For such a tendentious article, the citations to opposing viewpoints are fairly lacking. > A review of both the psychology literature and anthropological resea

For such a tendentious article, the citations to opposing viewpoints are fairly lacking. > A review of both the psychology literature and anthropological research on societies ranging from the ethnolinguistic groups of hunter-gatherers to tribes, chiefdoms, and states (less formally, “nations”),3 reveal that a universal society is unattainable. Big if true! The key supposition here is that the concept of a "nation", and thus an analysis of "nationalism" applies across human history (even pre-history!) and in all different localities. Contrast this with the view that what we think of as nationalism is a distinctly modern phenomena, an outgrowth of the rise of capitalist social relations and print as a mass medium. On this view, nationalism is initially a curiously European phenomena and later spreads outward with the march of "print-capitalism". I find this analysis much easier to square with the early modern history of Japan or China, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community