Understanding Of National Identity Research Articles

“Put on a Jacket, You Wuss”: Cultural Identities, Home Heating, and Air Pollution in Christchurch, New Zealand

Central heating, insulation, and double glazing, such as you might find in many countries with colder climates in the northern hemisphere, are virtually lacking in Christchurch, in New Zealand's South Island. In this city, houses tend to be inadequately heated and rely primarily on a combination of open fires, log burners, and electrical heaters. This form of home heating, combined with local climatic and topographical factors, results in high levels of wintertime air pollution. While much research has been conducted into the air-pollution problem in Christchurch to date, this research has focused on physical contaminants and their effects on health, rather than on the ways in which air pollution is socially and culturally mediated and on the sense-making practices of those who create pollution and suffer its effects. Based on information drawn from focus groups, we argue that reluctance to change behaviour results partly from investments in particular cultural identities which are tied into hegemonic masculinities and understandings of national identity, such as the masculine pioneer heritage established during the colonial period. We also explore the spatial relationships that air pollution plays out within and on the ‘body’ and how it transcends and weakens the bounded body. We believe that analyses which draw on theories of hybridisation, embodiment, identity, and discourse, and which highlight the links between modes of behaviour, identity and sense of place, and the interactions between humans and nonhumans, are able to shed new light on our understandings of public perceptions and responses to air pollution in Christchurch.

First, Second and Finally Third Order Understandings of Lithuanian National Identity: an Anthropological Approach

The term ‘national identity’ implies homogeneity, but field research shows that the members of a nation are very heterogeneous in their conceptions of their own national identity. How then can we speak of a national identity when there is significant diversity among the members of a nation? I rely on concepts of ‘first order’ and ‘second order’ components of identity to resolve this question. First order concepts are constructed from the top down by the cultural elite and second order concepts are precipitates of behavior from the bottom up through personal experiences. I also rely on the importance of situated knowledge as the way identity is understood in social practice. Situated knowledge used by ego in social interactions. Situated knowledge creates a common national (or cultural) identity when ego knows not only that alter knows what ego knows but that ego “knows that alter knows that ego knows that alter knows.” It is this third order “Knowing” that creates, expresses, and maintains a national identity that is actually practiced in everyday life. I conclude by noting that a socially just inclusive model of national identity has to be based on this “third order” understanding of national identity.

Constructing Another Kind of German: Catholic Commemorations of German Unification in Baden, 1870-1876

This essay discusses how Badenese Catholics responded to the nationalist rhetoric surrounding German unification in 1871. Faced with a Protestant dominated commemorative discourse aimed at reinforcing the Protestant hegemony over the definition of Germanness, Catholics successfully contested this ideological message. By creating an alternative commemorative discourse, Catholics were able to manifest their own understanding of national identity instead of becoming subsumed in a new nation-state based on Protestant values. The uneasy coexistence of Protestant and Catholic versions of German identity suggests that confessional elements constituted integral parts of German nationalism and that Catholic and Protestant integration into the Kaiserreich should be viewed as a contested debate over the definition and legitimization of the new state.

When too much sport is barely enough: Broadcasting regulation and national identity

Sport and broadcasting appear to enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Similarly, sport seems to play a central role in many current understandings of national identity. In this article, we explore some of the ways in which the legal regulation of sport broadcasting is often couched in terms of the protection of an essential, yet ill-defined, national interest. We offer a series of critiques of the competing interests at stake under such regulatory regimes - market power and competition, legally entrenched preferences for certain broadcast technologies, democracy and the construction of national identity. Through a critical and comparative analysis of the legal system of anti-siphoning and anti-hoarding legislation in effect in Australia, we attempt to highlight the confused and confusing state of broadcasting regulation there and in other jurisdictions in relation to access to key sporting events on television.

The Foreigner's Gaze: Constructions of National Identity and Alterity in Post-War Italian Literature

In the post-war period, Italian culture went through a crisis, which provoked thorough debates about the question of national identity. The article outlines the reasons for this crisis and examines some prominent attempts to redefine italianita through literary writing, focusing especially on novels that seek to describe Italy as seen through the eyes of foreign narrator-protagonists. Through discussion of the works and ideas of Guido Morselli, Ennio Flaiano, Antonio Tabucchi and Primo Levi, the article illustrates the aims behind this specific literary strategy as well as referring to its inevitable limits. Finally, it describes the emergence of an anti-essentialist understanding of national identity, which questions not so much specific connotations of italianita as the concept of a stable national identity itself. © 2002 Forum for Modern Language Studies.

Authorizing Experience: Reconfigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing by Jim Egan (review)

YES,31, 200I Authorizing Experience. Reconfigurations oftheBodyPoliticinSeventeenth-Century NewEngland Writing. By JIMEGAN. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. I999. x + 182 pp. /22.50. Jim Egan's study of key seventeenth-century New England writers contributes to the ongoing debate over the nature of Americanization and the theorizing of American national identity. He begins by engaging with the foundational work of Sacvan Bercovitch,while nodding in the direction of PerryMiller'searlierwork in the field. Egan's contribution to this area of inquiry is situated in terms of early American culturalstudies, and he is careful to locate his own work in terms of the contributionof Philip Gura, Andrew Delbanco, MyraJelen, and othersin revising the paradigm for the study of early American literature. Egan looks to dominant scholarlyinterpretationsof the exceptional natureofAmericancultureandnational identityto identifytheprimacyof experience over ideology as a dominatingnational trait. Experience, seen as a national characteristic, is used by Egan in order to analyse the ways in which early American writersused this concept of experience to imagine the relationship between the individual and the community. These rhetorical strategies, according to Egan, became distinctive to the New England colonies but have been recognized as such only in modern culturalanalysessuch as Bercovitch's;he argues, 'The colonial British-Americanwritershad to arguefor the very authority of experience that Miller, Bercovitch, and American literary scholarship in general now take as given' (p. 7). Egan's subject is the body of writingsthat tell of the nation'sfounding and subsequentexplanationsof America's distinctive cultural features; consequently, he focuses his discussion upon the relationship that developed between this emerging rhetoric and colonialism; specifically,the relations between the colonies and England. Egan shows how the writersJohn Smith, William Wood, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Tompson, and William Hubbard were aware of the challenge posed by the value attached to experiential authorityto the inherited patterns of social hierarchythat characterized contemporary English thinking. In his account, this rhetoric of experience enabled colonists to deal with the uncertainty and danger of their position in the New Worldwhile at the same time allowing them to reconceive the notion of Englishness in order to regulate the colonial populations (English and native)by embracinga new understandingof nationalidentity. In a series of chapters, each devoted to the work of one writer, Egan deals with each of his key writers in turn, looking at the uses to which important rhetorical figures such as the body politic are put. He begins with the promotional tracts written by John Smith and William Wood to highlight, first, the debate over experientialauthorityversusthe authorityof rankand, then, theplace of Englishness within these alternativeconceptions of authority.He then turnsto the roleof gender in rhetoricalplay of thesefiguresand uses the Antinomian controversyto show how notions of the body politic were used to regulate internal as well as external (colonial) social relations. FromJohn Winthrop's account of Anne Hutchinson's infection of the community with her Antinomian heresy, Egan moves to Anne Bradstreet's employment of an earlier, sexless model of the body politic which rejectsboth the Preparationistview of bodily experience as passingthrough a series of stages that prepare the unregenerate body for salvation and also rejects the opposition between masculine and feminine bodily experience from which both communal and individual subject formation develops. He concludes with a discussionof the latterhalf of the seventeenth century and writingsthat focus upon the differencesbetween the English communal body and colonial self-government that aregrounded in the particularitiesof colonial New Englandexperience. 305 306 306 Reviews Reviews Puritanismdoes dominate Egan'sdiscussionsandhisanalysesdo tend to highlight the now discreditednotion of New England as the cradle of the Republic. Egan is clearlyawareof these issuesand he counterswith the point thatin orderto provide a coherent and detailednarrativeof the rhetoricof experience he hashad to confine his analysis to a single discursive community. Within the methodological and chronological constraints of his study,Jim Egan has produced an intelligent and compelling account of one important aspect of the early foundations of American culturalidentity. SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY, LONDON DEBORAH L. MADSEN MasterPlots:RaceandtheFounding of an American Literature, I787-i845. ByJARED GARDNER. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998. xvii +238pp. C33. 'Master Plotsis an examination of the intersectionof racialand nationaldiscoursesin the "founding" of a national literaturein the United States, a national...

De fracasos y modernizaciones en la historia : agitaciones de la memoria y zozobras identitarias

This paper explores the relationship between memory and historiography, that is, between public discourse and the process of academic analysis. This relationship would be hard to unravel if we were not to examine carefully the ways in which the political system depends as much on ideas as on what people perceive as being just or opportune; a perception which to a large extent depends on the collective memory accumulated in each social group or class. Such is the thesis put forward in this article. The historiography of Spain harbours a memory which suffers from continuing disquiet on two counts: firstly, with regard to its very identity as a nation; secondly, concerning the conceptual dichotomy between disaster and normality, a recurring theme when attempting to explain the past, and something which affects our understanding of national identity. The conclusion drawn in this article is that the collective memory of Spain is currently at a crossroads where conflicting political legitimacies intersect.

Who Counts; Who Cares? Scottish children's notions of national identity

Summary Compared to the literature on children's racial and ethnic identities, relatively little is known about their understanding of national identity. Such knowledge is necessary if schools are to challenge racism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism effectively. In this paper, we present the findings of a case‐study (undertaken in a mainly‐white Edinburgh primary school) of 9‐11 year‐olds’ understanding of this complex form of collective identity. Particular attention is given to age‐related differences in response. Comparisons are drawn between the Scottish children's conceptions of their national identity and those of a multiethnic cohort drawn from three English primary schools (in a recently‐completed, parallel investigation by the same authors). We conclude by exploring the policy implications of our data.

National museums and international museums

At a time when nationalism grows more strident, the role of national museums assumes great importance. National museums encourage not only an understanding of national identity, but also patriotism. While this is natural, it has dangers in that the museum can be used politically to endorse racial and other charged emotions. The great international museums have provided an antidote to such tendencies by providing a universal view of the culture and natural history of the world from the earliest times. Because these museums have important material from other countries they are often attacked as odious relics of colonialism. Rather they should be seen as representative of internationalism and encouraged to collect as widely as possible—within the law. They should not be pressurized into returning material to its country of origin for narrow nationalistic purposes. National museums should themselves collect outside their own national boundaries so that countries can see themselves against the background of other cultures. As nationalism grows, internationalism must be stressed in national museums so that countries may understand each others' culture and points of view.