National Collective Identity


Book Description

Hall illustrates how centuries-old dynastic traditions have been replaced in the modern era by nationalist and ethnic identity movements.




Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-ascription


Book Description

Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription argues that groups have an irreducibly collective right to determine the meaning of their shared group identity, and that such a right is especially important for historically oppressed groups. The author specifies this right by way of a modified discourse ethic, demonstrating that it can provide the foundation for a conception of identity politics that avoids many of its usual pitfalls. The focus throughout is on racial identity, which provides a test case for the theory. That is, it investigates what it would mean for racial identities to be self-ascribed rather than imposed, establishing the possible role racial identity might play in a just society. The book thus makes a unique contribution to both the field of critical theory, which has been woefully silent on issues of race, and to race theory, which often either presumes that a just society would be a raceless society, or focuses primarily on understanding existing racial inequalities, in the manner typical of so-called "non-ideal theory."




Dynamics of National Identity


Book Description

Globalization, immigration and economic crisis challenge the conceptions of nations, trans-national institutions and post-ethnic societies which are central topics in social sciences' discourses. This book examines in an interdisciplinary and international comparative way structures of national identity which are in conflict with or supporting multi-ethnic diversity and trans-national connectivity. The book’s first section seeks to clarify the concepts of national identity, nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitism and to operationalize them consistently. The next section regards the diversity within national states and the consequences for the management of identity and intra-national integration. The third section focuses on external integration between different nations by searching for the "squaring of the circle" between the bonding with co-patriots and the critical reflection of one's own national perspective in relation to others. The last section explores to what extent and in which ways media use shapes collective identity.




Collective Identity and Integration Policy in Denmark and Sweden


Book Description

This book discusses the interrelationship between practices of collective self-interpretation, in this case national identity construction, and integration policies, using the example of Denmark and Sweden. Though both countries are considered to be socially progressive and modern, not least by themselves, the author makes the novel and provocative argument that both Denmark and Sweden are caught in a (discourse) paradox when it comes to integration policy, which stands in the way of successful immigrant integration. The author uses an innovative approach to reconstruct the Danish and the Swedish national identity by using social studies schoolbooks and novels as research material, thereby adding an interdisciplinary dimension to the book. About the author Marilena Geugjes is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany. She earned her doctorate in Political Science at Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on migration and integration policy, local politics, and the role of the police.




Tired of Being a Refugee


Book Description

After six decades of protracted refugeehood, patterns of social identification are changing among the young people of the fourth refugee generation in the Palestinian refugee camp Burj al-Shamali in Southern Lebanon. Though their identity as Palestinian refugees remains the same compared to older refugee generations, there is an important shift in the young refugees’ relationship towards the homeland, their status as refugees, Islam, the camp society, as well as in their relationship towards religious or ethnic “others” in and outside Lebanon. This ePaper examines how technology, globalisation and outside influences have impacted the young Palestinians’ interpretation of their identity and their understanding of Palestinianness. The author concludes with reflections on the young refugees’ attitudes towards their Palestinian identity in the diaspora, which, as she argues, can only survive when the young refugees see their identity as a virtue rather than as a hindrance.




Framing the Nation and Collective Identities


Book Description

This book analyzes top-down and bottom-up strategies of framing the nation and collective identities through commemorative practices relating to events from the Second World War and the 1990s "Homeland War" in Croatia. With attention to media representations of commemorative events and opinion poll data, it draws on interviews and participant observation at commemorative events to focus on the speeches of political elites, together with the speeches of opposition politicians and other social actors (such as the Catholic Church, anti-fascist organizations and war veterans’ and victims’ organizations) who challenge official narratives. Offering innovative approaches to researching and analyzing commemorative practices in post-conflict societies, this examination of a nation’s transition from a Yugoslav republic to an independent state – and now the newest member of the European Union – constitutes a unique case study for scholars of cultural memory and identity politics interested in the production and representation of national identities in official narratives.







Commemorations


Book Description

Memory is as central to modern politics as politics is central to modern memory. We are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to us through museums, historic sites, and public sculpture, that we easily lose sight of the recent origins and diverse meanings of these uniquely modern phenomena. In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the past to their own ends. The volume is introduced by John Gillis's broad overview of the development of public memory in relation to the history of the nation-state. Other contributions address the usefulness of identity as a cross-cultural concept (Richard Handler), the connection between identity, heritage, and history (David Lowenthal), national memory in early modern England (David Cressy), commemoration in Cleveland (John Bodnar), the museum and the politics of social control in modern Iraq (Eric Davis), invented tradition and collective memory in Israel (Yael Zerubavel), black emancipation and the civil war monument (Kirk Savage), memory and naming in the Great War (Thomas Laqueur), American commemoration of World War I (Kurt Piehler), art, commerce, and the production of memory in France after World War I (Daniel Sherman), historic preservation in twentieth-century Germany (Rudy Koshar), the struggle over French identity in the early twentieth century (Herman Lebovics), and the commemoration of concentration camps in the new Germany (Claudia Koonz).




Sociological Knowledge and Collective Identity


Book Description

Sociology, emerging in the 19th century as the study of national societies, is the intellectual product of its time, power relations and social imaginaries. As a discursive practice that was enmeshed in the meta-narratives of modernity, the discipline of sociology bears the inherent capacity to shape socially shared concepts and construct collective identities. This book examines the relationships between sociology and projects of national identity construction, and presents a critique of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, the prominent Israeli sociologist known as the "father of Israeli sociology". The book focuses on Eisenstadt’s sociology of Israel as a case of knowledge construction within an ideological system and examines the relationships between his various sociological analyses of Israeli society and the Zionist imaginary, namely the deeply entrenched political myths and historiographical narratives that constitute Israel’s hegemonic national identity. By emphasizing the interrelation between textuality, identity, and loaded language, the volume seeks to demythologize Eisenstadt’s sociology of Israel. Three major concepts in Eisenstadt’s scholarship are specifically thematized: integration, civilization, and modernities. In each of these foci, the author shows how Eisenstadt’s sociological conjectures reproduce dominant Zionist historiographical representations of the past, rationalize prevalent social hierarchies, reify the boundaries of a national collective "Self", and render legitimacy to Israel’s governing ethnocratic tendencies, underlying the premises of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Sociological Knowledge and Collective Identity will appeal to those interested in the interconnectedness of sociology and political memory, as well as in a radical postcolonial reconstruction of sociology.




Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity


Book Description

Five sociologists develop a theoretical model of 'cultural trauma' & build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new & binding understandings of social responsibility.