Nationalism is the political doctrine which holds that humanity can be divided into separate, discrete units — nations — and that each nation should constitute a separate political unit – a state. The claim to nationhood usually invokes the idea of a group of people with a shared culture, often a shared language, sometimes a shared religion, and usually but not always a shared history; to this it adds the political claim that this group of people should, by rights, rule themselves or be ruled by people of the same kind (nation, ethnicity, language, religion, etc.). Understood like this, the idea of nationalism as a political doctrine can be traced back to German Romantic philosophers like Herder and Fichte, whose ideas were also crucial in the development of the anthropological concept of culture. Anthropology, then, shares an intellectual history with nationalism, and nationalism serves as a reminder of the political implications of common anthropological assumptions about the world – for example, the idea that people can be naturally classified as belonging to discrete, bounded cultures or societies. Boas (who explicitly acknowledged the influence of Herder) and his students, for example, fought a long battle against the idea of ‘race’ in the inter-war years, but in substituting instead the idea of culture they failed to question the assumption that people naturally belonged to one culture and one culture only.
In fact this assumption is so widespread in the modern world that it has rarely been subjected to sustained intellectual scrutiny. The great social theorists like Weber and Marx often treated nationalism, and the vision of human cultural difference on which it is based, as a self-evident feature of the world, whereas other kinds of collective category, like class, received endless theoretical scrutiny. Their followers in sociology, history and political science usually followed suit so that nationalism, despite its pervasive effects on twentieth-century world history, was the great forgotten topic of the human sciences. Similarly, anthropologists rarely questioned the idea of nationhood, preferring the less politicized topic of ethnicity in some cases, or even contributing to the construction of nationalist stereotypes of national culture in other cases.
Although anthropological writers like Mauss, "Dumont, "W.L. Warner, and "Clifford Geertz had all written important essays on nationalism and the rituals of the nation, nationalism only really emerged as an anthropological problem in the 1980s. There were several reasons for this, none of them inherent to anthropology. In Europe, the growth of separatist nationalisms in the 1960s and 1970s was strongest in those peripheral areas — Brittany, the Basque country, Scotland — most attractive to anthropologists; ethnographers in those areas, therefore, had to come to terms with nationalist representations of local cultural differences. Elsewhere, the optimistic project of ‘nation-building’ in former European colonies was sometimes replaced by civil war and violent movements towards separatism — in India and Sri Lanka, as well as parts of Southeast Asia, East and West Africa. Ethnographers in these areas had to deal with the political and human cost of "postcolonial nationalisms. Finally, the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe in 1989 was followed by an apparent explosion of nationalist and separatist conflict, most spectacularly in former Yugoslavia. Anthropologists who had worked in these areas often found themselves unexpectedly sought out for comment and analysis, as relatively few political scientists had either the sensitivity or knowledge to offer plausible interpretations of what was happening.
The 1980s also saw the publication of a number of important theoretical books on nationalism. Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983), offers a general sociological model of links between nationalism and modernity. He argues that industrial society is based on a necessary cultural homogeneity which allows for continuous cognitive and economic growth. In order to ensure that homogeneity, the state takes control over the process of cultural reproduction, through the institution of mass schooling. Nationalism, an argument for the political preeminence of culturally homogeneous units, is the political correlate of this process. As such, far from the ‘primitive’, ‘atavistic’ or ‘tribal’ phenomenon of journalistic cliche, nationalism is unquestionably modern.
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) shared Gellner’s conception of nationalism as a modern phenomenon, but, influenced in part by the work of Victor Turner, focused more on nationalism as a mode of political imagination, to be analysed more like religion or kinship, for instance, than like other political ideologies such as Marxism or liberalism. Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) examined the paradoxes and contradictions of anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalisms, drawing on the history of Indian nationalism.
Anderson’s work has had the most obvious impact on anthropology so far, not least because his emphasis on the imaginary work of nationalism opens up potentially fascinating areas for new research on nationalist cultural production: for example, in the mass media, consumption, art and folklore (Foster 1991). Gellner’s arguments, in fact, often offer somewhat tougher theoretical propositions which could be usefully tested by historical and ethnographic research; but these are in anthropologically unfashionable areas like education, while Gellner’s unapolo-getic positivism is out of kilter with the postmodern Zeitgeist (in British and American anthropology, that is, not Central and Eastern Europe, or sociology, where his work commands wider respect).
In general, anthropologists have been slower to respond to nationalism as a specifically political phenomenon, and slower still to deal with its undoubted power to mobilize people politically in modern societies. Much ethnographic research has instead concentrated on the rituals and symbols of nationalism, pursuing a line of enquiry opened up by Hobsbawm and Ranger’s Invention of Tradition (1983). In this research, intellectuals and cultural producers become an unexpected object for anthropological enquiry, as in Verdery’s important study of Romanian nationalism under Ceausescu (1991) and McDonald’s work on Breton nationalism (1990). Handler’s research on Quebecois nationalism ‘as a cultural system’, turned into an important examination of the intellectual genealogy of anthropological and nationalist ideas, not least the very idea of a ‘cultural system’ which Handler had taken from the symbolic anthropology of his teacher "fDavid Schneider (Handler 1988: 26-7). The result, though, is disturbing because Handler’s argument is as much a critique of Quebecois nationalism as it is a critique of the anthropological ideas he brought to its study (cf. Handler 1985).
This element of critique - which occurs again and again in recent ethnography, as nationalist claims to authenticity and historical rootedness are challenged and exposed – suggests that nationalism occupies a sensitive place in the anthropological collective consciousness. After all, most anthropologists are expected to take a charitable line on the deeply held convictions of the people they write about, and it is unusual to find a political and social phenomenon subject to such unremitting criticism. Politically this is not a mystery, as nationalism can be held accountable for many of the gravest crimes in the bloody twentieth century. Intellectually, it should be more problematic, though. If nothing else, it serves as a salutary reminder that anthropologists cannot, and should not, employ assertions of relativism as a smokescreen to conceal their own inevitable political engagement with the subjects of their study.
