The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

▪ Abstract The study of food and eating has a long history in anthropology, beginning in the nineteenth century with Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. This review notes landmark studies prior to the 1980s, sketching the history of the subfield. We concentrate primarily, however, on works published after 1984. We contend that the study of food and eating is important both for its own sake since food is utterly essential to human existence (and often insufficiently available) and because the subfield has proved valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods. Food studies have illuminated broad societal processes such as political-economic value-creation, symbolic value-creation, and the social construction of memory. Such studies have also proved an important arena for debating the relative merits of cultural and historical materialism vs. structuralist or symbolic explanations for human behavior, and for refining our understanding of variation in informants' resp...

http://tucnak.fsv.cuni.cz/~hajek/ski/kolokvium/projekty2007/cista_strava_spravna_strava/Mintz%20et%20al%20(2002)%20%20The%20anthropology%20of%20food%20and%20eating.pdf

The Anthropology of Food and Eating

The nation is a relatively abstract imagined community that is visualised through a variety of symbols as well as communicative and performative practices. In this paper, we explore how the national territory, one of the foundations of the nation-state, is performed on national-day celebrations and brings the nation into being. Drawing on ethnographic research on national days in Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, we show how the state's internal administrative divisions and ethnic differences are at once made explicit but also subordinated to the nation. Moreover, we show how in such celebrations, potentially disruptive or competing affiliations such as ethnicity and regional loyalties are re-imagined. Both the rotation of the central celebration and its replication all over the national territory carry the nation into the regions and integrate the regions into the nation-state. The ‘co-memoration’ turns participants and spectators from locals into national compatriots and thus not only performs nationality but also performs the relationship among nation, state and citizen, set within a particular territory.

Performing the national territory: The geography of national-day celebrations

S. W. D. K. Gandah was the son of an influential chief and witnessed first-hand the way the conflicts, pressures and transformations of colonial rule played out on the ground in northern Ghana. Belonging to the first generation of educated northerners, he put his literary and intellectual attainments to original use throughout his life. In addition to an autobiography ( The Silent Rebel ), he wrote a fascinating history of his father ( Gandah-yir ), extracts from which are published here. In this introduction I discuss the author’s development as a writer and local historian. I analyse his ambivalent perspective on Chief Gandah’s life, as loyal son, but also critic of many aspects of village life – a perspective typical of a first generation of indigenous intellectuals who embodied both a traditional upbringing and new values instilled through Western education. I look at Kumbonoh’s reflections on the task that he has set himself for his Gandah-yir manuscript, namely reconciling oral tradition, local memories, and written history in an attempt to produce a historical account not only for his immediate family and the wider Dagara community, but for a broader readership.
	 Abstract: S. W. D. K. Gandah, fils d’un chef influent, a ete le temoin direct des conflits, des pressions et des transformations du regime colonial qui se sont joues sur le terrain dans le Nord du Ghana. Appartenant a la premiere generation d’instruits dans cette region, il a consacre ses œuvres litteraires et intellectuelles a ces origines tout au long de sa vie. Il est l’auteur d’une autobiographie ( The Silent Rebel ), mais aussi d’un recit fascinant sur son pere ( Gandah-yir ) dont cet article publie des extraits. Dans cette introduction, l’article retrace le cheminement de l’auteur en tant qu’ecrivain et historien local. Il analyse sa perspective ambivalente sur la vie du Chef Gandah, en tant que fils loyal mais aussi de critique sur de nombreux aspects de la vie de village; une perspective typique d’une premiere generation d’intellectuels indigenes qui incarnaient a la fois une education traditionnelle et des valeurs nouvelles inculquees par l’enseignement occidental. Il examine les reflexions de Kumbonoh sur la tâche qu’il s’est assignee pour son manuscrit Gandah-yir , a savoir de concilier tradition orale, memoire locale et histoire ecrite pour tenter de produire un recit historique s’adressant non seulement a sa famille immediate et a la communaute Dagara, mais aussi a un lectorat plus large.

/pdf/s-w-d-k-gandah-1927-2001-intellectual-and-historian-from-2etwix4krg.pdf

S. W. D. K. Gandah (1927–2001): Intellectual and historian from northern Ghana

Pre-colonially, Africans were not organized in ‘tribes’, culturally and linguistically distinct, internally homogeneous groups, inhabiting a clearly demarcated territory and enjoying some degree of political autonomy (an Africanized version of the European nation-state concept). On the contrary, the dominant characteristics of pre-colonial Africa were mobility, overlapping networks, multiple group membership, and the flexible, context-dependent drawing of boundaries. The concept of ‘tribe’, and the idea that each person belongs to one and only one ‘tribe’, is a colonial import. This contention has become conventional wisdom among Africanists, historians as well as anthropologists, since the path breaking studies of Lonsdale (1977), Iliffe (1979), Ranger (1983), and many others, from the late 1970s onwards.2

Carola Lentz

Papers

Performing the national territory: The geography of national-day celebrations

S. W. D. K. Gandah (1927–2001): Intellectual and historian from northern Ghana

Creating Ethnic Identities in North-western Ghana

Ghana@50 - celebrating the nation: an account from Accra

Staatsinszenierung, Erinnerungsmarathon und Volksfest : Afrika feiert 50 Jahre Unabhängigkeit