Nation building and social change in the United Arab Emirates through the invention of Emirati cuisine

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 538-559
Author(s):  
Eloísa Martín
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Other ◽  
Stages Of Development ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Building Process ◽  
National Cuisine

This article aims to analyse how the invention of a national cuisine in the United Arab Emirates takes part in the journey of building the nation, both as a metaphor and as performance of larger political and ideological processes. It analyses the discourses of chefs and professional cooks that are or have been tagged as Emirati food experts. In the Emirati nation building process, the construction of identity is not ‘defined by the other’ against which the image of a common ‘us’ should be reflected. This is also mirrored in the national cuisine in the making, which is developing mostly endogamously. Emirati food both participates in and tells the story of nation building in the UAE, through three overlapping stages of development: traditional, modern and fusion food, which correspond to different moments of the perceived nation development and its fit within Western definitions of both national-states and modernity. Emirati food also helps to create identity borders, by defining who is allowed to taste the authentic flavours, through practices of commensality, and who is able to replicate them in restaurants. This article highlights the connections between nation building, social transformation and food, and explores the ways in which constructions of Emirati cuisine reflect discourses and practices of national belonging.

scholarly journals Positive and Negative Aspects of Globalization in Nation Building in Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Alexander Kavina
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Golden Opportunity

There is no doubt to the fact that globalization has become a buzz word of our time and has significantly impacted the whole world and Africa without exception. Despite it being a buzz word, it has also become very confusing. Some people when asked to specify how they understand it, reply with considerable hesitation, vagueness and inconsistency. However, whether one understands it or not, the fact remains that globalization is real and it is impossible to avoid it, but we have to act. In recent decades globalization has become a factor that obstructs nation-building process in the developing world and Africa in particular. Increasing inequalities between social classes, ethnic groups, regions and nations are on the rise while nations are becoming more powerless to solve these problems. On the other hand, globalization will represent a golden opportunity for nation-building process, if Africa manages to grab the opportunities presented.

scholarly journals Dokument myśli otwartej. Studia poleskie Józefa Obrębskiego a rozważania o grupach etnicznych i stosunkach narodowościowych w polskiej etnologii i socjologii

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Lubaś
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Process Integration ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Local Populations ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The One

A document of open thought: Józef Obrębski’s studies on the Polesie region and debates on ethnic groups and nationality relations in Polish ethnology and sociologyThis article attempts to reconstruct and examine the concept of the ethnic diversity and nationalization process found in the writings of the Polish anthropologist and sociologist Józef Obrębski (1905-1967). It will be argued that Obrębski view on ethnic diversity and the nationalization allowed him not only to conceive of a highly original idea of nation-building process but also maintain a critical distance from the two forms of reflection and practice – “investigative modalities” – influential in the field of ethnic and national studies in prewar as well as in postwar Poland: “ethnogeography” and the “sociology of nation”. In the same time this text aims at underscoring usefulness of Obrębski ideas for contemporary analysis. Close reading of Obrębski works provides us with fresh tools for the ethnographic processual examination of the nationalization policies. It draws special attention to the process of nationalization of local populations, highlighting various and contradictory consequences of nationalization process: integration and homogenisation on the one hand and exclusions of minorities and class hierarchization of people on the other. Dokument myśli otwartej. Studia poleskie Józefa Obrębskiego a rozważania o grupach etnicznych i stosunkach narodowościowych w polskiej etnologii i socjologiiCelem artykułu jest omówienie koncepcji grup etnicznych i procesów unaradawiania wyłaniających się z prac Józefa Obrębskiego. W szczególności chodzi o wykazanie, że swoimi badaniami na Polesiu Obrębski wniósł niezwykle oryginalny wkład w badania stosunków etnicznych i narodowościowych, podając jednocześnie w wątpliwość niektóre założenia tkwiące u podstaw dwu modalności dociekań obecnych w polskich badaniach nad etnicznością i kwestiami narodowymi: czyli etnogeografii oraz socjologii narodu. Jednocześnie tekst służy ukazaniu aktualności propozycji teoretycznych i metodologicznych Obrębskiego w badaniach stosunków etnicznych i narodowościowych. Lektura pism Obrębskiego dostarcza perspektywy umożliwiającej nie tylko krytykę nacjonalizmu metodologicznego ale również daje podstawy do procesualnej, etnograficznej - uwzględniającej mikrostrukturalny wymiar władzy - analizy zjawisk etnicznych i stosunków narodowościowych. Otwiera to możliwość badania różnych niekiedy odmiennych i sprzecznych ze sobą efektów procesów unaradawiania, zarówno integracji i wyrównywania szans jak też konfliktów i wykluczenia społecznego.

Displacing Political Islam in Indonesia

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Chiara Formichi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Political Force ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The One

ABSTRACT This article investigates the narrative of Islamic nationalism in twentieth-century Indonesia, focussing on the experience of, and discourse surrounding, the self-identified Islamist Darul Islam movement and its leader, S. M. Kartosuwiryo (1905–1962). I offer a narrative of the independence struggle that counters the one advanced by Indonesia's Pancasila state, and allows us to capture subtleties that old discussions of separatism—with their assumption of fixed centres and peripheries—cannot illuminate. The article unfolds three historical threads connected to ideas of exile and displacement (physical and intellectual), and the reconstitution (successful or failed) that followed from those processes. Starting from the political circumstances under which Kartosuwiryo retreated to West Java after the Dutch reinvasion of 1947—in a form of physical exile and political displacement from the centre of politics to the periphery, from a position of political centrality to one of marginality and opposition—I then transition to an elaboration of Kartosuwiryo's ideology. His political strategy emerges as a form of voluntary intellectual displacement that bounced between local visions of authority, nationalist projects, and transregional imaginations in order to establish the political platform he envisioned for postcolonial Indonesia. Lastly, I argue that the elision of Islam from the reconstructed narrative of Kartosuwiryo's intentions, characterised as separatist and anti-nationalist, was a key aspect of Indonesia's nation-building process. It is my final contention that official Indonesian history's displacement of Kartosuwiryo's goals away from Islam and into the realm of separatism allowed for two reconstitutive processes, one pertaining to political Islam as a negative political force, and the other to Kartosuwiryo as a martyr for Islam.

A Nation Divided: Building the Cross-Border Mapuche Nation in Chile and Argentina

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH WARREN
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Mapuche People ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Building Project

AbstractIn Chile and Argentina, indigenous Mapuche intellectuals contend that there is a single Mapuche nation that spans the Chile–Argentina border. When Mapuche people talk about the Mapuche nation and create symbols to represent it, however, they can mean both the Mapuche nation within the Chilean and Argentine state borders and the cross-border Mapuche nation. The dual nature of this project raises important theoretical questions about the nation-building process. In this article, I argue that Mapuche activists are engaging in a multi-scalar geopolitical imagination. They are imagining the geographic, political and cultural elements of the Mapuche nation at two scales simultaneously: within nation-state borders and across them. The overlapping and contested nature of this process means that the nation-building project is full of new tensions and constraints. However, it is also an example of ‘thinking otherwise’ and imagining an alternative sense of national belonging.

Constructing Commonality: Standardization and Modernization in Chinese Nation-Building

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 731-755 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Kipnis
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Education System ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
The World

This essay examines the importance of Chinese nation-building in the contemporary era. Defining nation-building in terms of processes that help to bridge local differences especially but not only when also distinguishing China from the rest the world, I argue that a focus on globalization has masked the importance of Chinese nation-building to contemporary social change. I analyze three very different societal arenas in which national forms of commonality are being constructed: the consolidation of the education system, the expansion of the urban built environment, and the spread of the Chinese Internet. Though each arena illustrates a very different aspect of the nation-building process, they all result in an increased degree of commonality in lived experience and communicative practice across China.

Acting Inca: The Parameters of National Belonging in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia

2010 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Gabrielle Kuenzli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
National Politics ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Identity ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Archival Documentation

Abstract This article focuses on the connection between Aymara indigenous communities, Liberal intellectuals, and the nation-building process in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bolivia. The Liberal intellectuals’ designs of nation in early twentieth-century Bolivia were shaped in part by the actions and political initiatives of the very “Indians” the intellectuals sought to categorize, define, and contain. Somewhat paradoxically, the national intellectuals and the local Aymara elite unwittingly collaborated in the construction of a preferred Indian identity, the Inca, to create a noble and progressive past for the nation and to marginalize the undesirable, non-elite Aymara indigenous population in the wake of the 1899 Civil War between Liberals and Conservatives. The process of narrating the native past was of importance to national intellectuals as well as to native peoples. Several types of sources inform these late nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses of nation building, including judicial court cases, archival documentation, and theatrical performance. The narrative of the indigenous past and the role of the actual Indian population within the Bolivian nation in the early twentieth century was a site of negotiation located at the center of national politics, establishing the foundation for a nation that would maintain differentiated constructions of Indian identity at its core.

scholarly journals MOCKING NATION BUILDING AND IDENTITY. AN ANALYSIS OF CARICATURES IN HUNGARIAN, ROMANIAN, SERBIAN, AND SLOVAK SATIRICAL PERIODICALS IN THE MID TO LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-182
Author(s):  
ÁGNES TAMÁS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Building Process ◽  
The Press ◽  
Historical Memories ◽  
Definition Of

This paper aims to present a comparative analysis of caricatures published in Hungarian (Üstökös, Borsszem Jankó), Serbian (Bič, Vrač pogađač), Romanian (Gur’a Satului), and Slovak (Černokňažník) satirical press in Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century. The depth of the connection between identity, nation building, and humour will be demonstrated. Theories of nationalism often emphasise the primacy of the role of the press and of print media in nation building processes. To investigate this, humorous printed sources have been selected. The comparison utilises and complements Anthony D. Smith’s definition of the ethnic core and reflects on Christie Davies’ theory of ethnic humour. Tethered by these concepts, the analysis of the caricatures investigates the following aspects: names for the Self and the Other, elements of culture and tradition (languages, habits, religions, supposed characteristics, clothing and bodily features), symbols of the Self and the Other, historical memories and myths of the common ancestry of the Self and the Other, and the definitions of “our” vs. “their” territory and homeland. This analysis reveals that the stereotypes observed in satirical magazines and the images of the Other and of the Self depicted through the use of humorous or ironic techniques can be effectively distinguished and connected to the nation building process and to the process of shaping “enemies”.

scholarly journals Joint Jewish and Muslim Holy Places, Religious Beliefs and Festivals in Jerusalem between the Late 19th Century and 1948

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 220
Author(s):  
Menachem Klein
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Building Process ◽  
Holy Places

Whereas the conflict over Palestine’s’ holy places and their role in forming Israeli or Palestinian national identity is well studied, this article brings to the fore an absent perspective. It shows that in the first half of the 20th century Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem shared holy sites, religious beliefs and feasts. Jewish–Muslim encounters of that period went much beyond pre-modern practices of cohabitation, to the extent of developing joint local patriotism. On the other hand, religious and other holy sites were instrumental in the Jewish and Palestinian exclusive nation building process rather than an inclusive one, thus contributing to escalate the national conflict.

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