former colonies, you can
see that they re-present former administrative colonial units that often (if
not always) nothing to do with geographical ethnos of indigenous population.
Never the less, each new nation develops/constructs its own ethnicity as a
powerful ideological/rhetorical tool. There is no "as matter of facts" here.
For example, you can try to make to agree a Serb and Bosnian Muslim that
they "actually" belong to the same ethnicity (namely being Serb Slavs), but
under the current political circumstances, it does not makes much sense for
the participants. It is as useless as to argue to two African-American
people that they have different ethnicity because their ancestors came from
ethnically different parts of Africa. I agree with you that it is about who
is "outsider" and who is "insider" -- in short, it is about relationship. In
my view, ethnicity is about essentionalizing this relationship. By
"essentionalizing," I mean attributing/assigning properties of the
relationship to the intrinsic property (i.e., essence) of the party
participating in the relationship. For example, when my students, preservice
teachers, label some of the kids in their teaching practicum as "bad kids"
they essentionalize their own emerging relationship with the children
(probably, adversarial) as properties of the children. The next step of
essensionalization is to explain the attributed intrinsic properties. The
kids are bad because their parents neglect them, or because they are evil,
or because they were abused in past, or because they have moral vices, and
so on. Similarly, ethnicity is essensionalized as people having in common...
(language, religion, practices,...whatever you want). I remember reading a
study about French nationalists in Quebec that interviewed many-many
nationalists asking them to define who should be considered as French in
Quebec. After crossing all the definitions the result was 0, which means
that essentionalization is flexible in Quebec (or at least at the time of
the study).
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Owen [mailto:mowen@rem.bangor.ac.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 3:24 AM
> To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
> Subject: Re: RE: Prototypical defining middle class
>
>
>
>
>
> Nate, Eugene ,all
>
>
> >I have to admit that I'm lost again. If you think that taking native
> >American children at the beginning of the 20th century and coercively
> >putting them in boarding schools is naturalization or
> "internalization" --
> >Ok let's it be. But I can't see how Vygotsky is relevant here.
>
> Nationalism and cultural identity are, of course not satatic, the need to
> be reproduced. The conditions of reproduction are complex, and
> Russification, or Globalisation(nee Americanisation) are not singular
> imposed phenomena but complext cultural historic activity systems (am I
> preaching to the converted here?). Nationalism or ethno-nationalism
> presuppose the existence of a nation state, which is of course a very new
> phenomenum, and the definition of ethnicity or cultural alegience as
> cultural artefacts are reconstructed from generation to genreation.. I
> enclose a lengthy clipping from an essay by Edward Tiryakin, whose writing
> deserves attention from anywon interested in Nationalism and ethnicity. I
> think the questions he raises in the second paragraph my answer questions
> of why is Vugotsky relvant here, although my Vygotskyan erudition is
> outmatched by many other subscribers who can perhaps point me to where I
> should look for specific support in the discussion.
>
> the whole essay is on http://www.asanet.org/Sections/chsfall98a.htm
> While in Paris on a sabbatical, I chanced to see a poster
> proclaiming a coming festival of
> "minority nations". I attended the festival, consisting of different
> singing troupes from Corsica, Brittany,
> the Basque region, Catalonia, Quebec and so on. What
> particularly caught my attention was the
> recurrent theme of being "colonized" victims, deprived of
> expressing themselves in their own
> language and culture by that of the dominant state. Having (after my
> Philippines project) worked on another
> part of the Third World, late colonial Africa, to hear the
> discourse of the "colonial situation" in
> reference to long-established Western democracies was
> challenging. It led to my doing fairly
> extensive study of settings like Quebec, Wales and Scotland,
> utilizing both historical data, field
> interviews, and (in the case of Quebec) participant-observation. I
> became convinced that the "colonial
> situation" (having intersubjective as well as objective dimensions)
> and movements of independence, in Africa
> and in Western societies had significant structural features in
> common, and perhaps dynamic elements in
> common. The uncoupling of overseas "colonies" from
> "empires" seemed to have a cognate in
> the autonomous movements (that became labeled
> "ethnonationalism") seeking to uncouple
> "nation" from "state". This was taking place even as leading
> political sociologists (such as Skocpol
> and Tilly) were giving primary attention to "bringing back the
> state" to the forefront of comparative
> and historical analysis. With a group of social scientists intrigued
> by the "anomaly" of Western countries
> being seats of regional autonomy movements against the central
> state, we eventually brought out a
> volume seeking a comparative understanding of the phenomenon that
> had little place in the accepted
> sociological wisdom of modernity.
>
> This project is not ended. It got a new
> impulse in 1989-1990 with the implosion of the Soviet Empire,
> with a plethora of nationalist movements
> springing up from the Baltics to the Balkans and points east as
> unintended consequences of perestroika.
> I have come to consider the nationalist movements of Eastern
> Europe, those of Western societies, and
> those of Africa as one large interrelated set, one large
> "laboratory" for comparative and
> historical analysis. The ones in Western societies have political
> formations in the vanguard of autonomy
> which are essentially social democratic in their orientation and
> may or may not achieve in the next
> half-century their goal by peaceful means. Certainly this is an
> opportune time for comparative,
> collaborative studies with counterpart colleagues East and West, North
> and South. As a frame for this on-going
> research project, I find heuristic the set of questions "What is
> our national identity?"; "Who is ‘the
> other’?"; and "Under what conditions will ‘the other’ be accepted
> and accept to become an ‘insider’?"
> This, in my way of thinking, is a key problematic of national
> development in the post cold-war era. I
> cannot think of any country where the set of questions does not
> apply, whether Great Britain, Germany,
> France, Russia... or the United States. Obviously, there is
> great variability in the details of the
> questions, but sorting that out is certainly part of the challenge of
> cross-national analysis.
>
> >
>
>
> Martin O
> >
> >
> >
>
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