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But nationalism of that sort is just a modern example of a much older pattern, which stressed the exclusivity in membership of one population to one specific cu

But nationalism of that sort is just a modern example of a much older pattern, which stressed the exclusivity in membership of one population to one specific culture. The Greeks spoke of non-greeks as Barbaros, from which we get our word "barbarian" via the Latin borrowing. The Roman writers saw themselves as bringing the light of Roman culture to the barbarians (read Tacitus sometime), and so forth. This is found elsewhere too. The earliest Sanscrit writings refer to the early Sanscrit speakers as "Noble" (Sanscrit 'Aryan') which is one of the reasons folks assume (wrongly I think) that the caste system was set up by the invaders to privilege themselves over the local population.[1] The "nation state" is a somewhat new model to some extent. The older models were more fluid, but the idea of loyalty to one's nation (not necessarily the same as one's state) can be found going back into antiquity, and you can find similar patterns just about everywhere, whether early Ireland, Scandinavia, the Goths during their time in the Roman Empire, India, China, and so forth. The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government. You can see in racial stereotypes much the same thing going on actually. The old division is between people who "act and talk like we do" vs "everyone else." [1] Compare the colors of the Varnas to the colors of the Gunas and the colors of the classes in the Scandinavian poem Rigsthula and you see that the three colors in common are white, red, and black which represent spirituality, war, and labor of the earth respectively. Also note that if you compare functions to the labels of classes in Solonic Athens, the bottom three match-- Hippeis to Ksatria, Vassyia to Zeugmatis, and Sudra to Thetis), while the designations of the upper three match between India and Ireland. There are also long-standing spacial associations with these which can be found across Ireland, India, Scandinavia, and the Greco-Roman world. On this I conclude that the 5-fold division of a king and four castes was brought by the Sanscrit speakers fully as a ritual division of space and implemented in ceremonial divisions of society.

vidarh 13y ago
With this you directly contradict your earlier claim that: > Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish? Whether or not one agrees with your claim that pre-nation state forms of group loyalty or tribalism were equivalent to nationalism, you here yourself divorce the existence of traditions of local governance from your interpretation of nationalism ("The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.") The point is that culture and governance are not implicitly linked, and did not used to be. Contrary to your implication in the quoted part that the lack of nationalism would be a treat to survival of local culture, on the contrary, the rise of modern nationalism has had a substantial effect in threatening many cultures. A lot of nation states have explicitly set out to eradicate alternative cultures. Witness the Turkish state long held insistence that there were no such thing as Kurds, for example - just "mountain Turks" - and the number of states that at various times have outlawed the teaching of minority languages (including, again, Turkey) or even mentioning the minority (I knew a Turkish journalist in Norway as an asylum seeker because he had received death threats from the Turkish government because he was writing about the plight of the Kurds). In Norway too, since you bring up Scandinavia and I'm Norwegian, a lot of modern culture are constructs of modern nationalism: Our two official languages are both artificial and recent - one constructed as an amalgamation of dialects spoken around the country, and one constructed largely from Danish, and are increasingly pushing local dialects aside. Around Oslo, for example, many kids are not even aware that their speech has elements of old distinct dialects, and no effort is made to preserve them (note that I am not arguing that they should be preserved - I don't particular care about the preservation of such dialects). Unlike in most English speaking languages, the government even dictates the vocabulary and the rules of the language. Most of the mythos and trappings of the Norwegian national identify date from ~1800 onwards, especially as constructions of the Norwegian national romanticism movement from the 1840's onwards. This modern Norwegian culture that arose as a result is largely the result of a local elite that stimulated and utilised this nationalism as a means of asserting power and/or making their local seats more prominent in the face of a government in Copenhagen that had for hundreds of years let Norway remain a under-developed backwater. First in trying to gain independence in 1814 when Denmark-Norway was sufficiently weakened by having been on the losing side of the Napoleonic Wars, and they managed to get recognition for our constitution, and then again to build popular support for full independence from Sweden after we were handed over to Sweden as a "price" to the Swedes for supporting the victors. Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era. The lyrics to our national anthem even is one long national romantic representation of a myth of some thousand year tradition of a unified Norwegian nation. So not only is nationalism not a pre-requisite for protecting culture - it has been a major driver for steamrollering older local cultures over the last century in particular. But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I am not sure they do contradict. In the Middle Ages, for example, there was a significant amount of local governance and more continuity from baron to baron than from king to king. States as we might think of them might vary, and people might in theory owe allegiance to different crowns, but the overall nationhood was still closely connected to local governance. Personally I see the loss of local dialects in Europe (which is happening many places to various degrees, sometimes with government help, sometimes without) with a great degree of sadness. It used to be that you could walk from Amsterdam to Munich and never encounter a line where the dialects on one side were unintellible to those on the others, because the various sound shifts existed as gradients rather than hard boundaries (raising the question of whether Dutch, Low German, and High German were just dialects of the same language). > Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era. FWIW most of the Icelandic material mostly mentions Norwegians as Vikings too but that probably mostly has to do with geography. > But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions Those are good points. Thank you for sharing them. Perhaps the question is how we define a cultural community worth preserving. What you describe is not something I like. Again, I think the old idea was one of concentric circles, centered on the household (while Aristotle was the first to articulate it, my sense as a global traveller is that it is a very pervasive traditional model). So the question is what we do about it ;-)

vidarh 13y ago

With this you directly contradict your earlier claim that: > Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish? Whether or not one agrees with your claim that pre-nation state forms of group loyalty or tribalism were equivalent to nationalism, you here yourself divorce the existence of traditions of local governance from your interpretation of nationalism ("The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.") The point is that culture and governance are not implicitly linked, and did not used to be. Contrary to your implication in the quoted part that the lack of nationalism would be a treat to survival of local culture, on the contrary, the rise of modern nationalism has had a substantial effect in threatening many cultures. A lot of nation states have explicitly set out to eradicate alternative cultures. Witness the Turkish state long held insistence that there were no such thing as Kurds, for example - just "mountain Turks" - and the number of states that at various times have outlawed the teaching of minority languages (including, again, Turkey) or even mentioning the minority (I knew a Turkish journalist in Norway as an asylum seeker because he had received death threats from the Turkish government because he was writing about the plight of the Kurds). In Norway too, since you bring up Scandinavia and I'm Norwegian, a lot of modern culture are constructs of modern nationalism: Our two official languages are both artificial and recent - one constructed as an amalgamation of dialects spoken around the country, and one constructed largely from Danish, and are increasingly pushing local dialects aside. Around Oslo, for example, many kids are not even aware that their speech has elements of old distinct dialects, and no effort is made to preserve them (note that I am not arguing that they should be preserved - I don't particular care about the preservation of such dialects). Unlike in most English speaking languages, the government even dictates the vocabulary and the rules of the language. Most of the mythos and trappings of the Norwegian national identify date from ~1800 onwards, especially as constructions of the Norwegian national romanticism movement from the 1840's onwards. This modern Norwegian culture that arose as a result is largely the result of a local elite that stimulated and utilised this nationalism as a means of asserting power and/or making their local seats more prominent in the face of a government in Copenhagen that had for hundreds of years let Norway remain a under-developed backwater. First in trying to gain independence in 1814 when Denmark-Norway was sufficiently weakened by having been on the losing side of the Napoleonic Wars, and they managed to get recognition for our constitution, and then again to build popular support for full independence from Sweden after we were handed over to Sweden as a "price" to the Swedes for supporting the victors. Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era. The lyrics to our national anthem even is one long national romantic representation of a myth of some thousand year tradition of a unified Norwegian nation. So not only is nationalism not a pre-requisite for protecting culture - it has been a major driver for steamrollering older local cultures over the last century in particular. But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions

einhverfr 13y ago
I am not sure they do contradict. In the Middle Ages, for example, there was a significant amount of local governance and more continuity from baron to baron than from king to king. States as we might think of them might vary, and people might in theory owe allegiance to different crowns, but the overall nationhood was still closely connected to local governance. Personally I see the loss of local dialects in Europe (which is happening many places to various degrees, sometimes with government help, sometimes without) with a great degree of sadness. It used to be that you could walk from Amsterdam to Munich and never encounter a line where the dialects on one side were unintellible to those on the others, because the various sound shifts existed as gradients rather than hard boundaries (raising the question of whether Dutch, Low German, and High German were just dialects of the same language). > Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era. FWIW most of the Icelandic material mostly mentions Norwegians as Vikings too but that probably mostly has to do with geography. > But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions Those are good points. Thank you for sharing them. Perhaps the question is how we define a cultural community worth preserving. What you describe is not something I like. Again, I think the old idea was one of concentric circles, centered on the household (while Aristotle was the first to articulate it, my sense as a global traveller is that it is a very pervasive traditional model). So the question is what we do about it ;-)