Personal nationalism and the national interest
The issue before us, then, is how, and the extent to which, individuals' constructions and usages of their Scottishness converge so that it is indeed appropriate to refer to Scottish national identity. I shall begin this section with anecdotal accounts of two events more than twenty years apart, to show that the identification of self with nation is articulated through the notion of 'interest'. In the final section of the chapter, I shall argue that personally constructed national identity is...
Discriminating relations
Boundary, identity and authenticity are all used in the essays which follow more as terms of discrimination than of relativity. They do not describe people as being more or less White Aboriginal Celt Maori and so on, but as unambiguously one or the other. Where there may be doubts expressed about the validity of identity say, with regard to Asturian Celts Fernandez , or Australian 'Whiteness' or European-ness Paine these seem to concern the conditions for excluding ambiguity, rather than...
Indian Reserves In Canada Indian Homelands Or Devices For Assimilation Article
Abu-Lughod, L. 1991 'Writing against culture', in R. G. Fox ed. Recapturing Anthropology Working in the Present, Santa Fe NM School of American Research Press. Ames, M. M. 1986 Museums, The Public and Anthropology A Study in the Anthropology of Anthropology, Vancouver and New Delhi University of British Columbia Press and Concept Publishing Company. Asad, T. 1986 'The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology', in J. Clifford and G. E. Marcus eds Writing Culture The Poetics...
Reflections
Death provokes thought about the meaning of life. Life is understood in its absence. As breath ceases, and a person no longer moves, something is seen to have departed. For Maori, Ruatara's hau had returned to its source for the missionaries, his soul had left his body. The struggles over his death reflected a life that had been lived at the edges of cross-cultural encounter. While Ruatara's people believed that they lived in te ao maarama, the World of Light, the missionaries thought of them...
Notes Jjs
1 This example occasioned by the fact that I was speaking in Edinburgh 2 Different parts of this chapter in earlier versions were presented, before Edinburgh, at the National Museum in Rio De Janeiro and the Department of Anthropology of the University of Brasilia I am particularly grateful to Stephen Baines, whose initiative brought me to Brazil , and, after Edinburgh, in the anthropology departments at St Andrews, Tromso, McGill and Concordia in Montreal, and Memorial in St John's. I was much...
Authenticity
That the word authenticity has become part of the moral slang of our day points to our anxiety over the credibility of existence and of individual existences. Given our topic, I find it appropriate to open with Lionel Trilling on a note of moral concern.4 His statement also serves well as an 'opener' for discussion. First, what if one were to look for moral concern, historically, among Settler populations regarding 'their' Aboriginals But then, Trilling's supposition appears to be that...
Fredrik Barth
The concept of boundaries is important and versatile, but often unclear and even quite mystifying in contemporary anthropological thought. In the following, I wish to raise the twin issues of how we think when we use a notion of boundaries, and to what extent it provides a figure of thought, a concept, that is used generally by people to perform mental operations and construct categories. Since I am associated with an influential formulation thirty years ago on the theme of 'ethnic groups and...
Cognition social structure and change
These are examples of the connections across boundaries that were announced in my title. The crucial point is that most of them are built by processes other than those that define the boundary. To draw a boundary is a cognitive act that lays down some premises but it does not determine all the social forms that eventuate. The affordances of a boundary set the scene for social activities, and in that sense, yes, boundaries also connect. But the connections that emerge are the work of people who...
Introduction 1
how we situate ourselves says a lot about the kind of analysis we make. At its most general, this chapter is written in the conviction that to understand Aboriginality, and the debates it occasions, the approach has to be through ideas about authenticity. But let us recognize at the outset that Aboriginality is an exceptional way of attributing authenticity the 'English' suffice it to say for the moment do not regard themselves as 'Aboriginal', though they are certainly in no doubt as to their...
The image of group boundaries
I believe that for us, in our European tradition, the particular image of boundaries derives its power ultimately from humankind's ability as a tooluser. Using a tool involves an extension of one's self. When you hold a knife or a spoon in your hand and use it as an implement, the experienced limit of your body is no longer the skin of your hand, but the cutting edge of your knife or the cup of your spoon. Likewise, when we learn to use skis or a bicycle, they become extensions of ourselves....
Other images of social groups
But other lives create other images and schemas. If we return to the Basseri nomads, territorial boundaries lose their saliency, and no analogue to boundary-drawing is necessary to envisage social groups. The camp community as a group becomes a directly experienced unit, shifting between its two modalities as a migrating caravan and as a cluster of pitched tents. Physically it is manifest and distinct not as something contained within an imagined circle drawn on the ground around the group, but...
References Afy
Bateson, M. C. 1994 Peripheral Visions, New York Harper. Berlin, I. 1976 Vico and Herder Two Studies in the History of Ideas, London Hogarth. Burgess, A. 1966 The Age of the Grand Tour, New York Crown Publishers. Cahill, T. 1995 How the Irish Saved Civilization The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, London Hodder and Stoughton. Cohen, A. P. 1996 'Personal nationalism a Scottish view of some rites, rights, and wrongs', American...
Introduction rights values and peripherally in Scottishness
This essay continues my attempt to explore nationalist sentiment in Scotland from an anthropological perspective. I am not concerned with grand theorizing about the nature of nationalism vis-a-vis cognate phenomena such as ethnicity and sectarianism, nor with the social conditions under which nationalism may be expected to wax and wane. These matters have been exhaustively addressed in the literature, and continue to generate much work. With the notable exceptions of Gellner and of scholars...
The ethnographic context
When I was doing fieldwork among urban Punjabi families, some of whom had been displaced after the Partition of India, and all of whom had to deal with the events of Partition in one way or another, the violence they had experienced was muted. As I have described in several earlier papers, the large political events were played out in the register of the familial through repeated engagement with what I have called 'poisonous knowledge' Das 1991 1995 1996 . It was through the act of witnessing...
An analytical concept of boundaries
The image of a boundary, in the abstract sense of a separation that surrounds a social group and divides it from other groups and from its surrounding environment, has proved analytically powerful for many purposes in social science. In the study of the firm, it facilitates an account of the organization's exchanges with its environment, its inflows and outflows. It helps us envision the processes of recruitment and shedding of members in corporate groups, the viability of households, and the...
Veena Das
Like many other anthropologists compelled to write on violence, the grammar of terror, or on the dismay of images, I have been caught in a scene of writing in which the moral urgency has far outpaced the capacity to render the violence intelligible. In this chapter I want to reflect on this very poverty as a virtue. One may say of anthropology what Lefebvre 1968 said of philosophy, that 'The role of philosophical thought is to eliminate premature explanations, those limitative positions which...
The problem of the objective correlative
Rather than entering a debate about types of nationalism, my concern throughout this essay is to raise the question of what 'the nation' may mean to people who identify themselves with it, and who see in it a kind of referent of themselves. 'Personal nationalism' expresses the idea that people refract their identities as 'nationals' through their own selfhood. Of course, this does not exclude the proposition that they may also construct their selfhood to express what they perceive to be the...
Border ballads the Celtic fringe and other popular geographies
But rather than reflecting further on theoretical landscapes and the identities caught up in their metes and bounds, let us now turn to boundaries in more popular landscapes. There are many examples of popular wisdom that reflect widespread ideas in society about boundaries and identities. Let me take as my first exhibit a linen tea towel see Figure 5.1 on p. 125 with text relating to Scotland but made in Ireland, by the way . It is for sale in tourist shops throughout Scotland, and is a...
Anne Salmond
A human being is an existence carving itself out in space, shattering in chaos, exploding in pandemonium, netting itself, a scarcely breathing animal, in the webs of death. On 2 March 1815, on a hilltop in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, a rangatira chief named Ruatara lay dying. In his suffering, he complained to Thomas Kendall, a missionary who had travelled with him from Port Jackson present-day Sydney , of want of breath and pain. Because of his illness, Ruatara was prohibited from...