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 t

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 ;-)