scholarly journals Soil, Blood and Identity

1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zygmunt Bauman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
The Masses

Modern nations are products of nationalism, and can be defined only as such, rather than by their own distinctive traits – which anyway vary over an extremely wide range. Nationalism was, sociologically, an attempt made by the modern elites to recapture the allegiance (in the form of cultural hegemony) of the ‘masses’ produced by the early modern transformations and particularly by the cultural rupture between the elites and the rest of the population by the ‘civilizing process’, whose substance was the self-constitution and the self-separation of new elites legitimizing their status by reference to superior culture and knowledge. In the same way in which the modern state needed nationalism for the ‘primitive accumulation’ of authority, nationalism needed coercive powers of the state to promote the postulated dissolution of communal identities in the uniform identity of the nation. In the practice of both, there was an unallayed tension between the ‘inclusivist’ and ‘exclusivists’ prongs of the nation-state project; hence the never fully effaced link between nationalism and racism, nationalism being the racism of the intellectuals, and racism -the nationalism of the masses. Currently our part of the world undergoes the process of the separation between state and nation, effected by lesser reliance of state power on culturalist legitimation and a degree of de-territorialization of communal affiliations, which fills the efforts of nation-building, invention of heritage, tribal integration etc. with a new urgency and may lead to the sharpening of either of the two prongs of the nationalist project.

“The Necessary Ornaments of Place”

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Mana Kia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
The Self ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The West ◽  
Persian Language ◽  
The World

This article analyzes representations of place in seventeenth-century texts to consider how early modern Persians made sense of the world. The Persian formulation of alterity stands in contrast to Edward Said’s formulation about Orientalism, by which Europe makes itself into the West. In early modern Persianate Asia, common representations of place appear in geographical and travel writing. These shared features, which I call ornaments, adorned both places that shared a learned Persian language, Muslim rule, and those beyond, in other parts of Asia and Africa. The presence or absence of these ornaments made the world intelligible for early modern Persians, creating categories of similarity and alterity that were partial, diffuse, and aporetic, defying the self-other distinctions of Orientalism. This form of knowledge about the self and the world then generated the possibility for encounters different from both modern colonial power and the nation-state.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

The Baroque and Philosophy

2018 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Art And Architecture

Although the concept “baroque” is less obviously applicable to philosophy than to the visual arts and music, early modern philosophy can be shown to have connections with baroque culture. Baroque style and rhetoric are employed or denounced in philosophical controversies, to license or discredit a certain style of philosophizing. Philosophers engage with themes current in baroque literature (the mad world, the world as a stage, the quest for the self) and occasionally transform these into philosophical problems, especially of an epistemological kind (are the senses reliable? how far is our access to reality limited by our perspective?) Finally, the philosophies of Malebranche and Berkeley, with their radical challenges to so-called common sense, and their explanation of conventional understandings of the world as based on illusion, have something of the disturbing quality of baroque art and architecture.

The Remembered Anthropologist: Engaging with the Insights of M. N. Srinivas

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-240
Author(s):  
Nita Mathur
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Village Studies ◽  
Specific Sense

The plethora of M. N. Srinivas’s articles and books covering a wide range of subjects from village studies to nation building, from dominant caste in Rampura village to nature and character of caste in independent India, and from prospects of sociological research in Gujarat to practicing social anthropology in India have largely influenced the understanding of society and culture for well over five decades. Additionally, he meticulously wrote itineraries, memoirs and personal notes that provide a glimpse of his inner being, influences, ideologies, thought all of which have inspired a large number of and social anthropologists and sociologists across the world. It is then only befitting to explore the major concerns in the life and intellectual thought of one whose pioneering contributions have been the milestones in the fields of social anthropology and sociology in a specific sense and of social sciences in India in a general sense. This article centres around/brings to light the academic concerns that Srinivas grappled with the new avenues of thought and insights that developed consequently, and the extent of his rendition their relevance in framing/understanding contemporary society and culture in India.

Contacts, Collisions and Relationships

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Baeza Ruz
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
State Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The World ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Independence Era

This is a study on the relations between Britain and Chile during the Spanish American independence era (1806–1831). These relations were characterised by a dynamic, unpredictable and changing nature, being imperialism only one and not the exclusive way to define them. The book explores how Britons and Chileans perceived each other from the perspective of cultural history, considering the consequences of these ‘cultural encounters’ for the subsequent nation–state building process in Chile. From 1806 to 1831 both British and Chilean ‘state’ and ‘non–state’ actors interacted across several different ‘contact zones’, and thereby configured this relationship in multiple ways. Although the extensive presence of ‘non–state’ actors (missionaries, seamen, educators and merchants) was a manifestation of the ‘expansion’ of British interests to Chile, they were not necessarily an expression of any British imperial policy. There were multiple attitudes, perceptions, representations and discourses by Chileans on the role played by Britain in the world, which changed depending on the circumstances. Likewise, for Britons, Chile was represented in multiple ways, being the image of Chile as a pathway to other markets and destinations the most remarkable. All these had repercussions in the early nation–building process in Chile.

(Re-)Building the World: Local Agency and Human Security in the New Millennium

2017 ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Trudy Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Human Security ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Local Models ◽  
Initial State ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
State Security ◽  
The World ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Local Actors

The ‘rebuilding’ of a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence often subsumes the dynamic requirements of human security into a technical task that belies or fails to fully comprehend the needs of the community being ‘built’. Indeed, as Trudy Fraser in Chapter Ten explains, critics have suggested that ‘building’ in the aftermath of conflict merely serves to impose externally configured normative benchmarks as a panacea for peace, privileging the goals of international actors at the expense of local actors. One of the main problems is that externally configured normative benchmarks do not necessarily conform to local models of peace and security. In order for the ‘building’ to be reflective of the dynamic requirements of human security, this chapter asserts that it must be responsive to the following questions: (1) who is doing the building?; (2) what is being built?; and (3) for whom is it being built? These three questions speak to separate but interrelated issues in the context of modern state-, peace- and nation-building, and highlights the ambiguity that currently exists between the initial (state-security-centric) and subsequent (human-security-centric) phases of intervention and ‘(re-)building’.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Modern Era

In the early modern world, exceptional bodies are linked to knowledge, not as the production of knowledge of the self through the scrutiny of those who have been ‘othered’, but as a means of inducing self-scrutiny and awareness of the limitations of human understanding. Exceptional beings and phenomena entice us to consider the world beyond that which is familiar to us and raise questions concerning our knowledge systems based on notions of what is natural or, in our modern era, normal. Rather than reacting with horror, disgust or pity, we can learn to respect the variety, mobility and resilience of the natural world in our contemplation of that which we see as exceptional.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
To Come ◽  
Considerable Body

Ushering the reader into both the world of early modern radical religion and the considerable body of scholarly literature devoted to its study, the introduction offers a précis of what is to come and a backward glance to explain how the proposed journey contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations. After orienting readers to the basic methodological boundaries within which the book will operate and briefly situating the book within the wider historiography, the introduction adumbrates the shape of the work as a whole and encapsulates its central argument. The introduction contends that the mid-seventeenth-century men and women often described as “Particular Baptists” would not have readily understood themselves as such. This tension between the self-identity of the early modern actors and the identity imposed upon them by future scholars has significant implications for how we understand both radical religion during the English Revolution and the period more broadly.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Modes Of Operation ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Traditional Image

The Introduction defines the notion of “administrative entrepreneurship” and outlines the role the “administrative entrepreneurs” played in building the infrastructure of the early modern state, including schools. Recent historiography has tended to question the traditional image of the “absolutist” state as a powerful unified actor, stressing instead the limits of the rulers’ actual power, the role of social compromises, and the pervasiveness of unofficial clans and patronage networks that structured early modern politics in Europe and elsewhere. Scholars also emphasize the premodern, patrimonial character of bureaucracy in that era. Against this backdrop, the Introduction argues that it might have been the self-seeking projectors who drove the invention and expansion of the state as they strove to invent jobs for themselves and to promote their agendas. The chapter introduces three types of “administrative entrepreneurs”—the “experts,” the “ministers,” and the “functionaries”—and outlines their respective modes of operation.

scholarly journals Dreaming of a National Socialist World: The World Union of National Socialists (wuns) and the Recurring Vision of Transnational Neo-Nazism

Fascism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jackson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
The Self ◽  
Global Order ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Membership Application ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
New Tradition

Abstract This article will survey the transnational dynamics of the World Union of National Socialists (wuns), from its foundation in 1962 to the present day. It will examine a wide range of materials generated by the organisation, including its foundational document, the Cotswolds Declaration, as well as membership application details, wuns bulletins, related magazines such as Stormtrooper, and its intellectual journals, National Socialist World and The National Socialist. By analysing material from affiliated organisations, it will also consider how the network was able to foster contrasting relationships with sympathetic groups in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, allowing other leading neo-Nazis, such as Colin Jordan, to develop a wider role internationally. The author argues that the neo-Nazi network reached its height in the mid to late 1960s, and also highlights how, in more recent times, the wuns has taken on a new role as an evocative ‘story’ in neo-Nazi history. This process of ‘accumulative extremism’, inventing a new tradition within the neo-Nazi movement, is important to recognise, as it helps us understand the self-mythologizing nature of neo-Nazi and wider neo-fascist cultures. Therefore, despite failing in its ambitions of creating a Nazi-inspired new global order, the lasting significance of the wuns has been its ability to inspire newer transnational aspirations among neo-Nazis and neo-fascists.

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