OU blog

Personal Blogs

New photo

‘My own nation’ implications and a theory? A844 Exercise 1.5.1 - 2

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Thursday, 20 Sep 2018, 10:32

What does the phrase ‘my own nation’ imply? A844 Exercise 1.5.1

This exercise seems to imply that there is an answer to the question ‘what is my nation?’ However, truthfully, the answer isn’t so clear to me. The OU uses nation to differentiate the constituent parts of the UK but I’m not sure I identify with the term ‘England’. Not that the problem is eased by thinking of myself as British or belonging to Great Britain or the United Kingdom. In the end the terms are remote from any sense of implied ownership, of me of their referents or of their referents of me. One resists such a sense of legalistic ownership, yet in the end we are caught up in such legalist categories of identity. These categories are not just cognitions: they exert their power, for me and on me, as documents which could govern any future choices I might want to make – of domicile,   work or income and so on. In a sense they represent certain determinations of ‘self’ whether I own them or not, they own me and fit me into a whole series of extant power relationships, and include some which could emerge from complex forces in relation to as yet unseen circumstances. The issue and experience of Brexit is a case in point.

Is there a point in looking for associations of the term ‘my nation’ then? I think perhaps there is.  Not all of those meanings will I want to own consciously as a representation of myself but they will remain in the background. They include notions of racial origin, although the terms themselves are already compromised by ‘tribal’ origins that I don’t own – such as Angles, Bretons (Great and Little Bretons) and which don’t equate with current geography or political status, Nevertheless the sense of ‘race, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘tribe’ is an association. This causes problems of course in relation to these complex notions and their boundary with notions such as statehood and culture, and the end of the relevance of the term  ‘tribe’ (except as a means of differentiating a supposed (from the Eurocentric perspective) of lesser rather than greater cultural and/or economic-political development. So with the provision that this will happen with all terms – that they will become complex and hard to own by anyone as a conceptual representation of self, try:

‘Race’, ethnicity

Community (which allows for the sense of multi-racial/ethnic but does not always imply a community of communities with some indistinct boundaries between them).

Tradition ‘folk concepts

The sense of a shared past and/or ‘culture’

Political Belonging (enabling and constraining)

Geographical belonging (ditto). Including internal distinctions of capital, regions, districts, ‘parishes’ (for some but not me).

Government and a network of implied power relationships of citizenship

Issues of common faith or common beliefs

Institutions that represent that sense of nationhood in title or form or implicit claims.

Physical forms – traditions again, building, street plans and types etc.

You realise you could go on – so I’m not going to consult Williams now.

 

Theoretical terms in understanding nationhood: Benedict Anderson? A844 Exercise 1.5.2

Refer to my pre-course Preparatory Reading Notes.

To these I’d note that the key issues of the chosen passages for the course seem to me:

1.      That the concept of the ‘imagined’ is essentially to any notion of ‘nation’ or ‘national community’ that emerges. These are not things imagined by individuals in the first instance but by cultural work by peoples in certain kinds of determinate relationships with each other. They are not cognitions for the individual until they have been prepared (and evidenced by products) of a socially imagined category. Imagination here is something that is shared – building of common images. These images are created, shared (in an interactive manner) and developed as a sense of past, present and future identity project – a project that involves inclusions (of images and image components) and exclusions – and hence boundaries (not all of which are considered to be crossed or crossable with any or at least complete freedom – ties to notion of ‘freedom of movement’. Its  features:

a.      Objectively a modern concept but only in as far as it allows for a subjective sens of communal antiquity of origin (myth of origin perhaps – but driven heavily into the remotest part)

b.      It is universal as a category. No-one exists without a rewlationship to this category and one of its forms.

2.      It is rich in meanings in relation to power / politics but there is poverty of deep philosophical (ontological & epistemological) back-up.

3.      its characteristics as a concept are summed up as being:

a.      imagined

b.      limited / boundaried

c.      based in community

4. That the social / institutional practices by which these imaginations are threefold. However all three institutions / practices are interactive and share common development and some boundaries:

a.      The Census. There is a historical move to racialize the categories used to nominate nation (164) to the disadvantage of religious or belief-based categories. With race there is no fractions (166).

b.      The Map. Creates units with ‘state’ boundaries, which are relational with other states but also stable. They have IMAGINED ‘VERTICAL INTERFACES’ (172). They are a type that can be reproduced in space/time (175) – concept of reproducibility is important. Map becomes a logo or emblem.

c.      The Museum. To an extent the whole state is a museum curated by natural government of sites. The depth of archaeological sites relates to the imagined past of the nation. Linked to birth in nineteenth century of ‘colonial archaeology’ (178f) and of scholar-officials (179 I think of Ernest Jones in the 18th century). Good phrases ‘profaning processes’ of nation building (de-religionising) and ‘infinite reproducibility’ (182) A country’s past is selectively imagined and curated as if by nature.

Permalink Add your comment
Share post