Ethnographicity of a National Political Body

Abstract

The author analyzes cultural tactics and strategies aimed at the nationalization of the body in public, political and cultural spaces. The images of the national, nationalizing and nationalized body in modern cultures and spaces of memory are analyzed. The purpose of the study is to analyze visual strategies for the nationalization of the body in the intellectual histories of Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th and early 21st centuries. Geographically, the article is limited to the analysis of the politically motivated nationalizations of corporality in the greater Eastern and Central European cultural contexts. The chronological and geographical framework is motivated by the need to detect both continuity and discreteness in the nationalization of the body in the political cultures of the region, as well as general trends and regional characteristics of cultural and political practices, the author analyze in the article. The article shows that the historical and cultural prerequisites for the nationalization of the body developed in the 17th and 18th centuries within the framework of the “high” political culture, which operated with the images of great ancestors, projecting onto clothes as an element of socially acceptable physicality. The author believes that by the beginning of the 21st century, the nationalization of physicality express itself in several strategies, including the visualization of traditional ethnicity and the actualization of elements of modern political culture, which combine the visualization of biological signs of physicality in their combination with elements of a personality cult.