scholarly journals Learning National Identity Outside the Nation-State: the Story Of Latvian Primers (Mid-1940s – Mid-1970s)

Author(s):  
Iveta Ķestere ◽  
◽  
Baiba Kaļķe ◽  

In order to understand how the concept of national identity, currently included in national legislation and curricula, has been formed, our research focuses on the recent history of national identity formation in the absence of the nation-state “frame”, i.e. in Latvian diaspora on both sides of the Iron Curtain – in Western exile and in Soviet Latvia. The question of our study is: how was national identity represented and taught to next generations in the national community that had lost the protection of its state? As primers reveal a pattern of national identity practice, eight primers published in Western exile and six primers used in Soviet Latvian schools between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s were taken as research sources. In primers, national identity is represented through the following components: land and nation state iconography, traditions, common history, national language and literature. The past reverberating with cultural heritage became the cornerstone of learning national identity by the Latvian diaspora. The shared, idealised past contrasted the Soviet present and, thus, turned into an instrument of hidden resistance. The model of national identity presented moral codes too, and, teaching them, national communities did not only fulfill their supporting function, but also took on the functions of “normalization” and control. Furthermore, national identity united generations and people’s lives in the present, creating memory-based relationships and memory-based communities.

2016 ◽  
pp. 147-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kaganiec-Kamieńska

Nation and national identity formation in Latin America. Selected issues The history of nation formation in Latin America cannot be easily interpreted within the frames of existing theoretical perspectives, such as modernism. The difficulty lies in the fact that the existing theories only partly apply to this region. The aim of this article is to present the processes of nation and national identity formation in Spanish America until the 1950s pointing to its main characteristics and selected factors of the most significant impact. Procesy formowania narodów i tożsamości narodowej w Ameryce ŁacińskiejHistoria powstawania narodów w Ameryce Łacińskiej nie daje się jednoznacznie zinterpretować w ramach istniejących schematów i ujęć teoretycznych (np. modernizmu). Trudność polega na tym, że znajdują one jedynie częściowe zastosowanie w odniesieniu do Ameryki Łacińskiej. Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie procesów tworzenia narodów i tożsamości narodowej w Ameryce hiszpańskiej do połowy XX w. z uwzględnieniem wybranych głównych cech tego procesu i czynników, które miały na niego wpływ.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Toshkov

IntroductionThe significance of language and literature as formative to national identity is a major trope within studies of nationalism. The act of imagining and realizing a nation and a nation-state along these lines has been tackled from multiple angles including folklore, linguistics, historical studies of educational institutions and their curricula, with a prominent place reserved for textbook analysis. Even though historical studies for the most part have underscored the rapidity and novelty of these processes, a temporal claim that is part and parcel of the larger and fundamental assertion that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, these processes are negotiated over a period of decades. In Braudelian terms, the standardization of a national language would fall somewhere betweenconjonctureandévénement.


2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-218
Author(s):  
L. Koefoed ◽  
K. Simonsen

Abstract. Non-western minorities in Europe, one can argue, are experiencing particularly vulnerable processes of subjectification and identification. They are often caught between double processes of inclusion/exclusion, integration/segregation or identification/estrangement. This article explores some of the complex and ambiguous processes of identification within this group, in connection with development of the spatial identity of Danishness. It starts with a short theoretical pinning down of the figure of "the stranger'' working as a basis for the empirical analysis. Organised in three sections, each interpreting a specific narrative of identification, the analysis subsequently explores processes and problems of identity formation within a minority group increasingly designated as "strangers'' within the Danish nation state. The article concludes on the different ways in which uncertainty and ambivalence infiltrate the identity formation.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

The conclusion reaffirms the essential role played by cinema generally, and the coming-of-age genre in particular, in the process of national identity formation, because of its effectiveness in facilitating self-recognition and self-experience through a process of triangulation made possible, for the most part, by a dialogue with some of the nation’s most iconic works of literature. This section concludes by point out the danger posed, however, by an observable trend toward generic standardization in New Zealand films motivated by a desire to appeal to an international audience out of consideration for the financial returns expected by funding bodies under current regimes.


wisdom ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-161
Author(s):  
Tetiana URYS ◽  
Tetiana KOZAK ◽  
Svitlana BARABASH

National culture, especially literature, contains invaluable nation-building potential and is an effective factor in influencing the development of the national identity of the individual and the ethnic group as a whole. In the process of forming literary works, the author’s consciousness and subconscious play an im­portant role, so they are not only one of the best ways of expressing a creative personality and a form of its reaction to events occurring in the outside world, but also one of the most important means of forming the national identity of the recipients. Therefore, such a literary work contains a modus of national identity. The main content of this concept in the literature is revealed in the article. Its theoretical components and their functional aspects in the text are defined and analysed. The modus of national identity is formulated as a way of realising the identity of one with his nation through certain aesthetic elements and structures at all levels of literary work as an artistic system. Such element-dominants are motives, artistic imagery, lyrical character as the main expression of the author’s thoughts, as well as archetypes, symbols and place names.


Author(s):  
Ziad Fahed

The post-war period in Lebanon brought to the open all sensitive subjects that have marked the history of Lebanon: how to avoid falling into such a crisis? How not repeating such war? How can the Lebanese society eradicate the reasons that may lead to any other war? The Lebanese crisis had challenged the Church inviting her to move from being a passive witness to an active participant in the peaceful struggle for the liberation of the Lebanese society and help the country to complete its incorrect reading of history. Can the Maronite Patriarchate have a positive role in this regard? Can the Maronite Patriarchate bring about the purifi cation of the memory in a multiconfessional country? In this paper, and after defi ning the meaning of the purifi cation of memory in the Lebanese context, we will consider the important challenges that must precede any serious and defi nitive solution to the crisis in Lebanon and how can the Lebanese Church contribute in the development of a national identity and in the building of a new state free from any kind of domination. The purpose of this paper is not to justify what has happened in the past 34 years, i.e. since the beginning of the Lebanese war, but to contribute in searching for a sustainable peace.


2020 ◽  
pp. 217-248
Author(s):  
Roma Bončkutė

SOURCES OF SIMONAS DAUKANTAS’S BUDĄ SENOWĘS-LËTUWIÛ KALNIENÛ ĨR ƵÁMAJTIÛ (1845) The article investigates Simonas Daukantas’s (1793–1864) BUDĄ Senowęs-Lëtuwiû Kalnienû ĩr Ƶámajtiû (The Character of the Lithuanian Highlanders and Samogitians of the Old Times, 1845; hereafter Bd) with regards to genre, origin of the title, and the dominant German sources of the work. It claims that Daukantas conceived Bd because he understood that the future of Lithuania is closely related to its past. A single, united version of Lithuanian history, accepted by the whole nation, was necessary for the development of Lithuanian national identity and collective feeling. The history, which up until then had not been published in Lithuanian, could have helped to create the contours of a new society by presenting the paradigmatic events of the past. The collective awareness of the difference between the present and the past (and future) should have given the Lithuanian community an incentive to move forward. Daukantas wrote Bd quickly, between 1842 and May 28, 1844, because he drew on his previous work ISTORYJE ƵEMAYTYSZKA (History of the Lithuanian Lowlands, ~1831–1834; IƵ). Based on the findings of previous researchers of Daukantas’s works, after studying the dominant sources of Bd and examining their nature, this article comes to the conclusion that the work has features of both cultural history and regional historiography. The graphically highlighted form of the word “BUDĄ” used in the work’s title should be considered the author’s code. Daukantas, influenced by the newest culturological research and comparative linguistics of the 18th–19th centuries, propagated that Lithuanians originate from India and, like many others, found evidence of this in the Lithuanian language and culture. He considered the Budini (Greek Βουδίνοι), who are associated with the followers of Buddha, to be Lithuanian ancestors. He found proof of this claim in the language and chose the word “būdas” (character), which evokes aforementioned associations, to express the idea of the work.


Author(s):  
Robert Nadeau

When members of a society coordinate their activities based on a broadly disseminated and reinforced set of dogmatic beliefs in their mythological or religious traditions, anthropologists refer to these beliefs as useful myths. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that the dogmatic beliefs associated with the construct of the sovereign nation-state are useful myths that can no longer be viewed as useful because they are effectively undermining efforts to resolve the environmental crisis. This situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sovereign nation-state is a normative construct, or a construct that is assumed to be a taken-for-granted and indelible aspect of geopolitical reality. The large problem here is that this normative construct constitutes one of the greatest conceptual barriers to resolving the environment crisis. This brief account of the origins and transformations of the construct of the sovereign nation-state is intended to accomplish four objectives. The first is to demonstrate that the construct of the sovereign nation-state emerged in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in a series of narratives that transferred the God-given power and authority of sovereign monarchs to the states governed by these monarchs. The second is to reveal that the narratives about nationalism and national identity that emerged during and after the Protestant Reformation abused the truths of religion in an effort to convince core populations living within the borders of particular nation-states that they were a chosen people possessing superior cultural values and personal qualities. The third is to show that the dogmatic beliefs legitimated and perpetuated by these narratives eventually resulted in the creation of churches of state with sacred symbols, rites, and rituals similar to those in Protestant and Catholic churches. And the fourth objective is to provide a basis for understanding how these dogmatic beliefs eventually became foundational to a system of international government, the United Nations, predicated on the construct of the sovereign nation-state. The history of this construct is much more complex and far more detailed than the brief account in this chapter suggests.


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