Divine Ethnies and Sacred Nations

Abstract

The failure of nationalism to abate during the twentieth century came largely as a surprise to many social and political thinkers. The ideological power of nationalism was such that it continued to penetrate nearly all spheres of social and individual life, to such an extent that it seemed to become the normal and natural condition of humanity. Most modern human beings are socialised in such a way the existence of ethnic and national identity is taken as a given and unproblematic feature of lived life. As Gelmer (1983: 6) put it, today it is commonly assumed that ‘a man must have a nationality as he must have a nose and two ears’, a potent indicator of the enormously successful ideological penetration of nationalism. It is also worth citing Barthes (1993) again, who long ago noted that the success of a particular ideological practice is best gauged by the degree of its naturalisation — the fact that something is generally understood as normal and natural. Moreover the intensity of this widespread and universally shared feeling hides its profoundly contingent character and its historical novelty. The fact that ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002) is so ingrained in everything we do could not escape social and political thought, and it was not until late into the second half of the twentieth century that sociology took the study of nations and nationalism seriously. The true pioneers of this study, those whose works have shaped the direction of contemporary analyses and debates, are without doubt Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. Smith.