Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

States and Nationalism

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States and Nationalism

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States and Nationalism
MICHAEL HERZFELD

Abstract
Nationalism, especially in the form that links national identity and statehood, is in
its present form a relatively recent but highly successful and pervasive invention.
Grounded in metaphors of shared blood and collective inheritance (including the
idea of national culture as patrimony or heritage), it still displays unexpected staying power despite concern over its negative history as “ethnonationalism” and as the
translation of superficially benign ideologies into doctrines of violent exclusion and
genocide. Modern nation-states, also unexpectedly, often encapsulate segmentary
models of collective identity; nationalism may appear in everyday (“banal”) activities, the less respectable of which—as intimate zones of sociability—it may seek to
hide behind official images of cultural and genetic homogeneity. Current research
focuses on the practices that link idealized national identity to their realization and
subversion in social and bodily experience and performance.

EARLY CONCERNS
Despite predictions of the imminent demise of nationalism, countries that
had seemed unconcerned about the plethora of sometimes fluid minority
identities within their borders had begun, by the 1990s, to seem fixated on
the creation of national purity. From the Balkans to South Asia, and from
the Caucasus to Rwanda, blood flowed in direct proportion to its symbolic
importance as the sign of a biologically inherited, shared culture. Although
states can exist without nationalism, recent experience suggests that this is a
rare achievement. Nationalism is thus once again, and to an unprecedented
degree, of immediate, global concern.
The relationship between states and nationalism can be succinctly summarized. States are bureaucratic engines of reification; they create borders, not
only cartographically, but also semantically. Indeed, the word “definition”
comes from the Latin root finis, “earthwork,” a structure that defined the
territorial limits of ancient cities. Ethnicity, which anthropologists from
Evans-Pritchard (1940: 125–132, 217–228) (in a case now extremely relevant
to the warfare occurring in South Sudan) to Barth (1969), labored hard to
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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detach from its static conceptualization as a type of fixed identity, becomes
the basis of the nation-state, each rendering the other as both inevitable and
inextricably interconnected. In their recognition of the contingent nature
of national identity, however, they were anticipated by Renan’s (1882)
celebrated description of the nation as defined by “the shared possession
of a rich sediment of memories” and “the desire to live together, the will to
keep valuing the heritage that has been bequeathed in its entirety.” Although
the second part of this attempt at a definition appears to evoke the current
rhetoric of heritage and history (see, e.g., Daniel, 1996: 13–42; Hayden, 2002;
Lowenthal, 1985), the notion that a group of people must actively desire to
cohabit anticipates the critiques of nationalistic claims on common sense and
nature that have dominated anthropological and some other social science
thinking since the 1970s. Smith’s work (1995) comes closest to Renan’s
insistence on the role of the collective will and to Renan’s rejection of the
“primordialist” (Geertz, 1973: 259–261) view of nationalism—the idea that
an ethnic group was inherently entitled to its own territorial state. Nationism,
a term favored by Gregory Lobo (2014), places the nation clearly at center
stage as an object of worship around which leaders build powerful notions
of belonging, thereby distracting attention from their own failings.
Perhaps because of the historical legacy of mid-twentieth century fascism, social scientists have largely treated nationalism as both tending
toward exclusionary, often violent acts and on the brink of disappearance.
Nationalism, in its familiar forms, really only emerged in eighteenth century
Europe, although national states have existed in other times and places.
Some expected it to fade with the rise of supranational European and other
structures. But numerous newly minted nationalisms cast themselves in
terms of familiar metaphors of blood and kinship, thus investing their
common ideology with an air of naturalness, inevitability, and territorial
rootedness.
So thorough is this process of naturalization—a term built into nationalist
practices in the bestowal of national citizenship—that even in a notoriously
uneven history of national unification, that of Italy, one of the most stringent critics of national pride, Giambattista Vico, was claimed by Risorgimento
intellectuals as a spiritual ancestor and representative of transcendent Italian genius. In Germany, where the theories of Johann Gottfried von Herder
were more plausibly adumbrated to the emergence of national identity, and
whence these ideas spread rapidly through the pan-European development
of national folklore studies (e.g., Herzfeld, 1982; Wilson, 1976), the fusion
of state, nation, and nature itself came to its most intense formulation during the Nazi period (Kamenetsky, 1977; Linke, 1997). The serious scholarly
work of linguists was usurped by such movements to create arguments about
an “Aryan civilization” that not only informed the entire racial “science” of

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Nazism but even subsequently spread to such countries as Sri Lanka (Daniel,
1996: 55).
Such misuses of scholarship did not dupe the entire academic world;
archaeologist Clark (1939: 197–206; see also Arnold, 1990), for example,
wrote a sharp condemnation. Rich critiques of nationalistic appropriation of
archaeology have addressed more recent instances (e.g., Abu El-Haj, 2001:
127–129; Kohl, 1998; Kohl and Fawcett, 1995). Social anthropologists, too,
have addressed the ways in which nationalism and local identities affected
each other. A foundational text is Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica
(1949). Although Evans-Pritchard was a strong advocate of distinguishing
between segmentary and pyramidal societies—in other words, between
those based on the internal governance of the genealogically organized feud
and those centrally organized around a formal bureaucracy—he clearly
showed how a segmentary and tribal society could evolve, however incompletely, into a pyramidal and national entity, that of Libya. There, opposition
to an external power (Italy), seen as representing the most inclusive type
of clan from the Bedouin perspective, provoked the coagulation of all the
different tribal groups.
Such nation-states often retain elements of segmentary organization; Shryock’s (1997) work on Jordan usefully shows how competing, kinship-based
factions struggle to claim historical truth for themselves while denying it to
their opponents. They operate within a single shared idiom; their disputes
thus paradoxically help to forge cultural unity. Segmentation does not disappear with the creation of a centralized nation-state, but it may represent
a hidden dimension of the collective dynamic (see also Eriksen, 1993: 158).
Thus, in Thailand the erstwhile “pulsating galactic polity” (Tambiah, 1976:
115)—a fundamental segmentary arrangement of local powers—reappears
in forms of resistance to the centralized bureaucracy that was installed during the “modernizing” phase of Thai history as a way of placating the colonial
powers and preventing them from invading the newly reconstituted Siamese
polity (see Herzfeld 2016, forthcoming).
Twentieth century work on nationalism displays a growing awareness that
it represents a relatively recent reorganization of local social orders; often violates the complexity of the existing sociocultural terrain; and bureaucratizes
not only governance (the state) but also culture (the nation), moving from
processual models to rigid reification.
CLASSIC FORMULATIONS
Three post-World War II treatments of nationalism stand out as particularly
influential. Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) exemplifies
the liberal critique of nationalist extremism. Where the Marxist historian

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Hobsbawm (1990) saw the rise of nationalism as a product of bourgeois
domination, Gellner was more concerned to explore the reasons for its
frequent degradation into violent forms of exclusion. Gellner (1983: 138)
saw it as a radically modern phenomenon, characterized by three invariant features: literacy, homogeneity, and anonymity. His insistence that
nationalism was the result of a deliberate spreading of “high culture”—an
anthropologically suspect term—blinded him to how elite formulations of
national identity only gained purchase because they built on the preexisting
cosmology of the newly incorporated and often illiterate populations. He
also considered Islamic nationalisms radically different from their Western
equivalents in that, instead of relegating the remnants of the feudal past
to a purely symbolic or ceremonial role, they required continuing fealty
to these—in his view—outmoded concepts (Gellner, 1983: 79–80). In this
regard, he anticipated modern Western right-wing rhetoric more than he
did his own discipline.
Arguably the most influential of the three, political scientist Benedict
Anderson (1983) attempted through his remarkable “imagined communities” thesis to ask how so many states could persuade citizens to die and kill
in the name of such an abstract, recent concept. Their coercive power may
be sufficient, if not to control “hearts and minds,” then at least to demand
outward conformity. When the Thai and Turkish governments expect their
citizens to stand to attention in the street during the daily playing of a
national anthem, they are controlling bodies rather than minds; but docile
bodies, as Foucault (1977: 135–169) has so ably demonstrated, make for
effective governance. Anderson’s question is more interesting, however,
when addressed to the self-sacrifices that people are willing to make before
and for the creation of the nation-state, when the nationalist ideology is quite
new. Greeks, for example, mostly did not think of themselves as “Hellenes”
before 1770, and were reluctant even to countenance the idea that they were
descended from these mythical pagan giants; thus, the fervor of the 1821
revolution does demand explanation. Even if we dismiss the retrospective
reconstruction of the guerrillas known as klefts (literally, thieves) as heroes
of the national struggle and see them instead as self-interested bandits (St.
Clair, 1972: 37–39, 103–110), it is hard to see why so many were willing to
die for the cause of a nation still, and for a long time to come, controlled by
external interests. To say that the klefts were trying to throw off the yoke
of heavy taxation hardly explains anything, since most of them were not
paying their taxes anyway. Similarly, despite the apotheosis of the Boston
Tea Party (most recently and most virulently led by the right wing of the
Republican Party), it is hard to imagine that the idea of an “American
nation” was a necessary outcome of revolt.

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A difficulty with Anderson’s argument is that it rests too heavily on
assumptions about the psychological process of imagination. Performances
of affect are important to the public confirmation of loyalty, as witness
the outpourings of grief at North Korean leader Kim Il Jong’s funeral,
but they do not necessarily represent people’s actual feelings. Imaging
might have been a better term for what Anderson describes; the semiotic
principle of “iconicity”—the principle of resemblance, whether genetic
or cultural—transforms the idea of familial homogeneity into a national
coherence (as in the motto E pluribus unum) at the level of a collective
representation. Performance and semiosis, not thought processes, produce
the palpable forms of nationalism.
Anderson’s thesis nevertheless remains compelling in important respects.
First, it was the first to raise the central “why” question without tracing all
nationalisms to a unified European source. Had Anderson only penned those
few pages on the role of the novel in galvanizing Philippine identity, his book
would have profoundly affected our understanding. But Anderson also theorized the appeal of nationalism in innovative terms. Neither his own nor
any other single-stranded explanation, however, is likely to stand the test of
comparative critique.
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS AND QUESTIONS
Various scholars have attempted to wrestle with the unexpected, continuing
importance of nationalism. Some have critically analyzed nationalisms
based on myths of national homogeneity. Befu’s (2001) notable study shows
Japanese insistence on the internal coherence and purity of Japanese culture
to be largely a myth. Nevertheless, that ideology is reproduced in artisanal
production in ways that suggest that conformity is at least a cultural ideal
(Kondo, 1990). Other scholars have singled out nationalisms based on
racial, cultural, or religious exclusion, as in Tambiah’s (1989, 1992) trenchant
critiques of “ethnonationalism.” The conflicts in Sri Lanka, the former
Yugoslavia, Myanmar, and now the Crimea all illustrate the easy conversion
of ethnic loyalty into “ethnic cleansing” through an obsession with symbolic
purity (and conversely with “pollution” by others).
Other scholars have returned to religion for insight. Thus, Gregory Lobo’s
answer is that the nation itself transcends the pettiness of human governance and becomes a worthy object of a virtual millenarian cult. Indeed, some
nationalisms were born of actual cults, as in Papua New Guinea (e.g., Worsley, 1957), while similar movements fomented rebellion against what were
seen as oppressive majoritarian states (e.g., Bowie, 2014, on Thailand).
As Gellner (1983: 56–57) noted early on, Durkheim’s celebrated definition
of religion works a fortiori for nationalism. Gellner, however, did not explore

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why Durkheim’s argument works better for nationalism than for religion,
in part because, none too presciently, he rejected religion as the basis for
modern nationalism. While we cannot access the minds of long-lost religious
leaders, and so cannot disinter the process whereby the collective cohesion
Durkheim professed to find in religion was actually invented, we can do
exactly that for nationalism. Precisely because nationalisms are created,
as Gellner recognized, by bourgeois elites, the process of their invention,
although conveniently suppressed in their own propaganda (which lays
claim to an eternal and natural status), is usually traceable through the
normal channels of historical research. Thus, for example, in investigating
the creation of post-Ottoman, Turkish republican nationalism, we discover
that the main architect of the Turkish constitution, Ziya Gökalp, was a
passionate admirer of Durkheim’s ideas. It is hardly surprising that one sees
a carefully orchestrated effervescence (to recall one of Durkheim’s favorite
tropes) at every spot a Turkish radio can reach with the national anthem.
Bruce Kapferer (1988) has offered a distinctive approach that implicitly
builds on the Durkheimian tradition (although he attributes it more to Louis
Dumont). His formulation points us in the direction of another key question,
one not raised by Anderson: why do nationalisms, with their promises of
inclusion and redemption, so often morph into catastrophic violence? Comparing the masculine, “mateship” egalitarianism of Australian nationalism
and the ostensible pacifism of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Kapferer asks how
the first came to provide the context for some spectacularly nasty forms of
racism and sexism, while the second is the backdrop to a vicious campaign of
genocide (now repeated in Myanmar). He suggests that a Dumontian model
of “encompassment” allows us to see how all such “generous” ideologies
are necessarily and logically exclusionary. He also treats nationalism as a
religion, with its concomitant rituals; certainly, if Billig (1995: 9) is right to
see the United States as a nationalistic country in its everyday (“banal”)
performances of belonging, or if my own argument about bureaucratic
actions such as stamping documents similarly suggests ritual in the furtherance of a quasi-religious ideal (Herzfeld, 1992: 17–18), then the exclusion of
outsiders through apparently “trivial” (Özkırımlı, 2005: 119) bureaucratic
acts parallels the violent history of some of the most ostensibly peace-loving
religious systems. Kapferer’s argument foreshadows Handelman’s (2004)
performance-oriented understanding of Israeli nationalism, in which
bureaucratic logic is given potentially discriminatory force through repeated
productions—forms of secular ritual, as it were, paralleling my own coinage
of “secular theodicy”—in the public sphere. Handelman’s more general
argument, that national bureaucracies are machines for the performance of
systems of classification, underscores the symbolic nature of the state itself.
In related vein, Scott (1998) sees the state as demanding the legibility of its

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citizenry—a goal that adherence to a common language and performance
idioms advances.
Indeed, one can “perform the nation,” not only through spectacles that
reproduce and inculcate the bureaucratic logic of the state’s view of national
identity (for a remarkable example, see Bowie, 1997), but also through
song and dance officially acknowledged as national culture but sometimes
implicitly opposed to elite values (see Askew, 2002: 288, on Tanzania).
Such analyses take folklore out of the archive and back into everyday
life; today mass-mediated performances may also reveal to the perceptive
ethnographer some of the collective secrets of the nation (see Shryock,
2004). Performance is also a crafted activity that makes authenticity “real,”
whether for tourists or in relation to the state’s management of ethnicity
(Zhu, 2012; see also Eriksen, 1993: 118–120). The dimension of performance
thus provides the missing link between theories of national identity and the
state’s achievement of control over its formulation, and shows us, as I will
illustrate in the next section, how unofficial attitudes and cultural traits also
contribute—despite their non-normativity—to the emergence of a sense of
nationhood.
Significant recent research and directions
We still need an adequate explanation of the power of the kinship metaphor
even when it is stretched to accommodate such an impossibly vast scale.
Although much of the work on nationalism and the state has been done by
anthropologists working from local field research, the top–down formulations of writers such as Gellner and the very different Huntington (1996) have
disproportionately influenced public discourse, as Özkırımlı (2005: 191) has
noted. Ethnography, it seems, does not sell. But it does offer clues that earlier
research, too focused on ideology and the “big picture,” failed to grasp.
I begin with the idea that kinship groups, especially families (Panourgiá,
1995), do not always behave according to their own stated ideals, and that
this naughtiness is part of what makes them so dear to their members.
In some cases, these metaphors represent transmutations of prenational
formations, as in the adoption by the Turkish Republic of a modified version
of the Ottoman formula (Delaney, 1995). Furthermore, kin groups are often
corporate owners of property. The landholdings of a family easily become
a metaphor for national territory (as the house does for the protection of
its interests, often gendered as female (see Yanagisako & Delaney, 1995;
Mankekar, 1999). More complex in its origins and interpretation is the notion
of a culture, and of heritage, as the collective property of a nation.
Nation-states are like families in ways that neither states nor families
would want to acknowledge. They succeed in commanding loyalty when
it becomes clear that they will tolerate a certain degree of disobedience—a
disobedience couched in culturally familiar idioms (Herzfeld, 2005).

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The so-called “klefts” (guerrilla fighters) supported the Greek war of
independence because it undermined an existing authority, the Ottoman
administration, and so became the model for the way citizens of the new
state would imagine themselves: rambunctious, naughty, and cunning.
Those who continued in this vein after the consolidation of national power,
however, found themselves quickly in disgrace (and sometimes in jail).
But the self-image of the insubordinate citizen persisted, and constituted a
challenge to the legitimacy of the state at two levels. On the one hand, the
tax-evading, “corrupt” stereotype represented a genuine problem as too
much punishment of those imitating a heroic model would risk alienating
the entire populace. On the other, its centrality to the self-presentation of
Greece to the rest of the world, and especially to the European Union, has
compromised the country’s legitimacy.
Outsiders demand reform. But aside from the fact that this is not easily
done, it would actually alienate a large segment of the population by
repressing the very things that citizens guiltily enjoy. Whoever heard of
a national government endorsing seamy jokes, for example? But they are
nevertheless as much a part of the culture, and arguably a more familiar
one than all the grand ideals that are trotted out at anniversary celebrations
and in monumental inscriptions. What really commands the loyalty of
citizens, I suggest, is the knowledge that the state will always connive at
archetypical infractions representative of what I have called cultural intimacy.
That knowledge, so precious to social life and yet so inadmissible in official
discourse, makes the nation—an abstraction made real by its translation into
kinship metaphors—worthy of the ultimate sacrifice. In other words, people
may be less invested in subsuming their personal mortality in a generic
immortality, as Anderson argues, than in preserving the conditions that
mortality makes precious. The converse of national heritage (Anderson’s
reaching for immortality) is “corruption” (corruption of the flesh being the
cause of historical time and therefore of mortality), and that neither holds
much meaning without the other (see Herzfeld, 2014).
Even political scientist Billig (1995: 10, 14–15), who is uncomfortable with
some aspects of Anderson’s thesis, accepts his concept of imagination. Yet
consider the Turkish citizens who stand to attention for the anthem: they
are not necessarily imagining anything beyond their immediate purview, but
they are fitting themselves to an image. Their bodies, like those of the Chinese
athletes described by Brownell (1995), are retrofitted to an entity expanded
from a more generic model of personhood. At stake here is not a psychological process, but the cultural management of resemblance or, as we might put
it in semiotic terms, iconicity—the creation of resemblance as the basis for
consensus.

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Naming symbolizes this play of similarity and difference, as in the
contrasted responses of Greek nationalists to the self-naming of Romania
and Macedonia. Architect of modern Greek folklore studies and sometime
diplomat Nikolaos Politis was adamant that it would be unreasonable for
the Greeks to take the name “Romania” for themselves even though it
had been their collective name in what he dubbed the national epic of the
Hellenes, apparently because it alluded to the post-classical era (Herzfeld,
1982: 128). But Greek nationalists have never applied the same logic to the
case of Macedonia, arguing that this ancient name was “theirs” and that
the “Skopjans” (as they call them after the republic’s capital city) should
simply find another name. Sutton (1997) has persuasively argued, from the
evidence of a direct parallel between the inheritance of personal names and
the inheritance of land, that for Greeks the name of Macedonia is tightly
bound to Greece’s territorial integrity mapped onto a particular reading of
its past.
In some languages, the terms heritage display patrilineal overtones redolent
of older European aristocratic systems of descent and inheritance. Thus, in
French, patrimoine is implicitly the birthright of a people, an inheritance from
the forefathers. Richard Handler, in several publications (Handler, 1985a,
1985b, 1988), has demonstrated that in nineteenth-century nationalism
culture itself was reified as a possession—not without help from some early
anthropologists, whose successors still sometimes experience difficulty in
ridding the term of its static implications and treating it instead as a process.
Although Québec, the case studied by Handler, never achieved full independence, its adherence to the logic of the patrimoine nicely illustrates the
political process through which “having a culture” becomes the state-level
equivalent of landowning. Nations in which the equivalent terms—often
legalistic translations from French or English—do not have comparable
inheritance systems at the local level seem also to evince relative difficulty
in marshaling emotion in defense of “national heritage,” although most
can point to something akin to “tradition” as the repository of their reified
national culture. In pre-modern Europe, a person without land was not a
complete person, so Handler’s argument goes; thus, failing to acquire a
national culture was a mark of incomplete nationhood.
SUGGESTIONS FOR NEW RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
What these insights show is that much more work is now needed, especially
from historians, on how the terminology of nationhood and “return” (e.g.,
Voutira, 2003; Handelman, 2004: 44–51) and the practice of heritage conservation and reconstruction have been adopted by various states; the International
Journal of Heritage Studies is becoming an important venue for the exploration

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of the latter topic. We also need to see more research on the impact of supranational entities—the EU, ASEAN, and others now in a more provisional
condition—on both the creation of cultural commonalities (on the EU, see
Shore, 2000) and on the weakening of national identities and the concomitant strengthening of regional ones; the examples of Russia and the former
Yugoslavia show that the demise of one nationalism can actually give birth
to several smaller but arguably more intense new ones. At the same time,
efforts to maintain peaceful coexistence within a single “umbrella state” are
not yet well understood, although a few detailed studies (see especially the
special section on educational policies and practices in Studies in Ethnicity and
Nationalism 13: 277–393) have now begun to show the way.
At the same time, it has also become imperative to understand what has
happened under the same circumstances to that inner-directed—but equally
intense—dynamic that corresponds to the zone of cultural intimacy—the
social dimension of nationalism, already emphasized in different ways by
Eriksen (1993) and Özkırımlı (2005). Do the new regional identities display
similar characteristics? That Italians commonly display the same affection
and defensiveness about local culture that Greeks are more inclined to
deploy for national identity is highly suggestive.
New research on migration, diasporas, ethnic solidarity across borders, and
refugee politics and asylum, while too wide-ranging to discuss in detail here,
are necessarily interdisciplinary (here perhaps following the example set by
Anthony D. Smith) and will help to illuminate the future trajectory of the
various forms of nationalism that have dominated the headlines or begun to
emerge quietly in the background but bid fair to play a more central role as
the West’s power either declines or becomes more diffuse and other cultural
traditions of personhood generate new configurations of national identity.
In this development, the role of local ethnography and archival research on
the new media as well as on diplomatic records will be central, displacing,
one hopes, the excessive generalizing that has made nationalism an easy target for critique but a difficult area for generating understanding of what is a
dynamic and ever-changing set of phenomena.
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workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Linke, U. (1997). Blood and nation: The European aesthetics of race. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lobo, G. 2014. What are Nations? Published 4 April 2014. http://blog.library
ofsocialscience.com/what-are-nations-essay-by-gregory-lobo/, last accessed 9
February 2015.
Lowenthal, D. (1985). The past is a foreign country. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Mankekar, P. (1999). Screening culture, viewing politics: An ethnography of television,
womanhood, and nation in postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Özkırımlı, U. (2005). Contemporary debates on nationalism: A critical engagement.
Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Panourgiá, N. (1995). Fragments of death, fables of identity: An Athenian anthropography.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Renan, E. (1882). Qu’est-ce qu’une nation ?: Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882.
Paris, France: Calmann Lévy.
Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition
have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Shore, C. (2000). Building Europe: The cultural politics of European integration. London,
England: Routledge.
Shryock, A. (1997). Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: Oral history and textual
authority in tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shryock, A. (Ed.) (2004). Off stage/on display: Intimacy and ethnography in the age of
public culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Smith, A. D. (1995). Nations and nationalism in a global era. Cambridge, England: Polity
Press.
St. Clair, W. (1972). That Greece might still be free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence. London, England: Oxford University Press.
Sutton, D. E. (1997). Local names, foreign claims: Family inheritance and national
heritage on a Greek Island. American Ethnologist, 24, 415–437.

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Tambiah, S. J. (1976). World conqueror and world renouncer: A study of Buddhism and
polity in Thailand against a historical background. Cambridge, England: University of
Cambridge Press.
Tambiah, S. J. (1989). Ethnic conflict in the world today. American Ethnologist, 16,
335–349.
Tambiah, S. J. (1992). Buddhism betrayed? Religion, politics, and violence in Sri Lanka.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Voutira, E. (2003). Refugees: Whose term is it anyway? Emic and Etic constructions
of ‘refugees’ in modern Greek. In J. van Selm, K. Kamanga, J. Morrison, A. Nadig,
S. S. Vrzina & L. van Willigen (Eds.), The refugee convention at fifty: A view from forced
migration studies (pp. 65–80). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Wilson, W. A. (1976). Folklore and nationalism in modern Finland. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Worsley, P. (1957). The trumpet shall sound: A study of “cargo cults” in Melanesia. New
York, NY: Schocken Books.
Yanagisako, S., & Delaney, C. (Eds.) (1995). Naturalizing power: Essays in feminist cultural analysis. New York, NY: Routledge.
Zhu, Y. (2012). Performing Heritage: Rethinking Authenticity inTourism. Annals of
Tourism Research, 39, 1495–1513.

MICHAEL HERZFELD SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the
Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where has taught since
1991. The author of eleven books—including The Poetics of Manhood (1985),
Cultural Intimacy (1997), The Body Impolitic (2004), and Evicted from Eternity
(2009)—and numerous articles and reviews, he has also produced two ethnographic films. He has served as editor of American Ethnologist (1995–1998)
and is currently editor-at-large (responsible for “Polyglot Perspectives”) at
Anthropological Quarterly. His research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has
addressed, inter alia, the social and political impact of historic conservation
and gentrification, the discourses and practices of crypto-colonialism, social
poetics, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, and the ethnography
of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.
RELATED ESSAYS
Understanding American Political Conservatism (Political Science), Joel D.
Aberbach
Political Conflict and Youth: A Long-Term View (Psychology), Brian K. Barber
Globalization Backlash (Sociology), Mabel Berezin
Political Ideologies (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and Nicholas J.
D’Amico

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

The State and Development (Sociology), Samuel Cohn
Globalization of Capital and National Policymaking (Political Science),
Steven R. Hall
Domestic Political Institutions and Alliance Politics (Political Science),
Michaela Mattes
The New Political Economy of Colonialism (Political Science), Thomas B.
Pepinsky
The Welfare State in Comparative Perspective (Sociology), Jill Quadagno et al.
The Institutional Logics Perspective (Sociology), Patricia H. Thornton et al.
Postsocialism (Anthropology), Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Katherine Verdery
Constitutionalism (Political Science), Keith E. Whittington



States and Nationalism
MICHAEL HERZFELD

Abstract
Nationalism, especially in the form that links national identity and statehood, is in
its present form a relatively recent but highly successful and pervasive invention.
Grounded in metaphors of shared blood and collective inheritance (including the
idea of national culture as patrimony or heritage), it still displays unexpected staying power despite concern over its negative history as “ethnonationalism” and as the
translation of superficially benign ideologies into doctrines of violent exclusion and
genocide. Modern nation-states, also unexpectedly, often encapsulate segmentary
models of collective identity; nationalism may appear in everyday (“banal”) activities, the less respectable of which—as intimate zones of sociability—it may seek to
hide behind official images of cultural and genetic homogeneity. Current research
focuses on the practices that link idealized national identity to their realization and
subversion in social and bodily experience and performance.

EARLY CONCERNS
Despite predictions of the imminent demise of nationalism, countries that
had seemed unconcerned about the plethora of sometimes fluid minority
identities within their borders had begun, by the 1990s, to seem fixated on
the creation of national purity. From the Balkans to South Asia, and from
the Caucasus to Rwanda, blood flowed in direct proportion to its symbolic
importance as the sign of a biologically inherited, shared culture. Although
states can exist without nationalism, recent experience suggests that this is a
rare achievement. Nationalism is thus once again, and to an unprecedented
degree, of immediate, global concern.
The relationship between states and nationalism can be succinctly summarized. States are bureaucratic engines of reification; they create borders, not
only cartographically, but also semantically. Indeed, the word “definition”
comes from the Latin root finis, “earthwork,” a structure that defined the
territorial limits of ancient cities. Ethnicity, which anthropologists from
Evans-Pritchard (1940: 125–132, 217–228) (in a case now extremely relevant
to the warfare occurring in South Sudan) to Barth (1969), labored hard to
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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detach from its static conceptualization as a type of fixed identity, becomes
the basis of the nation-state, each rendering the other as both inevitable and
inextricably interconnected. In their recognition of the contingent nature
of national identity, however, they were anticipated by Renan’s (1882)
celebrated description of the nation as defined by “the shared possession
of a rich sediment of memories” and “the desire to live together, the will to
keep valuing the heritage that has been bequeathed in its entirety.” Although
the second part of this attempt at a definition appears to evoke the current
rhetoric of heritage and history (see, e.g., Daniel, 1996: 13–42; Hayden, 2002;
Lowenthal, 1985), the notion that a group of people must actively desire to
cohabit anticipates the critiques of nationalistic claims on common sense and
nature that have dominated anthropological and some other social science
thinking since the 1970s. Smith’s work (1995) comes closest to Renan’s
insistence on the role of the collective will and to Renan’s rejection of the
“primordialist” (Geertz, 1973: 259–261) view of nationalism—the idea that
an ethnic group was inherently entitled to its own territorial state. Nationism,
a term favored by Gregory Lobo (2014), places the nation clearly at center
stage as an object of worship around which leaders build powerful notions
of belonging, thereby distracting attention from their own failings.
Perhaps because of the historical legacy of mid-twentieth century fascism, social scientists have largely treated nationalism as both tending
toward exclusionary, often violent acts and on the brink of disappearance.
Nationalism, in its familiar forms, really only emerged in eighteenth century
Europe, although national states have existed in other times and places.
Some expected it to fade with the rise of supranational European and other
structures. But numerous newly minted nationalisms cast themselves in
terms of familiar metaphors of blood and kinship, thus investing their
common ideology with an air of naturalness, inevitability, and territorial
rootedness.
So thorough is this process of naturalization—a term built into nationalist
practices in the bestowal of national citizenship—that even in a notoriously
uneven history of national unification, that of Italy, one of the most stringent critics of national pride, Giambattista Vico, was claimed by Risorgimento
intellectuals as a spiritual ancestor and representative of transcendent Italian genius. In Germany, where the theories of Johann Gottfried von Herder
were more plausibly adumbrated to the emergence of national identity, and
whence these ideas spread rapidly through the pan-European development
of national folklore studies (e.g., Herzfeld, 1982; Wilson, 1976), the fusion
of state, nation, and nature itself came to its most intense formulation during the Nazi period (Kamenetsky, 1977; Linke, 1997). The serious scholarly
work of linguists was usurped by such movements to create arguments about
an “Aryan civilization” that not only informed the entire racial “science” of

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Nazism but even subsequently spread to such countries as Sri Lanka (Daniel,
1996: 55).
Such misuses of scholarship did not dupe the entire academic world;
archaeologist Clark (1939: 197–206; see also Arnold, 1990), for example,
wrote a sharp condemnation. Rich critiques of nationalistic appropriation of
archaeology have addressed more recent instances (e.g., Abu El-Haj, 2001:
127–129; Kohl, 1998; Kohl and Fawcett, 1995). Social anthropologists, too,
have addressed the ways in which nationalism and local identities affected
each other. A foundational text is Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica
(1949). Although Evans-Pritchard was a strong advocate of distinguishing
between segmentary and pyramidal societies—in other words, between
those based on the internal governance of the genealogically organized feud
and those centrally organized around a formal bureaucracy—he clearly
showed how a segmentary and tribal society could evolve, however incompletely, into a pyramidal and national entity, that of Libya. There, opposition
to an external power (Italy), seen as representing the most inclusive type
of clan from the Bedouin perspective, provoked the coagulation of all the
different tribal groups.
Such nation-states often retain elements of segmentary organization; Shryock’s (1997) work on Jordan usefully shows how competing, kinship-based
factions struggle to claim historical truth for themselves while denying it to
their opponents. They operate within a single shared idiom; their disputes
thus paradoxically help to forge cultural unity. Segmentation does not disappear with the creation of a centralized nation-state, but it may represent
a hidden dimension of the collective dynamic (see also Eriksen, 1993: 158).
Thus, in Thailand the erstwhile “pulsating galactic polity” (Tambiah, 1976:
115)—a fundamental segmentary arrangement of local powers—reappears
in forms of resistance to the centralized bureaucracy that was installed during the “modernizing” phase of Thai history as a way of placating the colonial
powers and preventing them from invading the newly reconstituted Siamese
polity (see Herzfeld 2016, forthcoming).
Twentieth century work on nationalism displays a growing awareness that
it represents a relatively recent reorganization of local social orders; often violates the complexity of the existing sociocultural terrain; and bureaucratizes
not only governance (the state) but also culture (the nation), moving from
processual models to rigid reification.
CLASSIC FORMULATIONS
Three post-World War II treatments of nationalism stand out as particularly
influential. Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) exemplifies
the liberal critique of nationalist extremism. Where the Marxist historian

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Hobsbawm (1990) saw the rise of nationalism as a product of bourgeois
domination, Gellner was more concerned to explore the reasons for its
frequent degradation into violent forms of exclusion. Gellner (1983: 138)
saw it as a radically modern phenomenon, characterized by three invariant features: literacy, homogeneity, and anonymity. His insistence that
nationalism was the result of a deliberate spreading of “high culture”—an
anthropologically suspect term—blinded him to how elite formulations of
national identity only gained purchase because they built on the preexisting
cosmology of the newly incorporated and often illiterate populations. He
also considered Islamic nationalisms radically different from their Western
equivalents in that, instead of relegating the remnants of the feudal past
to a purely symbolic or ceremonial role, they required continuing fealty
to these—in his view—outmoded concepts (Gellner, 1983: 79–80). In this
regard, he anticipated modern Western right-wing rhetoric more than he
did his own discipline.
Arguably the most influential of the three, political scientist Benedict
Anderson (1983) attempted through his remarkable “imagined communities” thesis to ask how so many states could persuade citizens to die and kill
in the name of such an abstract, recent concept. Their coercive power may
be sufficient, if not to control “hearts and minds,” then at least to demand
outward conformity. When the Thai and Turkish governments expect their
citizens to stand to attention in the street during the daily playing of a
national anthem, they are controlling bodies rather than minds; but docile
bodies, as Foucault (1977: 135–169) has so ably demonstrated, make for
effective governance. Anderson’s question is more interesting, however,
when addressed to the self-sacrifices that people are willing to make before
and for the creation of the nation-state, when the nationalist ideology is quite
new. Greeks, for example, mostly did not think of themselves as “Hellenes”
before 1770, and were reluctant even to countenance the idea that they were
descended from these mythical pagan giants; thus, the fervor of the 1821
revolution does demand explanation. Even if we dismiss the retrospective
reconstruction of the guerrillas known as klefts (literally, thieves) as heroes
of the national struggle and see them instead as self-interested bandits (St.
Clair, 1972: 37–39, 103–110), it is hard to see why so many were willing to
die for the cause of a nation still, and for a long time to come, controlled by
external interests. To say that the klefts were trying to throw off the yoke
of heavy taxation hardly explains anything, since most of them were not
paying their taxes anyway. Similarly, despite the apotheosis of the Boston
Tea Party (most recently and most virulently led by the right wing of the
Republican Party), it is hard to imagine that the idea of an “American
nation” was a necessary outcome of revolt.

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A difficulty with Anderson’s argument is that it rests too heavily on
assumptions about the psychological process of imagination. Performances
of affect are important to the public confirmation of loyalty, as witness
the outpourings of grief at North Korean leader Kim Il Jong’s funeral,
but they do not necessarily represent people’s actual feelings. Imaging
might have been a better term for what Anderson describes; the semiotic
principle of “iconicity”—the principle of resemblance, whether genetic
or cultural—transforms the idea of familial homogeneity into a national
coherence (as in the motto E pluribus unum) at the level of a collective
representation. Performance and semiosis, not thought processes, produce
the palpable forms of nationalism.
Anderson’s thesis nevertheless remains compelling in important respects.
First, it was the first to raise the central “why” question without tracing all
nationalisms to a unified European source. Had Anderson only penned those
few pages on the role of the novel in galvanizing Philippine identity, his book
would have profoundly affected our understanding. But Anderson also theorized the appeal of nationalism in innovative terms. Neither his own nor
any other single-stranded explanation, however, is likely to stand the test of
comparative critique.
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS AND QUESTIONS
Various scholars have attempted to wrestle with the unexpected, continuing
importance of nationalism. Some have critically analyzed nationalisms
based on myths of national homogeneity. Befu’s (2001) notable study shows
Japanese insistence on the internal coherence and purity of Japanese culture
to be largely a myth. Nevertheless, that ideology is reproduced in artisanal
production in ways that suggest that conformity is at least a cultural ideal
(Kondo, 1990). Other scholars have singled out nationalisms based on
racial, cultural, or religious exclusion, as in Tambiah’s (1989, 1992) trenchant
critiques of “ethnonationalism.” The conflicts in Sri Lanka, the former
Yugoslavia, Myanmar, and now the Crimea all illustrate the easy conversion
of ethnic loyalty into “ethnic cleansing” through an obsession with symbolic
purity (and conversely with “pollution” by others).
Other scholars have returned to religion for insight. Thus, Gregory Lobo’s
answer is that the nation itself transcends the pettiness of human governance and becomes a worthy object of a virtual millenarian cult. Indeed, some
nationalisms were born of actual cults, as in Papua New Guinea (e.g., Worsley, 1957), while similar movements fomented rebellion against what were
seen as oppressive majoritarian states (e.g., Bowie, 2014, on Thailand).
As Gellner (1983: 56–57) noted early on, Durkheim’s celebrated definition
of religion works a fortiori for nationalism. Gellner, however, did not explore

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why Durkheim’s argument works better for nationalism than for religion,
in part because, none too presciently, he rejected religion as the basis for
modern nationalism. While we cannot access the minds of long-lost religious
leaders, and so cannot disinter the process whereby the collective cohesion
Durkheim professed to find in religion was actually invented, we can do
exactly that for nationalism. Precisely because nationalisms are created,
as Gellner recognized, by bourgeois elites, the process of their invention,
although conveniently suppressed in their own propaganda (which lays
claim to an eternal and natural status), is usually traceable through the
normal channels of historical research. Thus, for example, in investigating
the creation of post-Ottoman, Turkish republican nationalism, we discover
that the main architect of the Turkish constitution, Ziya Gökalp, was a
passionate admirer of Durkheim’s ideas. It is hardly surprising that one sees
a carefully orchestrated effervescence (to recall one of Durkheim’s favorite
tropes) at every spot a Turkish radio can reach with the national anthem.
Bruce Kapferer (1988) has offered a distinctive approach that implicitly
builds on the Durkheimian tradition (although he attributes it more to Louis
Dumont). His formulation points us in the direction of another key question,
one not raised by Anderson: why do nationalisms, with their promises of
inclusion and redemption, so often morph into catastrophic violence? Comparing the masculine, “mateship” egalitarianism of Australian nationalism
and the ostensible pacifism of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Kapferer asks how
the first came to provide the context for some spectacularly nasty forms of
racism and sexism, while the second is the backdrop to a vicious campaign of
genocide (now repeated in Myanmar). He suggests that a Dumontian model
of “encompassment” allows us to see how all such “generous” ideologies
are necessarily and logically exclusionary. He also treats nationalism as a
religion, with its concomitant rituals; certainly, if Billig (1995: 9) is right to
see the United States as a nationalistic country in its everyday (“banal”)
performances of belonging, or if my own argument about bureaucratic
actions such as stamping documents similarly suggests ritual in the furtherance of a quasi-religious ideal (Herzfeld, 1992: 17–18), then the exclusion of
outsiders through apparently “trivial” (Özkırımlı, 2005: 119) bureaucratic
acts parallels the violent history of some of the most ostensibly peace-loving
religious systems. Kapferer’s argument foreshadows Handelman’s (2004)
performance-oriented understanding of Israeli nationalism, in which
bureaucratic logic is given potentially discriminatory force through repeated
productions—forms of secular ritual, as it were, paralleling my own coinage
of “secular theodicy”—in the public sphere. Handelman’s more general
argument, that national bureaucracies are machines for the performance of
systems of classification, underscores the symbolic nature of the state itself.
In related vein, Scott (1998) sees the state as demanding the legibility of its

States and Nationalism

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citizenry—a goal that adherence to a common language and performance
idioms advances.
Indeed, one can “perform the nation,” not only through spectacles that
reproduce and inculcate the bureaucratic logic of the state’s view of national
identity (for a remarkable example, see Bowie, 1997), but also through
song and dance officially acknowledged as national culture but sometimes
implicitly opposed to elite values (see Askew, 2002: 288, on Tanzania).
Such analyses take folklore out of the archive and back into everyday
life; today mass-mediated performances may also reveal to the perceptive
ethnographer some of the collective secrets of the nation (see Shryock,
2004). Performance is also a crafted activity that makes authenticity “real,”
whether for tourists or in relation to the state’s management of ethnicity
(Zhu, 2012; see also Eriksen, 1993: 118–120). The dimension of performance
thus provides the missing link between theories of national identity and the
state’s achievement of control over its formulation, and shows us, as I will
illustrate in the next section, how unofficial attitudes and cultural traits also
contribute—despite their non-normativity—to the emergence of a sense of
nationhood.
Significant recent research and directions
We still need an adequate explanation of the power of the kinship metaphor
even when it is stretched to accommodate such an impossibly vast scale.
Although much of the work on nationalism and the state has been done by
anthropologists working from local field research, the top–down formulations of writers such as Gellner and the very different Huntington (1996) have
disproportionately influenced public discourse, as Özkırımlı (2005: 191) has
noted. Ethnography, it seems, does not sell. But it does offer clues that earlier
research, too focused on ideology and the “big picture,” failed to grasp.
I begin with the idea that kinship groups, especially families (Panourgiá,
1995), do not always behave according to their own stated ideals, and that
this naughtiness is part of what makes them so dear to their members.
In some cases, these metaphors represent transmutations of prenational
formations, as in the adoption by the Turkish Republic of a modified version
of the Ottoman formula (Delaney, 1995). Furthermore, kin groups are often
corporate owners of property. The landholdings of a family easily become
a metaphor for national territory (as the house does for the protection of
its interests, often gendered as female (see Yanagisako & Delaney, 1995;
Mankekar, 1999). More complex in its origins and interpretation is the notion
of a culture, and of heritage, as the collective property of a nation.
Nation-states are like families in ways that neither states nor families
would want to acknowledge. They succeed in commanding loyalty when
it becomes clear that they will tolerate a certain degree of disobedience—a
disobedience couched in culturally familiar idioms (Herzfeld, 2005).

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The so-called “klefts” (guerrilla fighters) supported the Greek war of
independence because it undermined an existing authority, the Ottoman
administration, and so became the model for the way citizens of the new
state would imagine themselves: rambunctious, naughty, and cunning.
Those who continued in this vein after the consolidation of national power,
however, found themselves quickly in disgrace (and sometimes in jail).
But the self-image of the insubordinate citizen persisted, and constituted a
challenge to the legitimacy of the state at two levels. On the one hand, the
tax-evading, “corrupt” stereotype represented a genuine problem as too
much punishment of those imitating a heroic model would risk alienating
the entire populace. On the other, its centrality to the self-presentation of
Greece to the rest of the world, and especially to the European Union, has
compromised the country’s legitimacy.
Outsiders demand reform. But aside from the fact that this is not easily
done, it would actually alienate a large segment of the population by
repressing the very things that citizens guiltily enjoy. Whoever heard of
a national government endorsing seamy jokes, for example? But they are
nevertheless as much a part of the culture, and arguably a more familiar
one than all the grand ideals that are trotted out at anniversary celebrations
and in monumental inscriptions. What really commands the loyalty of
citizens, I suggest, is the knowledge that the state will always connive at
archetypical infractions representative of what I have called cultural intimacy.
That knowledge, so precious to social life and yet so inadmissible in official
discourse, makes the nation—an abstraction made real by its translation into
kinship metaphors—worthy of the ultimate sacrifice. In other words, people
may be less invested in subsuming their personal mortality in a generic
immortality, as Anderson argues, than in preserving the conditions that
mortality makes precious. The converse of national heritage (Anderson’s
reaching for immortality) is “corruption” (corruption of the flesh being the
cause of historical time and therefore of mortality), and that neither holds
much meaning without the other (see Herzfeld, 2014).
Even political scientist Billig (1995: 10, 14–15), who is uncomfortable with
some aspects of Anderson’s thesis, accepts his concept of imagination. Yet
consider the Turkish citizens who stand to attention for the anthem: they
are not necessarily imagining anything beyond their immediate purview, but
they are fitting themselves to an image. Their bodies, like those of the Chinese
athletes described by Brownell (1995), are retrofitted to an entity expanded
from a more generic model of personhood. At stake here is not a psychological process, but the cultural management of resemblance or, as we might put
it in semiotic terms, iconicity—the creation of resemblance as the basis for
consensus.

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Naming symbolizes this play of similarity and difference, as in the
contrasted responses of Greek nationalists to the self-naming of Romania
and Macedonia. Architect of modern Greek folklore studies and sometime
diplomat Nikolaos Politis was adamant that it would be unreasonable for
the Greeks to take the name “Romania” for themselves even though it
had been their collective name in what he dubbed the national epic of the
Hellenes, apparently because it alluded to the post-classical era (Herzfeld,
1982: 128). But Greek nationalists have never applied the same logic to the
case of Macedonia, arguing that this ancient name was “theirs” and that
the “Skopjans” (as they call them after the republic’s capital city) should
simply find another name. Sutton (1997) has persuasively argued, from the
evidence of a direct parallel between the inheritance of personal names and
the inheritance of land, that for Greeks the name of Macedonia is tightly
bound to Greece’s territorial integrity mapped onto a particular reading of
its past.
In some languages, the terms heritage display patrilineal overtones redolent
of older European aristocratic systems of descent and inheritance. Thus, in
French, patrimoine is implicitly the birthright of a people, an inheritance from
the forefathers. Richard Handler, in several publications (Handler, 1985a,
1985b, 1988), has demonstrated that in nineteenth-century nationalism
culture itself was reified as a possession—not without help from some early
anthropologists, whose successors still sometimes experience difficulty in
ridding the term of its static implications and treating it instead as a process.
Although Québec, the case studied by Handler, never achieved full independence, its adherence to the logic of the patrimoine nicely illustrates the
political process through which “having a culture” becomes the state-level
equivalent of landowning. Nations in which the equivalent terms—often
legalistic translations from French or English—do not have comparable
inheritance systems at the local level seem also to evince relative difficulty
in marshaling emotion in defense of “national heritage,” although most
can point to something akin to “tradition” as the repository of their reified
national culture. In pre-modern Europe, a person without land was not a
complete person, so Handler’s argument goes; thus, failing to acquire a
national culture was a mark of incomplete nationhood.
SUGGESTIONS FOR NEW RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
What these insights show is that much more work is now needed, especially
from historians, on how the terminology of nationhood and “return” (e.g.,
Voutira, 2003; Handelman, 2004: 44–51) and the practice of heritage conservation and reconstruction have been adopted by various states; the International
Journal of Heritage Studies is becoming an important venue for the exploration

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of the latter topic. We also need to see more research on the impact of supranational entities—the EU, ASEAN, and others now in a more provisional
condition—on both the creation of cultural commonalities (on the EU, see
Shore, 2000) and on the weakening of national identities and the concomitant strengthening of regional ones; the examples of Russia and the former
Yugoslavia show that the demise of one nationalism can actually give birth
to several smaller but arguably more intense new ones. At the same time,
efforts to maintain peaceful coexistence within a single “umbrella state” are
not yet well understood, although a few detailed studies (see especially the
special section on educational policies and practices in Studies in Ethnicity and
Nationalism 13: 277–393) have now begun to show the way.
At the same time, it has also become imperative to understand what has
happened under the same circumstances to that inner-directed—but equally
intense—dynamic that corresponds to the zone of cultural intimacy—the
social dimension of nationalism, already emphasized in different ways by
Eriksen (1993) and Özkırımlı (2005). Do the new regional identities display
similar characteristics? That Italians commonly display the same affection
and defensiveness about local culture that Greeks are more inclined to
deploy for national identity is highly suggestive.
New research on migration, diasporas, ethnic solidarity across borders, and
refugee politics and asylum, while too wide-ranging to discuss in detail here,
are necessarily interdisciplinary (here perhaps following the example set by
Anthony D. Smith) and will help to illuminate the future trajectory of the
various forms of nationalism that have dominated the headlines or begun to
emerge quietly in the background but bid fair to play a more central role as
the West’s power either declines or becomes more diffuse and other cultural
traditions of personhood generate new configurations of national identity.
In this development, the role of local ethnography and archival research on
the new media as well as on diplomatic records will be central, displacing,
one hopes, the excessive generalizing that has made nationalism an easy target for critique but a difficult area for generating understanding of what is a
dynamic and ever-changing set of phenomena.
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MICHAEL HERZFELD SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the
Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where has taught since
1991. The author of eleven books—including The Poetics of Manhood (1985),
Cultural Intimacy (1997), The Body Impolitic (2004), and Evicted from Eternity
(2009)—and numerous articles and reviews, he has also produced two ethnographic films. He has served as editor of American Ethnologist (1995–1998)
and is currently editor-at-large (responsible for “Polyglot Perspectives”) at
Anthropological Quarterly. His research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand has
addressed, inter alia, the social and political impact of historic conservation
and gentrification, the discourses and practices of crypto-colonialism, social
poetics, the dynamics of nationalism and bureaucracy, and the ethnography
of knowledge among artisans and intellectuals.
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