When Did Nationalism Become Banal? The Nationalization of the Domestic Sphere in Spain

Abstract

Inspired by Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism, social scientists have begun to study the impact of nationalism on everyday life. However, Billig’s concept is far from clear. Actually, banal can refer to ‘mundane’ expressions of nationalism, to their ‘unconscious’ consumption or their ‘cold’ temperature. Moreover, on many occasions Billig referred to the state instead of the nation, thus in fact analysing ‘banal statism’. For historians it is often difficult to ascertain whether people consciously perceived certain expressions of nationalism or not. However, we can analyze when certain mundane forms of nationalism were invented, while looking for clues as to how they cooled down and slowly became taken for granted. In this article, I will analyze how the nationalization of the domestic sphere manifested itself in Spain. In fact, this transnational trend has been largely ignored by architectural historians and scholars dealing with gender, food, design and animal–human relations, because they primarily focused on processes of modernization. In this way, the intensification of the nation-building process, which now also actively implies housewives, has remained largely invisible. Using evidence from a broad array of books, lectures and magazines, I will show that during the belle époque – when Spanish nationalism was quite hot – all kinds of spaces, objects and practices associated with the private sphere and the home were consciously nationalized by writers, architects and cooks. The focus will be on the nationalization of domestic architecture, food and dishes, but I will also pay attention to the nationalization of furniture, pets, gardening and cleaning. There are clear indications that over time many new national forms, objects and spaces slowly became banal stereotypes, thus further naturalizing existing national identities.