Bringing the ‘Local’ Back in: the Production of Welsh Identities

Abstract

The period since the mid-1980s has witnessed a growing interest in questions of national identity. In part this development has been inspired by a sense of urgency; by the necessity to understand, and respond to what has, perhaps somewhat misleadingly, been viewed as a surprisingly vigorous ‘resurgence’ of nationalism. Debates on the time-space consequences of globalisation processes have also raised crucial questions with respect to the future role of the ‘nation’, and the changing forms of ‘national identity’ (Featherstone, 1995); (Lash and Urry, 1994). Additionally, recent studies have pointed to the need to address the more ‘banal’ (Billig, 1995) processes implicated in the production of forms of ‘national identity’. Furthermore, one of the most significant conceptual developments in sociology has been the re-prioritisation of the ‘local’, the implications of which have yet to be systematically explored with reference to national identity. While the notion of the ‘local’ has been a central feature of the debate on globalisation, it has also figured prominently, as might be expected, in examinations of ‘community’ and associated definitions of ‘belonging’, which we will argue have an intimate connection with ideas of national identity. Through the prioritisation of questions of ‘space’, ‘place’ and the ‘local’, particularly in terms of how they are socially constituted (and conversely, how social relations are spatially constituted), these studies have pointed to the contested nature of national identity.