The Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore visited the United States several times, though his second trip in 1916-1917 seems to have generated the most excitement. On the verge of American entry into World War I, the Nobel prize-winning writer embarked on an extensive lecture tour critiquing the excesses of nationalism and imperialism. The visit generated a number of remarkable texts, including a series of important letters to family and friends written on the trip and the four long lectures collected and published in 1917 as Nationalism. I argue that the lectures on “Nationalism,” can and should be read as a form of “reverse Orientalist” travel writing, where Tagore aimed to show Americans how their own political and economic system could be seen as rather similar to the European powers. Tagore uses the lectures to develop a series of metaphors for the modern, instrumentalist deployment of power in the nation-state and the colonial world, against which he posited an ideal of modern man cultivated and “perfected,” rather like a work of art.
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Veiled Strangers
Rabindranath Tagore's America, in Letters and Lectures
Amardeep Singh
Richard Wright and the 1955 Bandung Conference
A Re-Evaluation of The Color Curtain
Babacar M'Baye
The Color Curtain reflects Richard Wright's problematical assessment of the 1955 Bandung Conference and his difficult attempts to reconcile his sincere denunciation of the consequences of colonialism and racism on people of Asian and African descent with his condescending representation of Third World nationalism during the middle of the twentieth century. The book reveals striking paradoxes in Wright's evaluation of a nationalism that he occasionally vilifies as an ideology that was grounded on impassioned and essentialist cultural or religious affiliations and feelings. Yet Wright's demeaning, elitist, and patronizing attitudes about Third World nationalism and cultures did not prevent him from identifying with the core spirit of the Bandung Conference. In his assessment of the summit, Wright occasionally reveals his admiration for a Third World nationalism that echoed his disparagement of Western racism and imperialism.
Durkheim, the Action Française and the Question of Nationalism
Sue Stedman-Jones
called ‘AF’), which was formed out of the response to it. The Ligue de la Patrie Fran ç aise had a relatively short life and morphed into its more radical progeny. Central to the Affair also was the question of nationalism: ‘La question nationale est au
In Durkheimian Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 31–48 (18 total)
Sports Diplomacy and Emergent Nationalism
Football Links between the Two Yemens, 1970-1990
Thomas B. Stevenson and Abdul Karim Alaug
In the 1970s and 1980s, North and South Yemen appeared to be two states pursuing opposing, sometimes hostile, economic and political policies. Then, in 1990, they suddenly united. This article analyses sport diplomacy as an instrument in opening institutional contacts between the two governments and as a venue for conveying important socio-political and historical messages. Cross-border football contests reinforced the largely invented notion of a single Yemen derived from pre-Islamic kingdoms. This idea remains a foundation of Yemeni nationalism and a base of Yemeni national identity.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–19 (19 total)
Iranian Environmentalism: Nationhood, Alternative Natures, and the Materiality of Objects
Satoshi Abe
In addressing mounting environmental problems in recent years, many Iranian environmentalists have increasingly adapted discourses and implemented programs that are modeled on scientific ecology. Does this mean the verbatim transfer of Western scientific modernity in Iran? My analyses suggest otherwise. This article explores the unique ways in which a burgeoning environmental awareness unfolds in Iranian contexts by investigating how conceptions of "nature" shape the environmentalists' discourses and practices. It appears that an ecological scientific conception of nature is becoming an important frame of reference among such environmentalists. However, another conception of nature-one framed in relation to Iranian nationhood-makes a key contribution to environmentalism in Iran. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2009-2011 in Tehran, this study demonstrates how "Iranian nature" is delineated and practiced through the environmentalists' (re)engagements with certain objects-maps, posters, and photographs-in relation to which local ways of conceptualizing nature are elaborated.
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 259–284 (26 total)
The Nature of Nationalism: Populist Radical Right Parties on Countryside and Climate
Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa
This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental issues are conditioned by deeper structures of nationalist ideology and the understandings of nature embedded therein. It illustrates a fundamental difference between the way nationalist actors engage in, on the one hand, the protection of nature as national countryside and landscape, epitomizing the nation's beauty, harmony and purity over which the people are sovereign. On the other hand, they deny or cast doubt on environmental risks located at a transnational level, such as those that relate to climate. The article argues that this apparent inconsistency is rooted in the ideological tenets of nationalism as the transnational undermines the nationalist ideal of sovereignty.
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 199–224 (26 total)
Introduction
The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State
Nicolas Argenti
long-standing notions of ‘Balkan mentality’ and ‘Balkan myths’, including the myth of the ‘500-year Turkish yoke’. They point out that these stereotypes all stem from and say more about the Western preoccupation with the militant nationalisms of this
The Continent Behind
Alienation and the American Scene in George William Curtis’s Lotus-Eating: A Summer Book
James Weaver
. Written during a period of extensive literary nationalism in the United States, Lotus-Eating articulates a longing for a lost connection to Europe. In this light, we might consider Curtis’s Lotus-Eating in relation to American accounts of European
Eschatology, Ethics, and Ēthnos
Ressentiment and Christian Nationalism in the Anthropology of Christianity
Jon Bialecki
This is an article about eschatology, ressentiment , and Christian nationalism. It is also about the unfixed nature of the nationalist imagination, the mutability of the ethical form, and the consequences of the various masks that ethics takes. My
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 42–61 (20 total)
City, Community, Nation, State
Participation and Spectacle
Judith Kapferer
The events and sites of a national holiday (17 May in Bergen, Norway) are the grounds from which to draw out meanings of nationalism and tradition, and analyze ideologies of egalitarianism and individualism in a social democratic welfare state. My project has two aims: to open up and deconstruct aspects of the material and symbolic life of the city, and to engage an examination of patterns of local and national community life in relation to shifting evaluations of localism and nationalism within the a changing state formation. Bergen can be thought of as a case study of social order and control, with women, children, and reverence for home life, highlighted in the town’s celebrations. The symbolism of the day discovers community and state in a difficult relation between domestic communities and nationalist ideology in the maintenance of governmentality, a relation mediated by the city itself.
In Social Analysis
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2004
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 108–125 (18 total)