Rag Doll Nations and the Politics of Differentiation on Arbitrary Borders: Karelia and Moldova*

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnic Community ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Interesting Aspect ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Shed Light

“Tell a man today to go and build a state,” Samuel Finer once stated, “and he will try to establish a definite and defensible boundary and compel those who live inside it to obey him.” While at best an oversimplification, Finer's insight illuminates an interesting aspect of state-society relations. Who is it that builds the state? How and where do they establish territorial boundaries, and how are those who live within that territory compelled to obey? Generally speaking, these are the questions that will be addressed here. Of more immediate concern is the fate of peoples located in regions where arbitrary land boundaries fall. Are they made loyal to the state through coercion or by their own compulsions? More importantly, how are their identities shaped by the efforts of the state to differentiate them from their compatriots on the other side of the borders? How is the shift from ethnic to national identities undertaken? A parallel elaboration of the national histories of the populations of Karelia and Moldova will shed light on these questions. The histories of each group are marked by a myriad of attempts to differentiate the identity of each ethnic community from their compatriots beyond the state's borders. The results of such overt, state-initiated efforts to differentiate borderland populations by encouraging a national identity at the expense of the ethnic, has ranged from the mundane to the tragic—from uneventful assimilation to persecution and even genocide. As an illustration of the range of possibilities and processes, I maintain that the tragedies of Karelia and Moldova are not exceptional, but rather are a consequence of their geographical straddling of arbitrary borders, and the need for the state to promote a distinctive national identity for these populations to differentiate them socially from their compatriots beyond the frontier.

scholarly journals Negotiating Conflict: Regional and National Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (I) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Present Article ◽  
The State ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Marginal Groups ◽  
Bapsi Sidhwa ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Politics Of Religion ◽  
Language And Ethnicity

Pakistan has frequently been viewed as a stronghold of Islamic radicals, often overlooking the fact that various trends of both dormant and obvious conflicts exist between the politics of religion and region. Whereas the former is mainly controlled by the state, the latter is generally influenced by language and ethnicity. The state’s monolithic notion of national identity, from the country’s birth in 1947 to the present, has overshadowed the regional identities mainly the Pashtuns, Baluchis, and Sindhis, and disregarded the minority credos such as Shias, Parsis, Ahmadis, Hindus, and Christians. The present article aims to explore how contemporary Pakistani fiction in English spotlights images of a fragmented national self, underlining plights of the aforementioned marginal groups and exhibiting strong resistance to hidebound national identity. Reviewing contemporary Pakistani fiction in English with a particular focus on the fiction of Bapsi Sidhwa, Sara Suleri, Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Bina Shah, and Jamil Ahmad, this paper aims to bring critical attention of the scholars to the socio-cultural and political valuation of the regional identities.

scholarly journals Język jako czynnik zakorzenienia w tożsamości narodowej na przykładzie białoruskojęzycznej inteligencji na Białorusi

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 85-112
Author(s):  
Natalia Mamul
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Ethnic Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Identity Learning ◽  
Common Memory

Belarus is a typical borderline country featuring multi-ethnicity, including various cultures, denominations and languages co-existing one near the other. Current socio-linguistic situation in Belarus may be defined as socially conditioned diglossia. Russian is the language of the governing elites, all-level education, popular culture and massmedia. Urban inhabitants speak almost entirely Russian, and the majority of village inhabitants speak Belarusian dialects. When, during Lukaszenka’s rule, Belarusian language fell once again in disgrace, it once again became a symbol of national revival and a fighting tool of opposition. Representatives of democratic elites speak Belarusian, but only when they hold informal meetings or political events. Based on biographic interviews held with the representatives of the Belarusian intelligentsia in Belarus, the Author has revealed a process of the narrators’ discovering an importance of a mother tongue as a sign of national identity. The process of realizing the importance of the Belarusian language in the life of an individual, as well as ethnic community, as well as a process of conscious learning of the language is, for contemporary Belarusians, one of the stages of shaping national identity. Learning the language is followed by participating in Belarusian symbolic culture and remembering history and reviving common memory, which finally leads to conscious identity with a mother land in a symbolic sense, which is broader than purely territorial reference.

scholarly journals Preservation of national identity as one of UNESCO’s roles

2016 ◽  
pp. 877-888
Author(s):  
Miodrag Cujic
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Social Development ◽  
The State ◽  
National Identities ◽  
International Organization ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Strategic Objectives ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
The World

The cultural heritage and historical monuments are silent witnesses of social development and they deserve a special place in the world?s annals, both in material and in spiritual sense. In this regard, UNESCO has undertaken a number of measures which recognize such values. However, the current international events directly usurp cultural and historical features using international politics which in the process of globalization puts in an uncertain position the characteristics of certain national identities. The jurisdiction of this international organization is compromised by pressures of leading international subjects. By defining its strategic objectives, the position of the state sovereignty of its member states is determined. Consequently, it is necessary to induce the criteria and proposals to prevent such tendencies in order to preserve not only the cultural heritage of a nation, territory, religious population, but also its identity and its statehood.

Reading The Time of Trimming under the Desk of Religious Zionism: Haim Beʾer and National-Religious Identity

Zutot ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Yael Shenker
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

This article addresses Israeli novelist Haim Beʾer’s relation to national-religious identity and the rifts and the pain it causes him, as can be discerned from his fiction and journalism, and certainly from interviews with him. His relation to national-religious identity also reflects a sort of mirror image, at times inverted, of the relationship between religious and national identities. Beʾer’s movement between religious community and nation criticizes on the one hand prevalent conceptions of secularization and national identity in Zionist discourse, and, on the other hand, conceptions of redemption in religious discourse.

TENSIONS OF NATIONALISM: THE MZABI STUDENT MISSIONS IN TUNIS AND THE POLITICS OF ANTICOLONIALISM

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amal N. Ghazal
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
National Movements ◽  
Student Missions ◽  
National Identity Formation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThis article examines the significant yet largely overlooked role of the Mzabis, a community from the northern edges of the Algerian desert, in Algerian and Tunisian anticolonialism and nationalism. In so doing, it pursues two aims: first, to shed light on the importance of Tunis to the politicization of the Mzabis in the 1920s and to their induction into local and regional anticolonial and national movements; and second, to highlight the tensions of subsuming regional identities into overarching national identities by focusing on Mzabi political activists’ negotiation of the relationship between the Mzab and Algeria as a national project. The article also explores the spectrum of political possibilities and alternatives envisioned by Mzabis as they participated in religious reform, anticolonial, and nationalist movements. This spectrum, I argue, conveys the fluid relationship between local, national, and regional identities, thus undermining teleological readings of national identity formation.

scholarly journals Historical identity in the coordinate system of world development

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polina Gerchanivska
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Ethnic Community ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
Cultural Code ◽  
Sociocultural Systems

The purpose of the article is to conceptualize the phenomena of «ethnic» and «national» identity and to determine the vectors of their development. Research methods are based on the fundamental principles of historical and cultural analysis. The methodological core of the research is a comparative analysis of ethnic and national identities in the chronotype as complex sociocultural systems. The scientific novelty lies in the conceptualization of the ethnonational identity dichotomy through the prism of the cultural code. It is substantiated that in the conditions of modern modernization, the ratio between the ethnic and national components of identity depends on the direction of their development vectors: a) when the vectors are parallel and equally oriented (for example, one of the ethnic communities monopolizes power), there is a reduction of national identity to ethnic one; b) when the vectors are parallel, but oppositely oriented (for example, when an ethnic community seeks to recognize its right to political self-determination), national identity collides with the interests of the ethnic community, entering into confrontation with it. Conclusions. Within the framework of constructivism, the phenomenon of ethnic identity is analyzed as a social construct and the factors of deviation from this model are revealed (in particular, adaptation to the environment, acculturation, violation of the demographic balance between different groups), causing its variability. The systemic characteristics and the main conceptual components of national identity (internal and external) are analyzed, factors of the weakening of social ties due to the processes of globalization, the growth of entropy, and information expansion in society are identified. Typical models of interaction of ethnic and national identities are considered. Keywords: ethnic identity, national identity, cultural code, ethnos, nation.

scholarly journals Patriotism and Islam on social media: How Pakistani publics revisit their allegiance to the state

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Munira Cheema
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Direct Contact ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Broadcast Media ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Online Conversations

This study focuses on a series of events related to the sudden disappearance of bloggers in Pakistan on 7 January 2017. Following the incident, the broadcast media reported that the bloggers were sharing blasphemous content and were involved in anti-state activities. This revelation triggered online conversations that questioned their sympathizers’ patriotism and loyalty to Islam. The study locates how this led to the emergence of several hashtag-led publics on Twitter. While focusing two hashtags that polarized the publics on the issue, the study utilizes discourse analysis to evaluate the discourses generated by the conservative and the liberal publics on patriotism and national identity. This study finds that while conflating national identity with Islam, the conservative discourse constitutes angry, threat-like closed statements that allowed no room for disagreement. Liberal publics, on the other hand, use strategic speaking to create anti-state discourse on patriotism. Despite the heated exchange between the two publics, I argue that on this occasion (event-led), Twitter offered the opportunity for initiating counter-narratives that refuse to translate patriotism in the idiom of religion. I see this as an occasional, episodic, yet unprecedented form of public sphering in Pakistani context that brings both liberals and conservatives in direct contact with each other.

A Twist of Race: Ben Johnson and the Canadian Crisis of Racial and National Identity

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Canadian Identity ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
Fast Lane

This study maps the media discourses surrounding Ben Johnson’s life “in the fast lane” to further understand one particular aspect of a contemporary crisis of identity (or, more accurately, identities) in Canada. Specifically, this study provides: (a) a context within which to locate Johnson’s rise and fall from hero to scapegoat as articulated to the 1988 crisis of Canadian identity; (b) a chronology of the twist of race, or changing racial discourses which serve to define and redefine Ben Johnson’s racial and national identities; and (c) a discussion of the politics of identity in relation to multiculturalism and the representation of Ben Johnson as the “other” in Canada. The results reveal that Ben Johnson’s identity was the subject of a range of representations including those linked to racist stereotypes. Moreover, the results suggest that the discourses defining Ben Johnson are constituted by, and constitutive of, broader debates about identity in Canada.

scholarly journals Manufacturing Authenticity: The Cultural Production of National Identities in Singapore

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 877-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
TERENCE CHONG
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The State ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Confucian Ethics ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Difference

AbstractAccording to Prasenjit Duara, the sacredness of the nation hinges on its ‘regimes of authenticity’ where timelessness and the politics of embodiment are key to an authentic national identity. This paper looks at three different cultural impulses that have attempted to manufacture authenticity in Singapore. They are: the Malay literary movementAngkatan Sasterawan 50prior to independence; the state-sponsored Confucian ethics discourse during the 1980s; and the romanticization of the working-class ‘heartlander’ through contemporary popular culture in confrontation with the politics of global capitalism and globalization. In doing so, this paper articulates the difference between the regimes of authenticity of state elites and non-state cultural producers, as well as their ‘national imaginaries’. It concludes that the regime of authenticity, that operationalizes the representations of the working class as a diametric opposite to the logic and force of globalization, offers the most popular symbols of national identity in Singapore.

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