Showing papers in "Ethnos in 1993"

Materializing the nation in Sweden and America

Abstract: How has the international ideology of nationalism been used for a differentiating culture‐building in shifting national settings'? This article develops a comparative and historical framework to discuss the when, where, how, and why of the national experience, the arenas and situations in which national identity and sharing are materialized, expressed, or contested. The constant remaking of “the national” in Sweden is contrasted with the American experience, with a focus on everyday practice rather than on rhetoric.

When culture is everywhere: Reflections on a favorite concept

Abstract: Current debates over the concept of culture are examined, especially with regard to the relationship of culture to bounded collectivities, human nature, and individuality; present‐day views are seen against the background of back‐and‐forth swings in the history of anthropological thought. Recent theorizing about cultural acquisition is also considered.

The nationalization of trivialities: How cleaning becomes an identity marker in the encounter of Swedes and Danes

Abstract: Modernity is often said to cause homogenization, but it creates new diversity as well. From the late nineteenth century, cleanliness became a central theme in the construction of modern society, and the same debates on cleanliness developed in Sweden and Denmark. Exploring dishwashing as an example, it becomes evident that very similar ways of approaching cleanliness are turned into differences: from the ways people do the dishes to the design of kitchens. As routines of every day life, dishwashing has become nationalized and naturalized in the post‐war period. Because of this, dishwashing is today not seen as a cultural phenomenon.

Beauty and the feast: Official and visceral nationalism in Belize

Abstract: This article discusses two nationalizing projects in the recently independent Caribbean country of Belize. Beauty pageants, promoted by political parties as an explicit effort to build unified national consensus in a multi‐ethnic society, have failed to do so. In practice they dramatize difference more than identity. In the meantime other forms of national identification have flourished, often in sites completely outside of state intervention. An example is provided in the growth of a Belizean cuisine.

A tournament of value: strategies of presentation in Japanese advertising

Abstract: This article discusses a Japanese advertising agency's attempt to win a prestigious European car manufacturer's account by means of a competitive presentation. It outlines the difficulties facing the agency with regard to competing accounts, the import car market in Japan, coordination of a campaign and strategies to be adopted in preparing the presentation, as well as showing how the ‘social’ side of the advertising world has an important bearing on what is, or is not, include din any advertising campaign. In calling for an approach that focusses on the similarities, rather than differences, between Japan and other (western) advanced industrialized societies, the author analyzes the Japanese advertising industry and argues that competitive presentations are one form of what Appadurai (1986) has termed ‘tournaments of value’.

Israel: The making of self in the “pioneering” of the nation

Abstract: The Zionist project was more than a simple “ingathering” of people. All Jews by birth, those who reached Palestine in the early decades of this century were swept into the making of a “new” people with a “new” ethic and a “new” discipline—out of which would emerge the “old‐new” state of Israel. The present article addresses this multiple process with its strains and contradictions, as experiences by the “pioneer” generation and their Palestinian‐born children—the sabra.

Defining the national in the transnational: Cultural identity in the Afro‐Caribbean Diaspora

Abstract: On the basis of a case study of the small Caribbean nation‐state of St. Kitts‐Nevis, this article discusses the problems of defining a national culture in a former colonial area. It is argued that African‐Caribbean culture emerged, to a great extent, in the margins of the colonial regime. During the last century and a half this margin has become extended to involve relations with emigrants who are dispersed over the globe. The cultural traditions which most clearly demarcate and unify the nationals in the new independent entity therefore are expressed and defined largely in a transnational context which cannot easily be called upon to support a national entity.

Armenia remembered and remade Evolving issues in a Diaspora

Abstract: Among “transnational” phenomena, diasporas play an increasingly prominent role. The Armenian diaspora is a classical one—it is of long standing, constitutes a large part of the Armenian nation, and is widely dispersed. This article tries partially to account for its continuing existence in terms of intellectual networks. It focuses on three issues which have been tinder debate throughout the diaspora, since the Armenian genocide in 1915 to present‐day independent Armenia and beyond.

Landscape, personhood, and culture: Names of places and people in the Faeroe Islands

Abstract: With placenames so ubiquitously affixed, to the landscape and to people of the Faeroe Islands, this research demonstrates the central ecological and cultural roles of geographic names in Faeroese c...

The withering away of the Nation? an afterword

Abstract: The article examines the argument that the nation, and national sentiments, are now in decline. It identifies contemporary social categories whose ties to individual national settings may become tenuous or ambiguous, and it suggests that in some instances they may be engaged in shaping transnational cultures which cannot be labeled “superficial.” While print language may have supported the delineation of nations as imagined communities, the symbolic modes involved in other media technologies may draw cultural boundaries differently.

Becoming the perfect swede: Modernity, body politics, and national processes in twentieth‐century Sweden*

Abstract: Compared with the rather dull subtitle of this article, the main title—"Becoming the Perfect Swede"—is catchy and certainly gets more to the heart of what the discussion will touch upon. The word “becoming” denotes that cultural identity is a process, in a constant flux, something always in the making. And the word “perfect” indicates the utopian direction of that process. The empirical field I will investigate is nevertheless body politics—and bodily practice.

A Future-Oriented, Non-Ethnic Nationalism? Mauritius as an Examplary Case

Abstract: This article consists of a critical application of recent theory of nationalism to the unusual case of Mauritius. It is a poly‐ethnic and poly‐religious society whose inhabitants neither share a mythical distant past nor consider themselves culturally identical, but where nation‐building has nevertheless been moderately successful since the late 1960s. Through an examination of the processes of institutional and cultural nation‐building in the island, it is argued that the current Eurocentric view of the nation (notably as a culturally homogeneous imagined community) must be modified to fit cases like this one. Thus, the value of nationalism and nationhood as comparative concepts is questioned.

Controlling a Future by Admiring a Past : An Ecomuseum in Sweden

Abstract: This article considers some aspects of an historical open-air museum, an 'eco-museum', in a region called the Bergslag in mid-Sweden, an area renowned for its age-old iron -ore mining and iron foundries and its modern steel industry. It is now an area in economic decline with a relatively high unemployment rate—proclaimed by the state some years ago as a 'crisis area' in need of 'economic and cultural support and development'. The argument of the article is that concern with controlling the future is a central motivation for the ecomuseum to turn to the past, since history is interpreted as a rational continuity and the roots of local identity, essential ingredients in the making of a good future. This lends the concentration on varying techniques of iron production and work some of its cultural meaning. This concentration is a projection of present values and interests on to the past—from which people in turn seek knowledge as if it were something natural of the past while in fact the cultural identity and a sense of uniqueness are inherent in the events of their ongoing lives, tied to places and networks of social relations.

Designs of identity: Politics of aesthetics in the GDR*

Abstract: Within less than five decades we could witness the ascent and descent of a national project in East Germany. From the very start, the scope of this project was total, this resembling a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Various cultural themes, with which competing designs for a socialist nation on German soil resonated, gained or lost in force in accordance with historical trends. Such cultural themes, especially those relating to images of collective identity, are interpreted with regard to the aesthetic cum political efforts that went into the construction of a new nation and a new people.

Spot the Trini

Abstract: A radio programme which asked how Trinidadians might be spotted wherever they are found unexpectedly highlighted a particular form of anti‐social individualistic behaviour called boldface. This is contrasted with a recent ethnography of its opposite shamefaced behaviour in nearby Guyana. It is suggested that these differences relate partly to differences in the recent history of the two states, but that they also point to a core contradiction in the concept of citizenship as a political ideal.

East and west: Rationality in review

Abstract: Western social scientists have insisted on the specific character of rationality’, firstly, in comparison with ‘primitive societies’, secondly, in relation to the East. These differences are seen as related to the subsequent achievements of the West. It is argued that oral societies have logial systems that differ systematically from the ‘logic’ developed in Greece, and these differences are related to developments that writing makes possible. But not only in Greece. Embryonic types of the syllogism, the critical form for Aristotle, had developed earlier in Mesopotamia and emerged in India, China and Japan, largely through the expansion of Buddhism. What was possible in the West was possible in the East.