Everyday nationhood

JON E. FOX

University of Bristol, UK

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS

New York University, USA

INTRODUCTION

Contrary to the predictions of some, neither the proliferation of suprana-tional forms of governance, the ascendancy of free market principles ofglobal capitalism, nor expanding flows of transnational migration haveunseated the nation state as the dominant form of political organization inthe world today. From violent secessionist movements in the formerYugoslavia and Soviet Union to a growing backlash against immigrationand multiculturalism in Europe and North America, nationalism and itsxenophobic correlates continue to flourish in – and adapt to – a changingworld.

Nationalism is the project to make the political unit, the state (or polity)congruent with the cultural unit, the nation. Attempts to accomplish thiscongruence have been studied from a variety of macro-analytical perspec-tives. Nationalism has been examined as a political ideology holding thateach state should have its nation and each nation its state; as the histori-cally contingent outcome of modernizing and industrializing economicforces that bring the state into alignment with the nation; as a culturalconstruct of collective belonging realized and legitimated through insti-tutional and discursive practices; and as a site for material and symbolicstruggles over the definition of national inclusion and exclusion.

The targets of these endeavours are the people themselves: to make thenation is to make people national. Through the promotion of standardizedlanguages, national (and nationalist) educational curricula, militaryconscription and taxation – and the more nefarious methods of war, forced

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assimilation, expulsion and extermination – the nation, or people, are madeone with their state. Nationalism recasts the mosaic of diverse peopleswithin the boundaries of the state (or polity) into a uniform and unifiednational whole; it turns, as Eugen Weber (1976) put it, ‘peasants into French-men’. Yet while there is consensus that nationalism is a mass phenomenon,the masses have been curiously missing from much of the scholarship(Whitmeyer, 2002). The focus on the political, economic and cultural deter-minants of popular nationalism has not systematically accounted for thepopularity of nationalism. Rather, the people in whose names nations arebeing made are simply assumed to be attuned to the national content oftheir self-appointed nationalist messengers. Nationhood from this perspec-tive resonates evenly and unwaveringly among the people; the nation is afait accompli.

The nation, however, is not simply the product of macro-structuralforces; it is simultaneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary peopleengaging in routine activities. Eric Hobsbawm (1991: 10) acknowledges thatwhile nationalism is ‘. . . constructed essentially from above, [it] . . . cannotbe understood unless also analyzed from below, that is in terms of theassumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, whichare not necessarily national and still less nationalist’. Recently there hasbeen increased interest in the ways in which nationhood is negotiated andreproduced – and sometimes undermined and subverted (Herzfeld, 1997) –in everyday life (Billig, 1995; Edensor, 2002, 2006). These approaches do notdispute the popular resonance of nationhood; to the contrary, they describethe ways in which nations (and people’s attachments to them) have becomea taken-for-granted part of the landscape of things (Billig, 1995: 38;Edensor, 2002: 88).

But the general ways in which nationhood can resonate do not accountfor the specific ways in which nationhood actually does resonate – to theextent it does so at all (Thompson, 2001: 28). Rather than deducing thequotidian meaning and salience of nationalism from its political andcultural privileging, our aim in this article is to develop a research agendafor examining the actual practices through which ordinary people engageand enact (and ignore and deflect) nationhood and nationalism in thevaried contexts of their everyday lives.1 Following Hobsbawm, we examinenationalism ‘from below’.

Our examination considers four ways in which nationhood is producedand reproduced in everyday life.2 First, we explore the ways in which thenation as a discursive construct is constituted and legitimated not (only) inresponse to elite dictates but also according to the contingencies ofeveryday life. This is ‘talking the nation’: the discursive construction of thenation through routine talk in interaction. Second, we turn to the ways inwhich nationhood frames the choices people make. This is ‘choosing thenation’: nationhood as it is implicated in the decisions ordinary people

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make. Third, we explore the everyday meanings and invocations of nationalsymbols. This is ‘performing the nation’: the production of national sensi-bilities through the ritual enactment of symbols. Fourth, we examinenational distinction in the mundane tastes and preferences of ordinarypeople. This is ‘consuming the nation’: the constitution and expression ofnational difference through everyday consumption habits.

Our survey of these four modalities of everyday nationalism sheds lighton some of the ways in which ordinary people are active participants in thequotidian production and reproduction of the nation. But while theseapproaches give us a better idea of what everyday nationalism is, they don’tprovide consensus on how everyday nationalism should be studied. In thefinal portion of the article, we draw on these diverse traditions to elaborateour own methodological agenda for the empirically grounded investigationof the nation in everyday life. Our aim is to operationalize a researchstrategy for uncovering both the micro-processes and macro-dynamics ofnationhood as it is invoked and evoked by its everyday practitioners.

TALKING THE NATION

How, then, does the nation become a meaningful idiom in everyday life?For one, people talk about it. They make discursive claims for, about and inthe name of the nation. As Craig Calhoun (1997: 5) points out, ‘nations areconstituted largely by [these] claims themselves, by the way of talking andthinking and acting that relies on these sorts of claims to produce collectiveidentity, to mobilize people for collective projects, and to evaluate peoplesand practices’. The nation, in this view, is a discursive construct. Discourseanalytical approaches to the study of nationalism emphasize the ways inwhich understandings of nationhood are engaged, constituted and propa-gated through discursive acts (Dijk, 1984; Wetherell and Potter, 1992;Wodak et al., 1999). These discursive acts are not simply descriptive of socialreality; they are simultaneously constitutive of that reality, willing intoexistence that which they name (Bourdieu, 1991: 223).

Much of the scholarship has focused on the important role elites play inarticulating and propagating visions of the nation that have the potential toboth resonate with and shape popular perceptions of the nation (Suny andKennedy, 2001; Verdery, 1991). But the actual degree to which these elitedepictions are appropriated by ordinary people (to the extent they are soat all) has received less scholarly attention. Parallel to this, there has beenincreasing interest in the ways the nation is discursively invoked and consti-tuted by ordinary people. This talk does not simply follow the stylizedcontours of elite discourse; rather, it responds to the logics, imperatives andconcerns of the everyday contexts in which it is embedded. This scholarship

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does not take elite discourse as its starting point but examines the ways inwhich ordinary people talk about and with the nation in ways that matterto them.

Talking about the nation

Scholars recently have begun asking ordinary people what the nation meansto them (Miller-Idriss, 2006; Thompson and Day, 1999; Wodak et al., 1999).Using qualitative interviewing techniques, researchers are beginning tocapture ordinary people’s previously unrecorded articulations of the nation,national identity and national belonging. Findings reveal that these people’srepresentations of the nation do not simply mimic those variants traded inelite discourse, but more often resonate with the currents and rhythms oftheir everyday concerns and predicaments. Miller-Idriss’s (forthcoming)interviews with young working-class Germans in vocational schools showedhow their discursive claims of national pride departed from, and at timesexplicitly challenged, official sanctions against expressions of Germannational sentiment. Andrew Thompson and Graham Day (1999) inter-viewed ordinary people in Wales to reveal the mundane ways in which theygave discursive content to their understandings of Welshness. And inAustria, Ruth Wodak and colleagues (1999) assembled focus groups andconducted in-depth interviews to show how ordinary Austrians constructednational understandings of themselves with reference to immigration issues,Austria’s Nazi past, and the European Union.

Michael Billig (1995) has observed how nationhood often operates atthe level of unselfconscious disposition (what Edensor (2002: Chapter 3)terms, after Bourdieu, ‘national habitus’). Discourse analytical approachesto the study of nationalism, in contrast, draw attention to the ways inwhich nationhood can also be creatively and self-consciously deployed andmanipulated by ordinary people. In this view, nationhood is not (only)lurking in the crevices of the unconscious, furtively informing talk withoutbecoming the subject of talk; it is simultaneously the practical accomplish-ment of ordinary people giving concrete expression to their understand-ings of the nation. Nationhood does not only define their talk; it is definedby their talk.

In these ways, ordinary people give discursive shape and content to theirotherwise taken-for-granted understandings of the nation. Implicit nation-hood is made explicit through interviews and focus groups, shedding lighton the processes through which nationhood is discursively constructed.Understandings of the nation cloaked by the fog of commonsense orobscured by the traumas of history are teased out by skilled researchers.These studies reveal the importance of shifting the analytical focus toordinary people as active producers – and not just passive consumers – ofnational discourse.

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Talking with the nation

But this practical capacity to talk nationally does not, in itself, explain howsuch talk occurs spontaneously (to the extent it does so at all) in the courseof people’s everyday lives. When called upon, ordinary people can call forthand articulate their more-or-less taken-for-granted assumptions about whatthe nation means to them. But when are they called upon? Just becausepeople can talk about the nation doesn’t mean that they do. While discourseanalytical approaches are useful for appreciating the everyday contents ofthe nation, they have less to say about locating its everyday contexts.

National catastrophes, wars and, not least of all (see later), internationalsporting events, provide important contexts for everyday articulations ofthe nation. Ordinary people recognize, interpret and align themselves withpressing issues in explicitly national terms. But most of the time, the nationis not something ordinary people talk about; rather, it’s something they talkwith. This is the nation not as the object of talk but rather as an unselfcon-scious disposition about the national order of things that intermittentlyinforms talk. The nation in this sense is a way of seeing, doing, talking andbeing that posits and sometimes enacts the unproblematic and naturalizingpartition of the world into discrete ethnocultural units (Brubaker, 2004). Itis not (only) a topic of talk, but also a culturally available schema that canbe discursively deployed to make sense of other topics of talk, explainpredicaments and order social difference (Gamson, 1992). When nationalframes are discursively invoked, social actors become national actors,diverse phenomena become national phenomena and everyday storiesbecome national stories.

The nation does not resonate evenly across time or space; it comes tomatter in certain ways at particular times for different people. The questionthus shifts from ‘what is the nation?’ to ‘when is the nation?’.3 When – inwhat situations – does the category of nation become a salient frame forroutine talk and interaction? The answer, it turns out, is not very often. Mostof the time nationhood does not frame people’s understanding of them-selves, their interactions or their predicaments. Take the example of Cornel,a Romanian university student in the Hungarian-minority town of Cluj,Romania. Cornel explained how it was a year before he realized his friend,‘Soni’, was Hungarian. ‘He didn’t have an accent at all’, he explained. ‘Inthe first year I knew him, I didn’t know he was Hungarian. I knew his namewas “Soni,” and so I said to him, “. . . Soni, do you speak Hungarian,” –“yeah, I speak Hungarian,” . . . but he had only Romanian friends. . . . It wasa year before I figured out he was Hungarian.’ His brother teased him:‘After a year, he comes out with “maybe he’s Hungarian . . .”.’ By speakingunaccented Romanian, socializing in nationally unmarked ways, and notexplicitly advertising his Hungarianness, Soni [‘Sanyi’ in Hungarian]remained ethnonationally invisible to Cornel. It wasn’t that Soni wasn’t

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Hungarian. He was. It was that his Hungarianness hadn’t been an experi-entially salient feature of his interactions with Cornel (Fox, 2004b: 115–61;see Richard Jenkins’ (1997: 56) distinction between ‘nominal’ and ‘virtual’identities).

Since nationhood does not define people’s experiences of all interactionsall the time, the everyday contexts in which it is discursively invoked byordinary people need to be identified. Brubaker et al.’s (2006) ethnographyof Cluj, Romania traced the ways interactions between friends, neighbours,classmates and colleagues momentarily become ethnic or interethnic inter-actions. Gerd Baumann’s (1996) ethnography of immigrants in a working-class London neighbourhood similarly depicted how local understandingsof community took shape according to the logics and rhythms of everydaylife. And in Hungary, labour migration provided the context for ethnicHungarian migrant workers from Romania to articulate and elaborate newforms of belonging that distinguished themselves nationally from theirhosts of the same name (Fox, 2007). Studies like these have situated thediscursive enactment and construction of nationhood in the routinecontexts of everyday life.

But contexts are not only understood as domains of daily activity; theyalso include the more fleeting micro-interactional and discursive momentsthat happen intermittently in the course of these activities. Recently, agrowing body of research has pointed to the ways in which language andother audible and visual cues trigger an awareness of category membershipthrough everyday interaction. Earlier, Cornel remarked that Soni ‘didn’thave an accent at all’. Had he an accent (or had he simply spoken Hungar-ian in the first place), Soni may very well have become more transparentlyHungarian to Cornel. In contexts where language is taken as a criterion ofethnonationality, linguistic conventions such as accent, intonation andsyntax can signal ethnonational membership (Giles, 1979: 255–9; Gumperz,1982: 32–3). Gábor, another Hungarian studying at the TechnicalUniversity, reported how his poor Romanian competency marked him asHungarian to his Romanian classmates. ‘They knew, everybody knew I wasHungarian, it was impossible not to know I was Hungarian’, he insisted.‘They could figure it out right away from how poorly I spoke Romanian . . .– it was as if I had been black. “He’s Hungarian . . .” – that was completelyobvious to everyone.’ While Soni’s/Sanyi’s flawless Romanian concealed hisHungarianness, Gábor’s accented Romanian revealed his own Hungarian-ness.4

To be sure, most of the time, language communicates information otherthan nationality. But there are certain contexts when the choice of languagebeing spoken, or the way it is spoken, communicates membership in anethnonational community. In Catalonia, Kathryn Woolard (1989) has shownhow routine shifts between Spanish and Catalan make ethnic affiliationsmomentarily transparent in everyday interactions. Similarly, Monica

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Heller’s research from Quebec (1999) has revealed how spoken French isboth deployed and perceived as constitutive of Frenchness. And KatharineJones (2001) has examined how English people living in the USA developstrategies for self-consciously deploying English accents to preserve andadvertise their Englishness to others. These discursive strategies andlinguistic conventions make nationhood momentarily salient in everydaytalk and interaction. They turn nominally interethnic interactions intoexperientially interethnic interactions.

This is nationhood as it is meaningfully embodied, expressed and some-times performed in the routine contexts of everyday life. The nation as adiscursive construct is reproduced not only through direct discursiveengagement, but also as it is implicated tangentially through talk and inter-action. It is the practical accomplishment of ordinary people talking aboutthemselves and their surroundings in ways that implicate and reproduce anational view of the world (Fox, 2004a). These are the micro-settings for theinvocation and reproduction of nationhood in everyday life.

CHOOSING THE NATION

Nationhood is also implicated in the choices people make. People ‘choose’the nation when the universe of options is defined in national terms.Reading a nationalist newspaper or sending one’s child to a minority-language school can thus be defined and experienced as national choices.Nationhood can also be the contingent outcome of other (non-national)choices. Thus, choosing (or approving) marriage partners or socializing withfriends, while not necessarily explicitly national, can structure the trajec-tories of future choices in ways that reinforce nationhood as a salient idiomof belonging.

Making national choices

There is a growing body of scholarship on the ways in which institutions andtheir organizational logics shape experience (Brinton and Nee, 1998; Powelland DiMaggio, 1991). Institutions organized according to national logicslegitimate and propagate a national view of the world (Brubaker, 1996).From nationally defined schools in Wales and Quebec to self-governmentin Catalonia and South Tyrol, educational, media, governmental, cultural,religious and other institutions can be formally or informally arrangedaccording to national logics. These institutions present those who encounterthem with a menu of nationally defined options. In Transylvania, forinstance, Hungarian minority schools and (de facto) churches operatealongside their Romanian majority counterparts. Decisions about whether

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to send one’s child to a Hungarian school or to get married in a RomanianOrthodox church can thus confront mothers and fathers and husbands andwives with opportunities to momentarily (if not durably) becomeRomanian and Hungarian. National belonging is implicated – and some-times explicitly reflected upon, hashed over and debated – in the institution-ally mediated choices people make (Brubaker et al., 2006: 272–3, 297).

On the one hand, nationally defined institutions can offer their claimantssymbolic rewards: the chance to be (or become) national. In some cases,choosing a national minority school for one’s child can be viewed as a formof insurance against assimilation. On the other hand, institutions can alsooffer their claimants material rewards: the incentive to be (or become)national. In many parts of the world, nationality and ethnicity have beeninstitutionally adopted, operationalized and legitimated as the preferredlanguage of claims-making (Koopmans and Statham, 1999; Olzak andNagel, 1996). Affirmative action programmes in the USA, multiculturalismin Canada and pillarization in the Netherlands have all rechristened andpartitioned the social landscape as an ethnocultural landscape. In thesecontexts, questions of who gets what can be determined (or perceived to bedetermined) by who is what in ethnonational terms (see, for example,Banton, 1983).

For the ordinary people encountering these institutions, national andethnic attachments just became worth something. Institutional configura-tions that offer material rewards according to national or ethnic criteriaencourage their claimants to view nationality or ethnicity as a resource thatcan be strategically deployed (or concealed or manipulated) to secureaccess to these rewards. Thus, the reconfiguration of political opportunitystructures according to ethnoracial criteria in the USA in the 1960s and1970s encouraged and even (re-)invented ‘Native American’ as a materially(and ultimately symbolically) viable category of belonging (Nagel, 1996). Inthe Baltics following the collapse of the Soviet Union, legislation that madelanguage a criterion of citizenship compelled ethnic minority Russians torecalculate the benefits of learning the titular languages of the countries inwhich they lived (Laitin, 1998). And in Romania, admissions quotas forethnic minority students at the ‘multicultural’ Babes-Bolyai Universityinvited applicants to consider and claim minority status to improve theirchances of admission (Fox, 2004b). By literally (or figuratively) tickingboxes, people ‘choose’ ethnonationality, momentarily invoking it andmaking it materially salient. Categories of belonging that may have hadlittle symbolic significance can nevertheless become materially consequen-tial when linked to the politics of redistribution.

This does not mean, however, that nationally marked institutions alwaysmake nationhood experientially salient. They don’t. In many situations, theinstitutions people encounter are seen less as gateways to material (orsymbolic) rewards than as simple sorting mechanisms. Krisztina, a

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Transylvanian Hungarian history student enrolled in a Hungarian line ofstudy at her Romanian university explained that she never consideredenrolling in the Romanian line. ‘Why would I want to study in Romanian?’,she asked, genuinely perplexed. Transylvania ‘is a Hungarian region,Hungarian is my native language, I know Hungarian . . . better than[Romanian], so?’ After having attended exclusively Hungarian minorityschools all her life, Krisztina did not choose to continue her studies at theuniversity in Hungarian. Rather, she chose to study history. It was self-evident that such choices would be made within an institutionallyprescribed Hungarian universe (Fox, 2004b: 87–8; see also Brubaker et al.,2006: 272–73).

Choosing a minority school can thus be like choosing a toilet – the signson the doors tell people where to go. In this sense, ‘choosing’ is hardly a‘choice’: it’s unreflective, automatic. Nationhood operates as an unselfcon-scious disposition: it underwrites people’s choices without becoming a self-conscious determinant of those choices (Bourdieu, 1977: 166; Bourdieu andPasseron, 1977: 54–67; see also Foucault’s (1995[1977]: 177–84) notion of‘normalization’). To conceal nationhood in this way, however, is not toenfeeble it. Rather, institutions powerfully reinforce their national logics byreproducing nationhood as a taken-for-granted fixture of the social world(Billig, 1995: 37–42). Nationhood defines the parameters, but not thecontent, of people’s choices.

Making choices national

Institutions do not only structure choices at the point of entry; they alsomediate subsequent choices that occur inside – and outside – of theirconfines. Friendship and partner choices can be deeply structured accord-ing to the logics of the institutions in which people are embedded. Nation-ally delineated institutions thus make nationhood a powerful but mostlyinvisible parameter of social relations by offering a template for the forma-tion and reproduction of social relations according to their national logics(Brubaker et al., 2006: 273–5). They shape social relations by proscribingthe limits and rules of interaction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; see alsoBourdieu, 1977: 164–7; Foucault, 1995[1977]: 177–84).

In nationally circumscribed universes, then, choices are usually madeaccording to non-national criteria. Emese, a classmate of Krisztina intro-duced above, did not choose to socialize at the university with otherHungarians because they were Hungarian. She chose them because theywere there. Friendship choices were ordered according to other criteria:‘boys and girls in the first place’, she explained, ‘then . . . shared interests,like there’s this girl I’m good friends with because we like the same kindsof films, we go to the same lectures, we have lots of things in common’. Innationally defined institutions, people don’t have to choose friends on the

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basis of national affinity because the institutions, in effect, do it for them(Fox, 2004b: 113–16). Nationhood does not experientially frame friendshipchoices; rather it is the contingent outcome of unselfconscious choicesmediated by nationally defined institutions (see, e.g. Tilly, 1998: 79–83).

People’s choices can thus become important occasions for the enactmentand reproduction of national sensibilities. When ordinary people encounterinstitutions displaying national menus of options, nationhood can becomean experientially salient frame for the choices they make. When these samepeople are already embedded in nationally circumscribed institutions,nationhood silently structures the logic of subsequent choices they make.This is nationhood not only as the practical accomplishment of people’snational ponderings, but also as the contingent (yet durable) outcome ofother institutionally mediated choices. Nationhood shapes, and is shaped by,people’s choices.

PERFORMING THE NATION

Nationhood is also given symbolic meaning in the ritual performances ofeveryday (and not-so-everyday) life. Symbols are the cultural ciphersthrough which meanings are assigned to phenomena and attachments madebetween people and things (Geertz, 1973: 216). National symbols – flags,anthems, statues and landmarks – are neatly packaged distillations of thenation: they are the linchpins that connect people to the nation (Cerulo,1995; Smith, 1986). Rituals provide occasions for the visual and audible real-ization of these symbolic attachments. Through the choreographed exhibi-tion and collective performance of national symbols, those in attendanceare united in the transitory awareness of heightened national cohesion.The electricity of the crowd, momentarily subsuming the individual tothe collective, generates the experience of ‘collective effervescence’(Durkheim, 1995[1912]: 217–18; see also Turner’s (1969: 132–6, 153) notionof ‘spontaneous communitas’). While such experiences of exultation arenecessarily infrequent and ephemeral, their impact on the national sensibil-ities of the ordinary people who engage in them can be more durable.

This is everyday life characterized not by its banality, but rather by theordinary individuals who people it. Indeed, these events do not belong tothe realm of the ordinary; rather, by definition, they are extraordinaryevents. They occur infrequently, punctuating the monotony of life at regular,fixed intervals as contrived occasions for the crystallization of nationalawareness (Mosse, 1975). Public spaces adorned with the symbolic accou-trements of the nation – flags, banners, songs and speeches – provide explic-itly national parameters to facilitate the organization and experience ofnational solidarities (on the integrative function of symbols and rituals, see

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Turner, 1967, pp. 22, 48–50). Songs sung, chants chanted, banners unfurledand flags waved, all in unison, make the bonds that join one anothermomentarily visible and audible (Cerulo, 1995). ‘By expressing the socialunity tangibly’, Durkheim (1995[1912]: 231–2) explains:

it makes the unit itself more tangible to all . . . [F]or the emblem is not only aconvenient method of clarifying the awareness the society has of itself: It servesto create – and is a constitutive element of – that awareness . . . It is by shoutingthe same cry, saying the same words, performing the same action in regard tothe same object that they arrive at and experience agreement.

National bonds don’t simply become transparent through their ritual per-formance; they are constituted through the collective act of performance.

Whether through the sacred liturgical observances staged by the Nazisat Nuremberg (Mosse, 1975), the elaborately orchestrated dramasperformed by Italian Fascists in Rome (Berezin, 1997), the festive pageantryof Soviet baton twirlers and nuclear missiles parading through Red Square(Petrone, 2000), or simply the ritual fireworks and backyard barbecuescelebrating the Fourth of July in the USA (Spillman, 1997), national holidaycommemorations are key sites for the affirmation and reaffirmation ofnational bonds.

Mixed messages

But the explicitly national designs of these public performances do not, inthemselves, ensure the generation of explicitly national solidarities. Most ofthe scholarship on national symbols and the rituals that deliver them hasfocused on their elite production. Yet the actual ways in which the meaningsof these symbols are consumed – perceived, interpreted, negotiated andconstituted – by those in attendance does not unambiguously follow fromtheir elite designs. The national messages conveyed by symbols are mixed– if not missed altogether (Kolstø, 2006). They are mixed because symbolsare inherently multivocal and multivalent: they mean different things todifferent people at different times. While the state or polity may have theupper hand in affixing national meanings to symbols, both their meaningsand valences remain subject to negotiation and reinterpretation by theirreceiving audiences. People are not just consumers of national meanings;they are simultaneously their contingent producers.

The meanings and uses ordinary people make of national holidaycommemorations cannot be simply deduced from the intentions of theirarchitects (Kligman, 1983). To what extent do Fourth of July celebrations inthe USA engender the sort of ‘collective effervescence’ described byDurkheim? Are the principles of liberté, égalité and fraternité experienced– and constituted – by the ordinary French citizens attending Bastille Daycommemorations? The nationalist passions of the multitudes are not always

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ignited by national holiday commemorations. Rather, such events oftenbecome occasions for family outings or consumer spending rather than thepublic affirmation of national pride. The national symbols adorning thesecommemorations are viewed by many as commercialized accessories,denuded of their officially sanctioned national venerability. In other partsof the world, official commemorations become sites for protest and struggle.Flag-waving is replaced by flag-burning as the cherished symbols of thenation are inverted and subverted by would-be revolutionaries. These un-intended uses of national symbols undermine their ability to generate theunambiguous experience of national allegiances (Fox, 2006: 221–22).

This is not to suggest that national solidarities are no longer publiclyperformed. The venue, however, has changed. While collective attachmentsare not typically generated on the stage of national commemorations, theyare on the pitch of international sporting competitions. Indeed, in manycountries, it’s sports – not holidays – that capture the (national) imaginationand inspire the (national) passions of the masses. Shifting the analyticalfocus from the producers of national symbols to their everyday consumersentails a concomitant search for the sites where those symbols are wieldedand manipulated by ordinary people.

The international profiles of World Cup football, the Olympics and otherinternational sporting competitions provide explicitly national parametersfor the organization and experience of collective belonging. Fans displaytheir loyalties to their team by borrowing the symbolic repertoire of theirrespective nations – the flags, the anthems, the colours and even the myths.Ordinary people who might otherwise show little interest in their nationalattachments are nonetheless capable of displaying their allegiances atsporting competitions with passion. The dramatic unfurling of national flagsand poignant singing of national anthems at the medal ceremonies of theOlympics can bring tears to the eyes of adulating fans. ‘God Bless America’,sung during the seventh inning stretch of baseball games, generated similarresponses among some of the post-9/11 crowds. And the exuberance of fanssaluting their teams at World Cup matches is unrivalled. Indeed, in theseand other cases, fans momentarily become the physical embodiment of thenation. Singing the same songs, chanting the same chants and responding tothe rhythms of the competitions in unison – with their faces painted, flagsdraped over their shoulders, and their t-shirts, scarves and jackets embla-zoned in the national colours – these fans physically encapsulate andcommunicate national allegiances.

Sports are able to succeed where holidays fail due in part to the dramainherent in competition (Elias and Dunning, 1986: 40–8). This drama keepsthose in attendance fixated on the action as it unfolds, providing them witha common focus (conveniently dressed in national colours) for their collec-tive engagement. As Eric Hobsbawm (1991: 143) observed: ‘The imaginedcommunity of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people’;

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the football team exemplifies and concretizes the nation (see also Eriksen,1993: 10–11). And through television, the boundaries of this imaginedcommunity extend far beyond the confines of sporting stadiums. Transfixedto their screens in bars and living rooms around the world, fans everywhereexperience excitement, tension, hope and dejection at precisely the samemoments. These shared experiences unite them in a spatially dispersedcommunity virtually connected through television and temporally boundedby the duration of the competition (Moores, 1993: 86–8). This is the nation-alism that attracts the masses.

Missed messages

But neither sporting competitions nor holiday commemorations can claimthe loyalties of those who simply don’t show up or tune in to them. Nationalholiday commemorations tend to inspire more scholarly investigation thanpopular participation; and sports produce and reproduce a heavily mascu-line version of the nation. The meanings of national symbols on parade atthese events are simply missed by large segments of their potential audi-ences. No matter how carefully orchestrated or creatively manipulated,national holidays and sporting events can only engender solidarities forthose who are physically or virtually present.

Even the most impressive symbols ensconced in statues, monuments andlandmarks vary in their ability to attract attention (Brubaker et al., 2006:145–6). When new, such symbols might capture the public imagination,instilling people with a sense of national pride. After 9/11, there was anexplosion of flags (and patriotic fervour) across the USA. Flags (already aprevalent feature of the American national landscape) proliferated likenever before, hanging from front porches, affixed to car windows, pasted onbillboards and stitched into clothing. For a time, it was impossible not tonotice this explosion of red, white and blue. But only for a time. As timepassed, the extraordinary became assimilated into the ordinary, and theAmerican consciousness absorbed these changes as a part of a new standardin flag bearing. Their colours faded and their fringes frayed, symbols thatonce inspired national attachments become camouflaged against thebackdrop of the familiar. Over time, the flags became an unremarkablefixture of the environment, neither requiring (nor receiving) much atten-tion. Once impossible to ignore, the flags now became impossible to notice.

Symbols like these miss their mark. Unseen, unheard and unnoticed,symbols do not and cannot generate national attachments. But this does notin itself render them ineffective. Indeed, there are relatively few momentswhen flags are exuberantly waved, monuments solemnly venerated andnational anthems proudly sung. Most of the time, symbols draw their powerin other more invisible (if not invidious) ways. Flags hanging limply frombuildings and monuments as inconspicuous as trees or lampposts are

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effective not because they attract attention but because they don’t attractattention. These symbols stealthily concoct and legitimate a world ofnations without inviting critical engagement. ‘[N]ational identity inestablished nations is remembered’, Michael Billig (1995: 38) explains:

because it is embedded in routines of life, which constantly remind, or ‘flag’,nationhood . . . [T]hese reminders, or ‘flaggings’, are so numerous and they aresuch a familiar part of the social environment, that they operate mindlessly,rather than mindfully. The remembering, not being experienced asremembering, is, in effect, forgotten.

Flags thus don’t have to be saluted or waved to work their national magic.The near complete assimilation of nationhood into the realm of theordinary – not its sporadic or spectacular invocations – testifies to its prosaicpower.

Some rituals also belong to this realm of the ordinary. Flag ceremoniesor school prayers, for instance, are occasions not for the heightened experi-ence of national belonging but for the veiled reproduction of national sensi-bilities (Kolstø, 2006: 677–8). The pledge of allegiance that starts the schoolday in classrooms across the USA relies neither on fireworks nor flamboy-ance but rather on the unthinking and unquestioned performance of thenation (Rippberger and Staudt, 2003). The daily repetition of this ritualizednational text does not – and indeed cannot – inspire the experience ofcollective effervescence. Rather, its dull, rote repetition, performed mind-lessly and dispassionately, is a national genuflection, instilling in the pupilstaken-for-granted loyalties to the abstract notion of the nation. Its effective-ness is measured not in moments but in lifetimes.

There are many ways in which national symbols intersect with the livesof ordinary people, from the extraordinary to the ordinary, from the obviousto the oblivious, from the profound to the prosaic. Much of the scholarshipon national symbols and their ritual platforms, however, has focused eitheron their formal properties or elite production. To understand symbols’popular meaning and resonance, the lens needs to be refocused on theordinary people who engage and interpret – and ignore and deflect – them(Fox, 2006; Zubrzycki, 2006).

CONSUMING THE NATION

Nations are not natural or enduring givens, but politically contested andhistorically contingent social constructs. They are the products (and in somecases unintended consequences) of various standardizing, universalizing,bureaucratizing and culturally indoctrinating processes more or less coordi-nated by states and their agents. National holidays, as we have just seen, are

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produced and performed to induce and reproduce national solidarities.Museums present a more static display of the nation, assembling people,places and events of the nation into a coherent national narrative to beviewed, learned, remembered and venerated (Anderson, 1991; Zubrzycki,2006). State-run media also play a key role in the production of nationalideologies and the dissemination of national ideas (Moores, 1997). Andschools are perhaps the most important sites for developing and transmit-ting the content and contours of the nation (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977;Weber, 1976). Their officially sanctioned curricula, conveniently packagedin textbooks, displayed in national emblems and performed in ritual prac-tices, inculcate the students with the values, myths and norms of the nation(Hahn, 1998; Soysal and Schissler, 2005). Taken together, these more or lesscoordinated efforts of the state give narrative structure, internal coherenceand emotional weight to the nation.

Nationalism, in this sense, is an act of production. But who then are itsconsumers? While nationalists throughout history have viewed the peopleas the ultimate repository of national values and the bearers of nationaltraditions, the people have not always viewed themselves in the same way.Ordinary people are not simply uncritical consumers of the nation; they aresimultaneously its creative producers through everyday acts of consump-tion (Billig, 1995; Edensor, 2002; Foster, 2002; Palmer, 1998). Yet while thestate-sponsored production and propagation of the nation have been welldocumented, less attention has been focused on the precise ways in whichthese national products and projects are received and consumed by thepeople at whom they are aimed.

Consumption constitutes, reinforces and communicates social member-ship: it makes ‘visible and stable the categories of culture’ (Douglas andIsherwood, 1996[1976]: 38; see more generally 36–52). Various studies haveexplored how such diverse axes of social differentiation ranging from class(Bourdieu, 1984[1979]) and gender (Ang, 1985) to race (Lamont andMolnár, 2001) and national belonging (Foster, 2002; Edensor, 2002) areconstructed and concretized through the routine consumption practices ofeveryday life. This is not the collective effervescence evinced through ritualperformance, but rather the quotidian experience of sameness – a vagueself-awareness of shared dispositions that materialize through consumption(see Edensor, 2002: Chapter 3). We shift our attention here to thisconsumption side of the equation.

Consuming national products

Some products are conceived, designed and disseminated as more or lessnational products. The flag is not just a symbol of the nation; it is also a thingthat can be bought and sold, copied and distributed. It can be hung fromflagpoles or windows, draped over shoulders or coffins, stitched into jackets

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or baseball caps and stuck on to car bumpers or envelopes. This is thecommodification of the nation: national (and nationalist) literature, media,music, costumes and food provide people with nationally marked (ormarkable) products for their national consumption needs. In the post-Soviet context, Melissa Caldwell (2002) has shown how ordinary peoplehave reclaimed and rearticulated their Russianness through the consump-tion of what is seen (and therefore constituted) as Russian food. Theirconsumption preferences and practices become everyday sites for defend-ing and defining the socialist values of Russian nationalism against theonslaught of global capitalism (Caldwell, 2002: 305–13). Consumers don’tsimply buy national commodities; they constitute national sensibilities,embody national pride, negotiate national meanings, thus making nation-hood a salient feature of their everyday lives.

Consumption doesn’t only occur only at the cash register. School curric-ula – the preferred purveyors of national (and sometimes nationalist)meanings, myths and memories – are also consumed and imbibed (andsometimes deflected and subverted) by pupils in classrooms around theworld. Students are not merely passive receptacles of nationalist messages,nor are their teachers their unquestioning conduits (Aronowitz and Giroux,1993). Rather, as Miller-Idriss (forthcoming) has demonstrated in theGerman case, both students and teachers are active participants in thecreative interpretation and constitution of understandings of nationhoodthat may bear little resemblance to those packaged in official curricula.

Media that are national in scope, content and/or format can also contrib-ute to the activation and reinforcement of national sensitivities. Readers ofnationalist newspapers and viewers of cultural programming are not onlyaligning themselves with their putative nations but actively interpreting andexpressing the meaning of those alignments. And nationally marked anddecorated spaces and places – public squares, national landmarks and entireregions (Löfgren, 1989; Molnár, 2005) – can similarly be seen, appreciatedand therefore consumed in ways that highlight and privilege nationalattachments. Joshua Hagen (2004) has shown how the medieval Germantown of Rothenburg was transformed and contrived as the epitome ofGermanness in the 1930s. Local residents became actively engaged in theproduction – and consumption – of their own exalted values of Teutoniccleanliness, order and beauty (Hagen, 2004: 214–18).

The commodification of the nation supplies ordinary people with more-or-less nationally marked products whose consumption can engender andreinforce a national view of the world (Edensor, 2002: 108–9). Throughshopping and tourism, school lessons and television viewing, ordinarypeople make a national world visible to themselves and, potentially, thosearound them. The consumption of these national artefacts defines, demon-strates, and affirms the consumer’s national affinities. It marks the products– and the people who consume them – nationally.

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Consuming products nationally

The consumption of products with explicitly national contents andparameters can help make nationhood a meaningful feature of everydaylife. But ‘intrinsically’ national products do not always engender explicitlynational sensibilities. Literary figures that may be cherished as nationaltreasures by their compatriots might simultaneously enjoy cosmopolitanreputations in international circles. Music that might be celebrated asevoking the national heritage of some nations might appeal to amazon.comshoppers as world music (Haynes, 2005). And food that might be a favouritenational dish for some might simply be lunch for others. Indeed, whilenationally minded consumers give expression to their national sensibilitiesthrough the consumption and display of their ‘own national’ artefacts,others consume the same artefacts, rechristened ‘world culture’, todemonstrate and perform their (ostensible) cosmopolitanism.

It is not the intrinsic properties of these products but rather the shiftingmodalities through which meaning is attached to them that distinguishesnational consumption from other forms of consumption. The focus in theliterature on consumption of cultural artefacts with seemingly nationalqualities overlooks the extent to which consumption is simultaneously itselfan act of production. The consumption of ‘non-national’ products innationally distinct ways can thus also engender national distinctions.

Indeed, even the most global products can be subject to local appropri-ation in different, sometimes national, ways. Daniel Miller (1998), forinstance, has shown how the consumption of Coca-Cola®, the symbol ofglobalization par excellence, is appropriated by African and IndianTrinidadians to construct and maintain local ethnic and racial distinctions.In Scandinavia, Anders Linde-Laursen (1993) has shown how washing upbecomes an everyday site for ordinary Danes and Swedes to perform andproduce national difference. And Daphne Berdahl (1999) has examinedhow east Germans have been incrementally purchasing Germanness (in itswestern variant) through their appropriation and emulation of post-communist patterns of consumption.

Public spaces can also become endowed with national meaning not onlythrough the intentions of their architects but also through the interpret-ations of their everyday users. Restaurants, bars and cafés become nationalhangouts through practice rather than design; squares, parks, buildings andneighbourhoods similarly get marked in ways that can make nationhood asalient feature of those who encounter them. In multiethnic Romania,certain establishments are seen and therefore marked as Hungarian, not bythe signs hanging in front of them but rather through the everydayconsumption practices of their Hungarian clientele (Brubaker et al., 2006:296). And years after reunification in Germany, the internal design andorganization of police stations in Berlin mark them unambiguously as

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eastern and western to the officers who inhabit them (Glaeser, 1999). Thepreferences and practices of spatial consumption mark and constitute theplaces of everyday life in nationally relevant ways.

The media, too, can be nationally consumed even when they’re notnational in scope, content or format. The consumption preferences ofnationally delineated audiences for non-national media can engender andreinforce the experience of shared national belonging (Moores, 1997, 1993).Viewers tuned into the same broadcasts or readers flipping through thesame papers acquire shared ‘cultural competencies’ (Moores, 1997: 230), theboundaries of which coincide with those of the viewing or reading public.‘Opening the pages of the newspaper’, explains Moores (1993: 87), ‘and, wemight add, switching on the news bulletin at the same time every evening. . . – are ritual practices which enable us to imagine ourselves as part of asocial collectivity that shares in the same anonymous, simultaneous activity’(see also Anderson, 1991: 34–6). It makes people national, but not necess-arily nationalist. In Transylvania, many Hungarians read the local Hungarianpaper not for its nationalist commentary but rather for the death noticesand television listings of the Hungarian community to which they see them-selves (and therefore constitute themselves) as belonging (Brubaker et al.,2006: 293–4). Nationally demarcated media can organize the wholly non-national content of their audience’s cultural repertoires along national lines(Storey, 1999: 113–19).5

In these and other ways, it is not the inherent national qualities of theproducts consumed but the consumption of non-national products innationally discernable ways that contribute to the emergence of nationallydefined communities (of consumers). Shared national consciousness neednot be premised on the practical mastery of the same national (or nation-alist) canon; it can also congeal within parameters that are explicitly definedas national. Routine consumption practices thus become important modal-ities for the production of national sensibilities. They provide people withoccasions for establishing, upholding and reproducing national differencein ways that follow not from elite designs but rather correspond to thecontingencies of their daily lives.

CONCLUSION, OR HOW TO STUDY EVERYDAYNATIONALISM

The broad brush strokes favoured by macro-analytical approaches to thestudy of nationalism blur (and sometimes obscure) the finer grains of thenation that are embedded in the routine practices of everyday life. Wecannot properly appreciate the variable meaning and salience of nation-hood in everyday life by only studying its state-sponsored construction,

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modern industrial context or elite manipulation. This is not to suggest thateveryday nationhood should be studied independently of these phenom-ena. But this is where our study begins; not where it ends. Nations are notjust the product of structural forces; they are simultaneously the practicalaccomplishment of ordinary people engaging in mundane activities in theireveryday lives.

We have attempted to shift attention to everyday life as a domain in itsown right for the study of nationalism. This does not mean the nationpervades everyday life (cf. Billig, 1995); most of the time, it doesn’t. Evenin parts of the world characterized by intractable and polarizing nationalistpolitics, ordinary people are often indifferent to national(ist) claims madein their names (Brubaker et al., 2006; Fenton, 2007; Fox, 2004a). Thispopular indifference to the more stylized rhetoric peddled by politicianssuggests that there is a disjuncture between nationalist politics on the onehand and the ways in which ordinary people understand and representthemselves and their predicaments in national terms on the other(Brubaker et al., 2006; Fox, 2004b; Herzfeld, 1997). Nationalism does notresonate evenly or resoundingly in everyday life.

The actual ways in which the nation does come to matter to ordinarypeople cannot therefore be inferred from its political robustness. Our aimhere has been to specify the actual practices and processes through whichnationhood is reproduced in everyday life by its ordinary practitioners. Wetake Hobsbawm’s call to study nationalism ‘from below’ seriously byelaborating some of these ways in which people enact, constitute, legitimateand sometimes undermine the idiom of the nation in the diverse contextsof their everyday lives.

In a sense, ours is a plea to take social constructivism seriously. Thenation and its derivatives are not simply discrete objects traded in elitediscourse or constructed by the state; they are also everyday processes:ways of doing, seeing, talking and being that implicate, enact, ratify anduphold a national view of the world (Brubaker, 2004). But while all agreethat nations are social constructs, few have operationalized empiricallygrounded methodological agendas to systematically uncover the ways inwhich ordinary people participate in this national construction. We there-fore build on the approaches elaborated in the previous sections to developand propose a methodological agenda that studies the everydayconstruction of the nation in its own right.

In what remains, we briefly consider a mixture of methods that can befruitfully deployed to study and appreciate nationhood in everyday life.This methodological agenda is guided by two interrelated domains ofenquiry. First, we ask what is the nation in everyday life? This is the nation’severyday meaning and contents. Then we turn to the question, when is thenation in everyday life? This is the nation’s everyday salience and contexts.We consider appropriate methods for the study of each set of questions.

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What is the nation?

What, then, does the nation mean to ordinary people? We propose amethodology that looks not first to political speeches, newspaper articles orhistory textbooks for the nation’s everyday meanings, but rather puts thequestions to the audiences of the speeches, the readers of newspapers, andthe pupils of history – and to those who don’t listen to speeches, read papersor do their history lessons.

Survey research can be particularly useful in this regard. Questions aboutpolitical and cultural attitudes, in-group and out-group stereotypes, andsocial distance scales shed light on the diversity of ways in which ordinarypeople understand themselves and the world around them in nationalterms. Surveys are effective instruments for gaining a general overview ofthe national sensibilities of relatively large segments of the population.

Surveys are less well suited, however, for capturing variation in thenuance and texture of everyday nationhood. For this, more qualitativemodes of investigation are helpful, such as interviewing and focus groups.These methods (used in conjunction with survey methods) can provide aricher and more balanced picture of the scope, depth and content of theeveryday meanings of the nation. Interviews and focus groups provideresearchers with opportunities for exploring ordinary people’s discursiverepresentations of nationhood in terms chosen by the interviewee – not theinterviewer. They also record the sorts of non-verbalized manifestations ofeveryday nationhood that are missed by survey methods. The nation is notonly expressed discursively; it is also embodied in non-discursive forms –the shrugs, grimaces, chuckles, winces and snorts that accompany (andsometimes replace) ordinary people’s more articulate representations ofnationhood. These embodied embellishments, missing from spreadsheets,can transform sincerity into cynicism, affiliation into disaffiliation andcommitment into indifference. Ordinary people’s talk (and body talk)reveals their capacity for articulating their understandings of the nation –and aligning themselves with those understandings – in discursive andnon-discursive ways meaningful to them.

When is the nation?

But just because people can talk nationally in these research settingsdoesn’t mean that they do talk nationally in other contexts of their everydaylives. Ordinary people’s practical mastery of the idiom of the nation, repro-duced for social scientists in research settings of their own choosing, doesnot, in itself, explain the salience of such idioms in everyday life. Rather, itreflects a basic familiarity with the content and contours of nationhood that,when elicited, can be more-or-less competently deployed. But when is itelicited? Aside from those few odd times that students of nationalism come

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knocking at the doors of ordinary people with their grab bags of nationalquestions, when – if, indeed, at all – do ordinary people engage the nationand its contents?

Other methods of data collection are needed as a corrective to contex-tualize national talk. While surveys and directed interview questioning canprovide insight into what the nation means for ordinary people, they cannot,in themselves, explain when the nation matters to them. But the everydaycontents of the nation cannot be properly appreciated detached from theeveryday contexts in which they are invoked and evoked (Glaeser, 1999:10, 21–2; see also Wimmer, 2004). Different contexts – from the micro-interactional to the macro-structural – produce different types of talk andeven substantively different views from the same people (Verkuyten et al.,1995: 262–4). Directed interview and survey questioning supply people withone set of contexts for talking nationally. But such talk must simultaneouslybe recognized as an artefact of the research settings in which it is solicited.Nationally framed questions typically elicit nationally framed answers.Strategies that pre-emptively tag the nation as a relevant frame of interpret-ation are less sensitive to the larger everyday contexts in which ‘the nation’spontaneously happens – to the extent it does so at all. Left to their owndevices, ordinary people may simply ignore or discard national categoriesin favour of other categories that are more suitable for their quotidianneeds and wants.

We therefore propose a research agenda designed to leave people totheir own devices. Rather than continually equipping interview subjectswith our own national categories, we also adopt a ‘wait-and-listen’ approachto see how and when nationhood comes up in the discursive and interac-tional contexts of everyday life. Participant observation is best suited forthis sort of investigation. More than any other method, participant obser-vation is sensitive to context – not as it is supplied by the researcher but asit is constituted by ordinary people according to the contingencies of theireveryday lives. Participant observation provides a window for viewing thenation in everyday life. This is the nation as it is marked in accents and code-switching, displayed in dress and demeanour, cued by sights and sounds, andresponded to in news broadcasts and history classrooms. And this is thenation as it is also deflected, ignored and subverted in these same and othercontexts. These quotidian fluctuations in nationhood can easily be missedin interviews or distorted by surveys. Researchers interested in the salienceof nationhood in everyday life therefore need to spend some time ineveryday life. This requires a wait-and-listen approach because mostof everyday life is devoid of national inflection. But such is the study ofeveryday nationalism: nationhood, it turns out, is not salient across time orspace. The contexts in which it matters to ordinary people need to bespecified.

Indirect questioning in interview and focus group settings can also prove

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useful for assessing the everyday salience of the nation. But rather than onlyasking questions about what the nation means to ordinary people, strategiesneed to be formulated for asking questions about when the nation mattersto them. Nationhood can manifest itself not only as a topic of conversation,but also as an interpretative frame for making sense of other topics ofconversation. Researchers should thus consider questions on topics thatallow (but do not compel) those being interviewed to frame their responsesin national terms. Such methods are useful for gauging when, how and inwhat (discursive) contexts the nation becomes a meaningful frame forordering difference, explaining predicaments and interpreting socialphenomena. Like participant observation, these strategies also entail await-and-listen approach, as much talk is simply non-national.

Ultimately, the contents and contexts of the nation are best studied intandem. A singular focus on the nation’s contents fails to take into accountthe everyday contexts in which those contents are embedded. Too muchfocus on the contexts of the nation, however, ignores the ways in whichpeople’s non-verbalized mastery of national idioms can invisibly undergirdroutine talk and interaction. We propose, therefore, a mixed-methodsapproach that is sensitive to the variable meaning and contextual salienceof nationhood in everyday life (Brubaker et al., 2006: 380–5; Fox, 2004b:24–9).

We have explored just some of the ways in which the empirical study ofeveryday nationalism might be undertaken. In the aggregate, the variedapproaches elaborated in the preceding sections contribute to a burgeon-ing scholarship on the quotidian meanings, uses and salience of nationhood.Our goal here has been to harness these contributions under the banner ofeveryday nationhood and develop a research agenda for the systematicstudy of the phenomenon. This is the view of nationalism from below.

Acknowledgements

We thank John Hall for his critical feedback on an earlier version of this paperpresented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association,Montreal, August 2006. We are also indebted to Rogers Brubaker, Steve Fenton,Gail Kligman, and Andy Thompson for their comments.

Notes

1 There is a substantial scholarship on everyday life growing out of French (seeespecially de Certeau, 1984) and German traditions (the Alltagsgeschichte schoolof historiography). More recently, renewed interest in the field has come from avariety of social scientific perspectives (witness Routledge’s ‘New Sociology’series with all 12 of its titles on ‘everyday life’). While recognizing the intellec-tual traditions out of which this scholarship has grown, our own use of ‘everydaylife’ is a bit more ‘everyday’. That is, we define everyday life as a domain ofenquiry. Though its boundaries are not easily marked or maintained, in the study

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of nationalism everyday life is to be understood as a realm for the routine (andsometimes not so routine) activities of ordinary people. In this sense, everydaylife is to be distinguished from that field of activities coordinated and pursued by(national) elites.

2 Broadly speaking, our interest is in the relationship between politicized forms ofcollective belonging on the one hand and their everyday analogues on the other.Practically speaking, however, we limit our discussion to nations and nation-alisms on the one hand and everyday nationhood on the other. While we willoccasionally refer to ethnicity and its derivatives (particularly when such termi-nology is employed in the studies we reference), we do not treat such instancesof ethnicity as analytically distinct from nationhood. This is not to say that nation-hood and ethnicity are the same thing. Rather, it is to acknowledge that there isconceptual overlap in the ways in which ordinary people use such terms in theireveryday lives. Our usage follows the practices and preferences of these ordinarypeople.

3 The question could also be posed as ‘where is the nation?’ Our aim here is tosituate the nation not only temporally but also spatially in the routine contextsof everyday life.

4 Other non-linguistic cues also signal membership in the nation. Visual andembodied markers, such as style of dress, physical comportment, phenotype andbehaviour can make ethnonational affiliation transparent (Edensor, 2002; seealso Goffman, 1959). Many visual cues (particularly phenotypes) can function asconspicuous (and at times inescapable) markers of ethnonational belonging.Miller-Idriss’s research in Germany (forthcoming) shows how the national affili-ation of non-ethnic Germans is imputed by others based on phenotype and/ordress. Julia, a twenty-something Palestinian who came to Germany as a child,reported feeling like a foreigner as an adult. ‘How can I explain it?’, she asked.‘Actually, my habits are German, because I’ve been living here since I was nine.But people separate you off in a lot of ways: “Yeah, what are you doing here?”’Mehmet, another twenty-something born in Germany to Turkish parents,explained that despite feeling German, he was not accepted as one of them: ‘Howcan you feel like a German?’, Germans say to him. ‘How can I not feel like aGerman?’, he responds: ‘I was born here.’ While there were situations in whichtheir non-ethnic German backgrounds were less relevant, neither felt they wereentirely escapable. Despite both being German citizens and seeing themselves insome way as culturally German, Julia and Mehmet were regarded as ‘foreigners’by their German interlocutors.

5 ‘Membership in a people’, Karl Deutsch (1966: 86–100) reminds us, ‘essentiallyconsists in a wide complementarity of social communication. It consists in theability to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, withmembers of one large group than with outsiders’ (1966: 97). ‘It matters preciouslittle’, adds Ernest Gellner (1983: 127), ‘what has been fed into them [thecommunity]: it is the media themselves, the pervasiveness and importance ofabstract, centralized, standardized, one to many communication . . . quiteirrespective of what in particular is being put into the specific messagestransmitted.’

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Fox, Jon E. (2004b) ‘Nationhood without Nationalism: Being National in EverydayLife’, PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of California, LosAngeles, CA.

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JON E. FOX is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociologyat the University of Bristol, UK. Address: Department of Sociology,University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol. BS8 1UQ, UK. [email:jon.fox@bristol.ac.uk]

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS is Assistant Professor of InternationalEducation and Educational Sociology in the Steindhardt School ofCulture, Education and Human Devleopment at New York University.Address: 246 Greene Street Suite 300, New York, NY 10003, USA. [email:cmi1@nyu.edu]

The limits of everyday nationhood

ANTHONY SMITH

London School of Economics, UK

Some brilliant early essays by John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton and ErnestRenan apart, the study of nationalism is barely a century old. But, startingwith the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner in the 1900s, and thehistorical analyses of nationalist ideology by Carlton Hayes, Louis Snyderand Hans Kohn from the 1920s, there has been a burgeoning literature onevery aspect of nations and nationalism. In the post-war period, socialscientists like Karl Deutsch (1966) and Ernest Gellner (1964 and 1983)joined the historians in their quest to uncover the intertwined causes ofnationalism’s appeal and the proliferation of nation states in the wake ofdecolonization. The high point of this social science approach was reachedin the late 1970s and the 1980s with the publications of Michael Hechter(1975), Tom Nairn (1977), John Armstrong (1982), John Breuilly(1993[1982]), Benedict Anderson (1981[1982]), Eric Hobsbawm andTerence Ranger (1983),Anthony Smith (1986) and John Hutchinson (1987).The works of each of these scholars contained a ‘grand narrative’ of nation-alism: an overall account of why and how the world became divided intonations, and why nationalism became the dominant ideology of the modern

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epoch. Of course, as one would expect in any field of study, there have beensharp divisions over key issues such as the definition of the nation, the antiq-uity of nations and nationalism, and the relationship between ethnicity andnationalism. Yet, there was also a surprising degree of agreement over theneed for a broad theoretical and historical approach to the many issues inthe field – a consensus reinforced in subsequent works by Eric Hobsbawm(1990), Liah Greenfeld (1992), Walker Connor (1994), Adrian Hastings(1997) and Steven Grosby (2002).

Yet, the same decade of the 1990s saw a clear rejection of the grandnarratives and the causal-historical rationale behind these accounts.Influenced by the cultural turn of postmodernism, and drawing on a numberof sources – the works of Benedict Anderson (1991[1983]) and MichaelBillig (1995), discourse analysis, gender studies, cultural studies and politi-cal philosophy – the new wave of research in the field has turned its backon macro-analytic studies and focused instead on specific issues raised bythe multicultural type of liberal society characteristic of the late 20th andearly 21st century West.

In particular, there has been a rejection of elite-centred studies.Nationalism, it is argued, following Walker Connor, is after all a massphenomenon. This is the burden of the article by Jon Fox and CynthiaMiller-Idriss. Their basic claim is that ‘To make the nation is to make peoplenational’. Unfortunately, they argue, macro-structural analyses havefocused on nationalism ‘from above’, that is, from the perspective of thestate and the elites; the ‘people’ in whose name nations are constructed ‘arecuriously missing from much of the scholarship’. But, they continue, wecannot assume that the masses to whom nationalist projects are directed arealways in tune with the nationalist messages of the elites. Rather, theirresponses need to be studied in relation to their own concerns and theirown everyday experiences. This constitutes a new field of study, the field ofan ‘everyday nationhood’.

The bulk of Fox and Miller-Idriss’s article is then given over to a system-atic delineation of such a field under four headings: ‘Talking the Nation’,the discursive construction of the nation through everyday speech;‘Choosing the Nation’, the decisions made by ordinary people about nation-hood (and ethnicity); ‘Performing the Nation’, the ritual enactment ofsymbols invoking the nation; and ‘Consuming the Nation’, the expressionof national differences in the daily tastes and preferences of ordinarypeople. As the authors point out, none of these aspects is new; there isalready a very considerable literature on each of them. What is new here istheir synthesis of these aspects and their literatures, and their attempt toestablish on this basis a separate field of enquiry and counterpose it to therole of elites and elite discourse discussed in ‘much of the scholarship’ aboutnations and nationalism.

I find much that is attractive and valid in Fox’s and Miller-Idriss’s

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approach, and their review of the literature in these subfields is insightful,sane and balanced. They are quite justified, as Hobsbawm recognized, inasking us to problematize and pay much greater attention to the role ofnon-elites than the grand narratives appeared to permit. For all that, theirclaims raise some fundamental issues about the definition of the field andthe purposes of a study of nations and nationalism.

To begin with, one might question the assumption of an undifferentiated‘ordinary people’ at the heart of the enterprise. Either ‘the people’ (folk) isa construct of nationalism itself, as in ‘We, the people . . .’; or it is an unso-ciological category that needs to be broken down into its constituent parts,be they individuals, or various organized groups of people (e.g. movements,parties), or different interest and status groups (castes, classes, ethniccommunities). From this perspective, we may speak of various non-elites,not simply ‘ordinary people’. But the studies cited by our authors give forthe most part little clue about the non-elite segment of ‘the people’ that isbeing studied, and how it relates to wider issues of nationhood andnationalism.

Of course, in a sense this hardly matters, if one’s purpose is simply todescribe and analyse the national actions and sentiments of non-elites. Onthe other hand, it becomes vitally important, the moment one wishes toengage in a causal analysis of the bases of nations and nationalism. But,interestingly, while Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss ask both ‘what is thenation?’ and ‘when is the nation?’ (talked about, performed, etc.), they donot touch on the main question behind much of the previous scholarship inthe field, namely, ‘why is the nation?’, let alone ‘who is the nation?’. Thisgives to their presentation a curiously four-square and static aspect. On theone hand, there are elites propounding their nationalist messages; on theother hand, there is the people who receive or ignore the message, and forwhom, it appears, for most of the time nationhood is implicit, but of littleovert concern. There is no sense of any interaction between elites and ‘thepeople’, or among groups of non-elites, and between them and the elites,which would give us a much more complex, nuanced and dynamic picture.

It is a picture to which only a sociohistorical approach could hope to dojustice, and history is what is conspicuously missing in Fox’s and Miller-Idriss’s prospectus. Theirs is a here-and-now conceptual apparatus andprogramme of research, which takes no account of the heritage ofcommunities or the traditions of successive generations, each building on(or destroying) the groundwork laid by others before them. While theyconcede that ‘everyday nationhood’ should not be studied independently ofstate construction, industrialism and elite manipulation, they claim thatnations ‘are not just the product of structural forces; they are simul-taneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaging inmundane activities in their everyday lives’.

True enough, but ordinary people and their activities are situated in an

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historic context, and one that is central to the very idea of a nation progress-ing, as Benedict Anderson memorably reminded us, through linear, ‘emptyhomogenous’ time (Anderson, 1991[1983]).

Under the rubrics of the authors’ research programme, there is littleroom for temporal questions, for the widespread sense of the nationexisting, if not in ‘nature’, then in ‘immemorial time’. Indeed, it would beinteresting to discover how far the perceptions of time on the part ofdifferent groups matched those of the elites. More important, raising the‘why’ and ‘who’ questions would inject a sense of process and movementover time into a research programme that could so easily turn into yetanother example of the ahistorical ‘blocking presentism’ that characterizesso much recent writing in the field. (See Anderson, 1991[1893]; Peel, 1989)

This lack of historical imagination is reinforced by the tacit ethno-centrism and state-centrism of Fox’s and Miller-Idriss’s programme. Asregards the first of these, questions of choosing and consuming the nationmake sense in the industrialized West, where relatively liberal regimes allowa range of national (and other) choices and ethnic preferences, though evenhere, there are limits. As Michael Billig remarked:

One can eat Chinese tomorrow and Turkish the day after; one can even dress inChinese and Turkish styles. But being Chinese or Turkish are not commerciallyavailable options. (Billig, 1995: 139, emphasis in original)

This constraint is even more marked in the many parts of the developingworld where ‘hot’ nationalisms predominate and where, even for thosewho may be indifferent to the nationalist messages of their leaders, the‘wrong’ choice could prove fatal, and where there is little room to displayindividual tastes and ethnic preferences. Even ‘talking the nation’, except inprescribed ways, could prove dangerous in Burma, North Korea, SaudiArabia and Zimbabwe. If this is correct, then ‘everyday life’ as a domain ofthe study of nationalism in its own right is necessarily confined, concep-tually as well as practically, to the democratic West (including post-communist Europe). Not only can it not serve as a universal subfield; it hasactually little or nothing to say about the most intractable current problemsof nation building and nationalism in large areas of the world. This is aserious limitation, and once again we see that at its heart lies the attemptto separate ‘everyday nationhood’ from ‘historic nationhood’, and to severthe actions and responses of non-elites from those of elites in the commonhistoric processes and problems of nationhood and nationalism.

To this involuntary ethnocentrism is allied the state-centred basis of theauthors’ research programme. This is partly a matter of the methodologicalnationalism that inheres in most questionnaires and quantitative surveys, aswell as in the extrapolations from the ethnographic investigations that theyrecommend. But it also stems from the tacit equation of the everydaynation with the nation state, the failure to separate ‘state’ from ‘nation’, and

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the questionable decision to assimilate ethnic difference and community tothe nation and national identity. What then is talked about, chosen, symbol-ized and consumed is the nation qua national state – a conclusion reinforcedby the brief opening definition of nationalism drawn from Ernest Gellner:‘the project to make the political unit, the state (or polity), congruent withthe cultural unit, the nation’ (1983: 1). But this state-centrism creates adouble limitation in Fox and Miller-Idriss’s research programme. The firstis their failure to specify the relevant frame of reference in the case of thosenations without states such as Catalonia, Scotland and Kurdistan, wherethere may be a conflict of loyalties or concentric circles of allegiance. Is itSpain or Catalonia, Britain or Scotland, which is the relevant cultural unit?And what is the relevant frame of reference of the various immigrantcommunities in western states? Here, the failure to separate ethniccommunity from nationhood conceals as much as it reveals – in particular,the very different perceptions, decisions and consumption of nationhoodthat members of ethnic minorities may hold and display.

But the second and more serious limitation is the authors’ failure to stepoutside the ring of an existing national state and consider the interactionsof elites and non-elites in the formation of nations and the origins anddevelopment of nationalist movements. In other words, the researchprogramme developed by Fox and Miller-Idriss assumes the framework andboundaries of an already functioning national state in which ‘ordinarypeople’, for the most part citizens of the national state, talk, choose, enactand consume the (their?) nation. It has little or nothing to tell us about thesentiments and activities of non-elites either in earlier ethnic communitiesor during the formation of nations, or as part of a nationalist movementaiming to create a nation out of pre-existing ethnic groupings. Moreover,partly because of the nature of the methodologies proposed, it is onlymodern national states that can furnish the necessary arena for the study ofeveryday nationhood, and so ‘everyday nationhood’ is revealed as anotherspecies of modernism. Once again, we are locked into the present epoch inthe name of ordinary people.

Ahistoricism; ethnocentrism; nation-statism; the failure to specify ‘thepeople’: these are serious limitations and problems for the study of‘everyday nationhood’ propounded by Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss,and they stem, I think, from an underlying rejection of the causal-historicalmethodology common to previous scholarship in the field. Much of theunderstanding and insight gained by these scholarly efforts came preciselyfrom their readiness to embrace the task of providing an overall account ofnations and nationalism. By concentrating on the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of thenation as talked, chosen, performed and consumed by ordinary people, andneglecting the ‘why’ and ‘who’, the study of everyday nationhood becomesrestricted to the micro-analytical and descriptive rather than the causal andsociohistorical. Its insights are therefore confined to a narrow frame that

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excludes the larger issues of enquiry into the origins and development ofnations which exercised earlier historical sociologies of nationalism.

I do not wish to be understood as implying that the study of everydaynationhood has no place among the approaches to our understanding ofnations and nationalism. On the contrary, such studies are vital, but only ifthey are part of wider approaches. But, though Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss are critically respectful of previous scholarship, they clearly oppose itto the study of everyday nationhood. Their assumption is that previousaccounts were more or less exclusively elite-centred (though they cite theexception of Eric Hobsbawm).

However, such an assumption is in part misleading. Admittedly, someonesuch as Elie Kedourie (1971), with his concern for ideas, concentrated onthe intellectuals, the ‘marginal men’. But Karl Deutsch’s analysis of thegrowth of nations focused exclusively on mass sociodemographic variablessuch as urbanization, literacy, communications and voting. Ernest Gellner’sfirst theory of nationalism (1964: Chapter 7) highlighted the role of therecently urbanized ‘proletariat’ as one of the two prongs of nationalism (theother being the intelligentsia). Tom Nairn (1977) spoke of ‘mass sentiments’and of the nationalists ‘inviting the masses into history’ in countering thedepredations of capitalist imperialism in the colonies. In John Breuilly’s(1993[1982]) historical account, the function of nationalism is to mobilize,coordinate and legitimate the needs and interests of various groups insociety; while for Walker Connor (1994), the sense of belonging of the massof the population is the sole criterion of national existence.

Clearly, there has been no lack of concern for the ideals and sentimentsof non-elites, even if that concern has been less than systematic; and thesame can be said of ethno-symbolist and perennialist scholars such as JohnArmstrong, John Hutchinson, Steven Grosby, Adrian Hastings and myself.But, the central point is that in all these accounts, the emphasis falls not onthe thoughts and actions of the mass of a designated population (the non-elites), but on the relations and interplay between them and the elites withina wider national, or international, framework. Unlike the study of everydaynationhood, this kind of analysis can never be an end in itself, only an essen-tial part of a wider account of why nations and nationalism emerge and whythey have become such central features of the modern world.

There is a further point. What counts in the study of this relationship arethe links that bind different strata to each other and to their leaders. Forseveral scholars, these links are to be found in the various symbols,memories, values, myths and traditions that resonate among differentsegments of the designated population. Contrary to Hobsbawm’s argumentthat there can be no connection between premodern religious, linguistic andregional communities and the modern quest for a territorial nation state(1990: 47), one can demonstrate that some of these communities – alongwith their traditions, myths and symbols – formed the bases upon which

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later generations actually sought to create a territorial national state. It iseasy, but quite misleading, to see this relationship simply in terms of eliteappropriation, manipulation and justification. On the contrary: in manycases, the prior existence of linguistic, ethnic and religious communitiesformed the basis of subsequent nationhood, and endowed it with its‘everyday’ qualities.

For example, the national states of western Europe were formed over thecenturies around ‘ethnic cores’ (the English, northern French, Castilians)with their particular cultures and symbolisms; without these, it would havebeen difficult, if not impossible, for a modern state, however strong andefficient, to have forged the nation. (We can see the problems of forgingnations and national states in the ethnically deeply divided (ex-colonial)states of sub Saharan Africa and elsewhere). On the other hand, withoutthe actions and institutions of the strong, centralized state, we might stillhave had only the ‘untutored’ and largely unselfconscious ethnicity ofpremodern life (Fishman, 1980). Hence, the importance of the continuinginterplay between the ethnic traditions, myths, symbols and memories ofvarious strata of the population and the political institutions andprogrammes of the elites. Only through analysis of this relationship and ofthe ‘resonance’ of these myths, symbols and traditions among non-elites aswell as elites, can we begin to account for the formation of nations and theirsubsequent persistence and changes (Marx, 2003).

Now, perhaps the most obvious cultural link in this relationship is the onethat Fox and Miller-Idriss highlight: the importance of mass ritual perform-ance. In this connection we tend to think of great state occasions – inaugu-rations, coronations, marriages, jubilees, funerals – for which non-elitesprovide audiences and spectators rather than active participants. But thereare also independence holidays that call for solemn rejoicing on the part ofnon-elites in processions, parades, flag waving and choral singing. We alsohave the mass Remembrance Day ceremonies in memory of those fallen intwo world (and other) wars, in which an official performance by the politi-cal, military and religious elites is followed by an unofficial and moreinformal procession of war veterans, as occurs each November at theCenotaph in London’s Whitehall, and across Britain. It is interesting torecall that both this ceremony and the parallel one in Paris were initiatedby a combination of elite and non-elite action. The original ceremony afterthe First World War was extempore and meant to be solely for a singleoccasion. But popular demand, and political fears at the time, quicklyconvinced the authorities to turn it into an annual institution and entrust itsorganization to the veterans’ association (Mosse, 1990; Winter, 1995:Chapter 4).

The popular element is even more in evidence in the annual AustralianANZAC Day ceremony, both at the central Memorial in Canberra and atlocal monuments across the country. Here, much of the day, after the more

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formal processions organized by veterans associations are completed, isgiven over to drinking and celebration of the comradeship (‘mateship’) ofthose who fell at Gallipoli in 1916. We can find an interesting parallel, albeitwith greater formality, in modern Switzerland. A similar combination ofstate organization and local popular action was responsible for the 600thanniversary celebrations in 1891 of the Everlasting Alliance of the SwissConfederation and the original Oath of the Rutli of 1291. Here it was a caseof local groups, notably in Berne, initiating the summer festival, but soonthe federal state stepped in to organize it on a grander, nationwide scale(Kapferer, 1988; Zimmer 2003).

The same interplay between elite ideals and non-elite traditions andattachments characterizes issues of landscape and homeland. This was, ofcourse, a key part of the nationalist crusades: human beings were to returnfrom the city’s corruption to the purity of Nature, and there find their ‘roots’in the (as yet) unspoilt landscapes and unchanging peasant life. One can seethis in the ways in which North American artists such as Edwin Church andAlbert Bierstadt sought out the vast ‘wilderness’ of the American interior;even when they admired modern progress and its achievements, theylooked to untamed nature to find spiritual exaltation. A similar search forroots opened the eyes of Russian artists and composers to their vast steppesand the life of the peasants, even as modern industry was beginning to erodeit. It was the traditions and attachments of the peasants to their landscapesthat was taken up, albeit selectively, by the nationalist intellectuals as keyelements in their programmes to secure a viable and recognized homelandand to mobilize the mass of its population to support the movement forpolitical autonomy and independence. (Ely, 2002; Wilton and Barringer,2002).

Of course, elite programmes did not always carry the non-elites withthem, as John Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss rightly point out. The numberof Irish who could fathom the complex symbolism of the conjoint martyr-dom of Christ and Cuchulain, which Patrick Pearse propagated in 1916,must have been severely limited. On the other hand, the equally distantsymbolism of the Finnish sage Vainamoinen and the hero Lemminkainen,the protagonists of the Kalevala, which Elias Lonnrot had edited in 1835out of the Karelian ballads that he had collected, was widely disseminatedand became increasingly popular in Finland, especially through the post-independence school system and the music of Sibelius. More generally,heroes and golden ages fed the pride of downtrodden as well as dominantethnic communities, and cults of such figures as St Joan, Arminius or KingArthur could touch the lives of millions through public enactments andschooling. This too became part of everyday nationhood, even if such cultstended to originate with sub-elites. Moreover, where the cult could beassimilated to pre-existing religious traditions, as with St Joan to RomanCatholicism, or the martyr Hussein to Shi’ite Islam, the line between elite

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and non-elite nationhood became well nigh invisible. Both have becomeassimilated into an ‘historic nationhood’, the sense of national identityconstructed in and through ethno-history (Branch, 1985; Gildea, 1994;Keddie, 1981; Lyons, 1979).

We can perhaps see the influence of historic on everyday nationhoodmost clearly by considering the ideals of mission and ‘chosenness’, whichplay so vital a part in various religions, particularly in the monotheistictradition. Religious dimensions hardly figure in Fox and Miller-Idriss’sanalysis and research programme, reflecting the wider failure to placenationalism within the long-term cultural and religious traditions out ofwhich it emerged. We may never know how widely a sense of ethnic electionwas shared by the populace at large in pre-modern times, except in somewell-documented cases such as the Armenians, Greeks, Irish and Jews, aswell as among the Puritan Dutch, Swiss, Scots, American colonists andAfrikaners. But, given the proximity of the Church in both the eastern andwestern traditions to the villagers and peasants, and, for all its universalism,its strong practical and organizational emphasis on the vernacular andethnicity, we should not be surprised if a sense of ethnic election andmission became widely disseminated among non-elites. A sense of missionwas also an important motive in, and consequence of, state warfare, particu-larly on the borders of Christendom against the Muslims, as in Catalonia orHungary; though how far mobilized peasants came to share the knights’ orghazi sense of religious or ethnoreligious mission we may never know.Certainly, accounts of battles fought and won (or better, lost) became thestaple of later legend and lore, as well as of works of drama and fiction.Clearly, this is an area that merits further research. (See Akenson, 1992;Armstrong, 1982: Chapter 3)

From these brief examples, we can begin to sense the need for a largerframework, one that brings together the concerns of Jon Fox and CynthiaMiller-Idriss and the scholars on whom they draw, and those of otherscholars for whom ‘historic nationhood’ is a prime construct. While studiesof the everyday national concerns of non-elites are important in indicatingthe degree of ‘fit’ between them and elite ideals and programmes, they needto be situated within a broader and more dynamic enterprise, one thatlocates concepts of the nation and nationalism within a longer time-span,thereby revealing their profound historicity and their capacity for develop-ment and change. In this context, we need to remember that nationalism,despite its unifying core doctrine, comes in different forms, and this varietynot only adds to the subject’s complexity, but also makes it necessary toplace the study of the manifestations of everyday nationhood within boththeir specific historical and geo-cultural contexts and the broader develop-ment of an overall sense of nationhood and nationalism in history. Howfar such an ambition is likely to be realized, will largely depend on thewillingness of scholars of different theoretical persuasions to pool their

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resources and agree on a common strategy for resolving the many problemsof understanding in the field of nations and nationalism.

References

Akenson, Donald (1992) God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israeland Ulster. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Anderson, Benedict (1991[1983]) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition. London: Verso.

Armstrong, John (1982) Nations before Nationalism. Chapel Hill, NC: University ofNorth Carolina Press.

Billig, Michael (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.Branch, Michael, ed. (1985) The Kalevala, the Land of Heroes, trans. W.F. Kirby.

London: The Athlone Press.Breuilly, John (1993[1982]) Nationalism and the State. Manchester: Manchester

University Press.Connor,Walker (1994) Ethno-Nationalism,The Quest for Understanding. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.Deutsch, Karl (1966) Nationalism and Social Communication (2nd edition). New

York: MIT Press.Ely, Christopher (2002) This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in

Imperial Russia. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.Fishman, Joshua (1980) ‘Social Theory and Ethnography: Neglected Perspectives on

Language and Ethnicity in Eastern Europe’, in Peter Sugar (ed.) Diversity andConflict in Eastern Europe, pp. 69–99. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio.

Gellner, Ernest (1964) Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.Gildea, Robert (1994) The Past in French History. New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press.Greenfeld, Liah (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.Grosby, Steven (2002) Biblical Ideas of Nationality, Ancient and Modern. Winona

Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.Hastings, Adrian (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Religion, Ethnicity and

Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hechter, Michael (1975) Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National

Development, 1536–1966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Hobsbawm, Eric (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,

Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds (1983) The Invention of Tradition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hutchinson, John (1987) The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic

Revival and the Creation of the Modern Irish Nation State. London: Allen andUnwin.

Kapferer, Bruce (1988) Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance andPolitical Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington: Smithsonian InstitutionPress.

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Keddie, Nikki (1981) Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kedourie, Elie (1971) Nationalism in Asia and Africa. London: Weidenfeld andNicolson.

Lyons, F.S. (1979) Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1930. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Marx, Anthony (2003) Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mosse, George (1990) Fallen Soldiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Nairn, Tom (1977) The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London:

Verso.Peel, John (1989) ‘The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethno-genesis’, in Elisabeth Tonkin,

Maryon McDonald and Malcolm Chapman (eds) History and Ethnicity,pp. 198–215. London: Routledge.

Smith, Anthony D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell.Wilton, Andrew and Tim Barringer, eds (2002) American Sublime: Painting in the

United States, 1820–1880. London: Tate Publishing.Winter, Jay (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European

Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Zimmer, Oliver (2003) A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in

Switzerland, 1761–1891. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ANTHONY SMITH is Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism in theGovernment Department at the London School of Economics. Address:Department of Government, London School of Economics, HoughtonStreet, London WC2A 2AE, UK. [email: Nations@lse.ac.uk]

The ‘here and now’ of everyday nationhood

JON E. FOX

University of Bristol, UK

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS

New York University, USA

Anthony Smith’s brief but pointed reply to our debate article, ‘Everydaynationhood’, reminds us of what inspired us in the first place in our ownscholarly pursuit of nationalism. This time, however, we find ourselves in thecrosshairs of Professor Smith’s critical focus. In the limited space provided

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to us here by the editors of Ethnicities, we aim to respond to what we seeto be his two most central criticisms. First, Smith argues that our work isahistorical. Second, he faults our research agenda for neglecting thequestion of the relationship between elite and non-elite versions of nation-alism. We take each of these criticisms in turn.

Professor Smith accuses us of playing fast and loose with history in ouraccount of everyday nationhood. Coming from an historian of Smith’sstature, this is a difficult criticism to ignore. Our response comes in twoparts. First, we acknowledge that the primary focus of our research agendais not historical. We are, as Smith characterizes us, interested in the ‘hereand now’ of nationhood: the everyday contexts in which nationhoodbecomes (or is made) meaningful for (or by) ordinary people. In a sense,this is a reflection of the methodological assumptions we bring to the studyof everyday nationhood: as both sociologists and ethnographers, we have aprofessional interest in the ‘here and now’. Smith is critical of this narrowfocus and elaborates an approach that is more sensitive to the historicalorigins and development of the nation. We do not view these approachesas incompatible but rather as guided by different concerns. Our primaryfocus is not on Smith’s moment of ethnogenesis (for which his work on thetopic remains definitive); rather, we concentrate on the ways in whichethnonational idioms – once in circulation – are enacted and invoked byordinary people in the routine contexts of their everyday lives. Indeed, weare indebted to scholars such as Smith for demonstrating the precise waysin which such idioms have entered circulation. But the availability of suchidioms over the longue durée does not in itself explain when, where or howthose idioms actually get manipulated by their end users: ordinary peoplein the ‘here and now’ of everyday life. This is what our research agendaseeks to explain.

Second, we challenge Smith’s point that history is conspicuously missingfrom our account – at least on a narrow reading of history. Just because wedo not elaborate an exclusively historical approach to the study of everydaynationhood does not make our work ahistorical. Indeed, the more generaltemporal dimensions of nationhood referred to by Smith constitute acornerstone of our research agenda. To be sure, our ‘when’ question is notexplicitly measured in centuries (though see the first half of Fox’s (2006)book with Brubaker et al. (2006) on the history of east central Europe). Butneither does it necessarily exclude such a timeframe. Rather, we propose acontext-sensitive approach to the study of nationhood where context isunderstood in multiple temporal and spatial dimensions. Such an approachneither rejects nor insists upon an exploration of the meanings of the nationaccumulated over the centuries. We acknowledge that today’s quotidianinstantiations of nationhood are encrusted with multiple layers of meaningaccumulated through the years. But we don’t simply assume the contem-porary salience of these historical meanings; rather, we try to specify them

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empirically. Miller-Idriss’s research on nationhood and citizenship inGermany (forthcoming) searches not for the origins of Germanness in pastmillennia, but for its more contemporary reworkings in recent generations.Indeed, her aim is to explain how German nationhood and citizenship arethe collaborative accomplishment of successive generations of ordinaryGermans. In the study of everyday nationhood, time has many dimensions.We suggest a variable salience to nationhood. We should consider not justits historical developmental dimensions, but also its micro-interactionalmoments, its institutionally embedded and repetitive routines, and the fixedintervals and fleeting effervescences of holiday commemorations andsporting competitions, to name but a few. In each case, the multiple andoverlapping temporal contexts of nationhood’s everyday salience should beempirically specified rather than surmised from their historically rootedgenealogies.1

Professor Smith’s second main criticism is that our research agenda failsto problematize the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’ understand-ings and uses of nationhood. To this charge we plead guilty. Our goal in thepresent article has been more modest: to draw attention to the paucity ofresearch in the field of nationalism on the non-elite side of the equation.Exploring the complex relationship between elites and non-elites (to theextent discrete categories of each can be identified and maintained inthe first place) is a more ambitious undertaking than we recommend in thepresent study (although again see Miller-Idriss’ work (forthcoming) on theways in which teachers and students mutually constitute the meanings ofnationhood in classrooms in Germany). We instead propose, followingHobsbawm, that more (and more serious) attention be paid to the non-eliteside of the equation (Hobsbawm, 1991: 10).2 Only when this bias iscorrected can we hope to gain a greater appreciation of the relationshipbetween elites and non-elites.

Ultimately what distinguishes Smith’s approach from our own is thateach is guided by different research questions. Professor Smith wants toknow how nations were forged by both elites and non-elites. Indeed, hiselaboration of this approach in his reply is not just a call to scholarly arms;it is simultaneously a description of much of the excellent work that he andhis like-minded colleagues have already undertaken. Our interest, incontrast, is in examining how nations, once forged, are evoked in everydaylife by ordinary people. This does not entail a rejection of the claims of thesemore historical approaches. Rather, we wish to build on these findings whilesimultaneously refocusing attention on the everyday meaning and salienceof the nation in the world today. This is a question that Smith neitheranswers nor asks. But the historical emergence and development of thenation does not in itself explain its everyday invocations in the world today.We hope that we have been able to develop a research agenda that shedssome light on this latter and no-less important question.

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Notes

1 We respond similarly to Smith’s contention that our state-centric definition ofnationalism is inherently (if unintentionally) ethnocentric. We concede that ourdefinition does somewhat narrowly link the nation to the state (and thereby carrya Eurocentric bias). But our definition of nationhood in everyday life does not.Indeed, we submit that it is Smith who assumes such a linkage between thepolitical and the national in the realm of the everyday. For us, this is again anempirical question: how, if at all, ethnicity and nationhood are politically inflectedin everyday talk and interaction. Such questions must be asked not only in thewest, but in the east, north, and south as well.

2 Smith, too, is sympathetic to increased attention to the role of non-elites. But hisprimary interest in the public performance of national rituals still privileges thispreferred domain of elites. While national commemorations are indeedimportant venues for non-elite participation (see Fox, 2006), they are not the onlysuch venues. The danger of focusing immediately on the linkages between elitesand non-elites is that such investigations often take elite sites of nationalism astheir starting point. We, in contrast, propose beginning our investigation ofnationhood ‘from below’ before looking for the linkages with elite brands ofnationalism.

References

Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox and Liana Grancea (2006) National-ist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.

Fox, Jon E. (2006) ‘Consuming the Nation: Holidays, Sports, and the Production ofCollective Belonging’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(2): 217–36.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1991) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miller-Idriss, Cynthia (forthcoming) Blood and Culture: Race, Citizenship, andNational Belonging in a Re-Imagined Germany. Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress.

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