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Copyright SAGE Publications 2008 (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Signapore and Washington DC) 1468-7968 Vol 8(4): 536576; 088925 DOI:10.1177/1468796808088925 http://etn.sagepub.com

Everyday nationhood
JON E. FOX
University of Bristol, UK

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS
New York University, USA

INTRODUCTION
Contrary to the predictions of some, neither the proliferation of supranational forms of governance, the ascendancy of free market principles of global capitalism, nor expanding ows of transnational migration have unseated the nation state as the dominant form of political organization in the world today. From violent secessionist movements in the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union to a growing backlash against immigration and multiculturalism in Europe and North America, nationalism and its xenophobic correlates continue to ourish in and adapt to a changing world. Nationalism is the project to make the political unit, the state (or polity) congruent with the cultural unit, the nation. Attempts to accomplish this congruence have been studied from a variety of macro-analytical perspectives. Nationalism has been examined as a political ideology holding that each state should have its nation and each nation its state; as the historically contingent outcome of modernizing and industrializing economic forces that bring the state into alignment with the nation; as a cultural construct of collective belonging realized and legitimated through institutional and discursive practices; and as a site for material and symbolic struggles over the denition of national inclusion and exclusion. The targets of these endeavours are the people themselves: to make the nation is to make people national. Through the promotion of standardized languages, national (and nationalist) educational curricula, military conscription and taxation and the more nefarious methods of war, forced

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assimilation, expulsion and extermination the nation, or people, are made one with their state. Nationalism recasts the mosaic of diverse peoples within the boundaries of the state (or polity) into a uniform and unied national whole; it turns, as Eugen Weber (1976) put it,peasants into Frenchmen. Yet while there is consensus that nationalism is a mass phenomenon, the masses have been curiously missing from much of the scholarship (Whitmeyer, 2002). The focus on the political, economic and cultural determinants of popular nationalism has not systematically accounted for the popularity of nationalism. Rather, the people in whose names nations are being made are simply assumed to be attuned to the national content of their self-appointed nationalist messengers. Nationhood from this perspective resonates evenly and unwaveringly among the people; the nation is a fait accompli. The nation, however, is not simply the product of macro-structural forces; it is simultaneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaging in routine activities. Eric Hobsbawm (1991: 10) acknowledges that while nationalism is . . . constructed essentially from above, [it] . . . cannot be understood unless also analyzed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist. Recently there has been increased interest in the ways in which nationhood is negotiated and reproduced and sometimes undermined and subverted (Herzfeld, 1997) in everyday life (Billig, 1995; Edensor, 2002, 2006). These approaches do not dispute the popular resonance of nationhood; to the contrary, they describe the ways in which nations (and peoples attachments to them) have become a taken-for-granted part of the landscape of things (Billig, 1995: 38; Edensor, 2002: 88). But the general ways in which nationhood can resonate do not account for the specic ways in which nationhood actually does resonate to the extent it does so at all (Thompson, 2001: 28). Rather than deducing the quotidian meaning and salience of nationalism from its political and cultural privileging, our aim in this article is to develop a research agenda for examining the actual practices through which ordinary people engage and enact (and ignore and deect) nationhood and nationalism in the varied contexts of their everyday lives.1 Following Hobsbawm, we examine nationalism from below. Our examination considers four ways in which nationhood is produced and reproduced in everyday life.2 First, we explore the ways in which the nation as a discursive construct is constituted and legitimated not (only) in response to elite dictates but also according to the contingencies of everyday life. This is talking the nation: the discursive construction of the nation through routine talk in interaction. Second, we turn to the ways in which nationhood frames the choices people make. This is choosing the nation: nationhood as it is implicated in the decisions ordinary people

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make. Third, we explore the everyday meanings and invocations of national symbols. This is performing the nation: the production of national sensibilities through the ritual enactment of symbols. Fourth, we examine national distinction in the mundane tastes and preferences of ordinary people. This is consuming the nation: the constitution and expression of national difference through everyday consumption habits. Our survey of these four modalities of everyday nationalism sheds light on some of the ways in which ordinary people are active participants in the quotidian production and reproduction of the nation. But while these approaches give us a better idea of what everyday nationalism is, they dont provide consensus on how everyday nationalism should be studied. In the nal portion of the article, we draw on these diverse traditions to elaborate our own methodological agenda for the empirically grounded investigation of the nation in everyday life. Our aim is to operationalize a research strategy for uncovering both the micro-processes and macro-dynamics of nationhood as it is invoked and evoked by its everyday practitioners.

TALKING THE NATION

How, then, does the nation become a meaningful idiom in everyday life? For one, people talk about it. They make discursive claims for, about and in the name of the nation. As Craig Calhoun (1997: 5) points out, nations are constituted largely by [these] claims themselves, by the way of talking and thinking and acting that relies on these sorts of claims to produce collective identity, to mobilize people for collective projects, and to evaluate peoples and practices. The nation, in this view, is a discursive construct. Discourse analytical approaches to the study of nationalism emphasize the ways in which understandings of nationhood are engaged, constituted and propagated through discursive acts (Dijk, 1984; Wetherell and Potter, 1992; Wodak et al., 1999). These discursive acts are not simply descriptive of social reality; they are simultaneously constitutive of that reality, willing into existence that which they name (Bourdieu, 1991: 223). Much of the scholarship has focused on the important role elites play in articulating and propagating visions of the nation that have the potential to both resonate with and shape popular perceptions of the nation (Suny and Kennedy, 2001; Verdery, 1991). But the actual degree to which these elite depictions are appropriated by ordinary people (to the extent they are so at all) has received less scholarly attention. Parallel to this, there has been increasing interest in the ways the nation is discursively invoked and constituted by ordinary people. This talk does not simply follow the stylized contours of elite discourse; rather, it responds to the logics, imperatives and concerns of the everyday contexts in which it is embedded. This scholarship

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does not take elite discourse as its starting point but examines the ways in which ordinary people talk about and with the nation in ways that matter to them.

Talking about the nation

Scholars recently have begun asking ordinary people what the nation means to them (Miller-Idriss, 2006; Thompson and Day, 1999; Wodak et al., 1999). Using qualitative interviewing techniques, researchers are beginning to capture ordinary peoples previously unrecorded articulations of the nation, national identity and national belonging. Findings reveal that these peoples representations of the nation do not simply mimic those variants traded in elite discourse, but more often resonate with the currents and rhythms of their everyday concerns and predicaments. Miller-Idrisss (forthcoming) interviews with young working-class Germans in vocational schools showed how their discursive claims of national pride departed from, and at times explicitly challenged, ofcial sanctions against expressions of German national sentiment. Andrew Thompson and Graham Day (1999) interviewed ordinary people in Wales to reveal the mundane ways in which they gave discursive content to their understandings of Welshness. And in Austria, Ruth Wodak and colleagues (1999) assembled focus groups and conducted in-depth interviews to show how ordinary Austrians constructed national understandings of themselves with reference to immigration issues, Austrias Nazi past, and the European Union. Michael Billig (1995) has observed how nationhood often operates at the level of unselfconscious disposition (what Edensor (2002: Chapter 3) terms, after Bourdieu, national habitus). Discourse analytical approaches to the study of nationalism, in contrast, draw attention to the ways in which nationhood can also be creatively and self-consciously deployed and manipulated by ordinary people. In this view, nationhood is not (only) lurking in the crevices of the unconscious, furtively informing talk without becoming the subject of talk; it is simultaneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary people giving concrete expression to their understandings of the nation. Nationhood does not only dene their talk; it is dened by their talk. In these ways, ordinary people give discursive shape and content to their otherwise taken-for-granted understandings of the nation. Implicit nationhood is made explicit through interviews and focus groups, shedding light on the processes through which nationhood is discursively constructed. Understandings of the nation cloaked by the fog of commonsense or obscured by the traumas of history are teased out by skilled researchers. These studies reveal the importance of shifting the analytical focus to ordinary people as active producers and not just passive consumers of national discourse.

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Talking with the nation

But this practical capacity to talk nationally does not, in itself, explain how such talk occurs spontaneously (to the extent it does so at all) in the course of peoples everyday lives. When called upon, ordinary people can call forth and articulate their more-or-less taken-for-granted assumptions about what the nation means to them. But when are they called upon? Just because people can talk about the nation doesnt mean that they do. While discourse analytical approaches are useful for appreciating the everyday contents of the nation, they have less to say about locating its everyday contexts. National catastrophes, wars and, not least of all (see later), international sporting events, provide important contexts for everyday articulations of the nation. Ordinary people recognize, interpret and align themselves with pressing issues in explicitly national terms. But most of the time, the nation is not something ordinary people talk about; rather, its something they talk with. This is the nation not as the object of talk but rather as an unselfconscious disposition about the national order of things that intermittently informs talk. The nation in this sense is a way of seeing, doing, talking and being that posits and sometimes enacts the unproblematic and naturalizing partition of the world into discrete ethnocultural units (Brubaker, 2004). It is not (only) a topic of talk, but also a culturally available schema that can be discursively deployed to make sense of other topics of talk, explain predicaments and order social difference (Gamson, 1992). When national frames are discursively invoked, social actors become national actors, diverse phenomena become national phenomena and everyday stories become national stories. The nation does not resonate evenly across time or space; it comes to matter in certain ways at particular times for different people. The question thus shifts from what is the nation? to when is the nation?.3 When in what situations does the category of nation become a salient frame for routine talk and interaction? The answer, it turns out, is not very often. Most of the time nationhood does not frame peoples understanding of themselves, their interactions or their predicaments. Take the example of Cornel, a Romanian university student in the Hungarian-minority town of Cluj, Romania. Cornel explained how it was a year before he realized his friend, S oni, was Hungarian. He didnt have an accent at all, he explained. In the rst year I knew him, I didnt know he was Hungarian. I knew his name was S oni, and so I said to him, . . . S oni, do you speak Hungarian, yeah, I speak Hungarian, . . . but he had only Romanian friends. . . . It was a year before I gured out he was Hungarian. His brother teased him: After a year, he comes out with maybe hes Hungarian . . .. By speaking unaccented Romanian, socializing in nationally unmarked ways, and not explicitly advertising his Hungarianness, S oni [Sanyi in Hungarian] remained ethnonationally invisible to Cornel. It wasnt that S oni wasnt

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Hungarian. He was. It was that his Hungarianness hadnt been an experientially salient feature of his interactions with Cornel (Fox, 2004b: 11561; see Richard Jenkins (1997: 56) distinction between nominal and virtual identities). Since nationhood does not dene peoples experiences of all interactions all the time, the everyday contexts in which it is discursively invoked by ordinary people need to be identied. Brubaker et al.s (2006) ethnography of Cluj, Romania traced the ways interactions between friends, neighbours, classmates and colleagues momentarily become ethnic or interethnic interactions. Gerd Baumanns (1996) ethnography of immigrants in a workingclass London neighbourhood similarly depicted how local understandings of community took shape according to the logics and rhythms of everyday life. And in Hungary, labour migration provided the context for ethnic Hungarian migrant workers from Romania to articulate and elaborate new forms of belonging that distinguished themselves nationally from their hosts of the same name (Fox, 2007). Studies like these have situated the discursive enactment and construction of nationhood in the routine contexts of everyday life. But contexts are not only understood as domains of daily activity; they also include the more eeting micro-interactional and discursive moments that happen intermittently in the course of these activities. Recently, a growing body of research has pointed to the ways in which language and other audible and visual cues trigger an awareness of category membership through everyday interaction. Earlier, Cornel remarked that S oni didnt have an accent at all. Had he an accent (or had he simply spoken Hungarian in the rst place), S oni may very well have become more transparently Hungarian to Cornel. In contexts where language is taken as a criterion of ethnonationality, linguistic conventions such as accent, intonation and syntax can signal ethnonational membership (Giles, 1979: 2559; Gumperz, 1982: 323). Gbor, another Hungarian studying at the Technical University, reported how his poor Romanian competency marked him as Hungarian to his Romanian classmates. They knew, everybody knew I was Hungarian, it was impossible not to know I was Hungarian, he insisted. They could gure it out right away from how poorly I spoke Romanian . . . it was as if I had been black. Hes Hungarian . . . that was completely obvious to everyone. While S onis/Sanyis awless Romanian concealed his Hungarianness, Gbors accented Romanian revealed his own Hungarianness.4 To be sure, most of the time, language communicates information other than nationality. But there are certain contexts when the choice of language being spoken, or the way it is spoken, communicates membership in an ethnonational community. In Catalonia, Kathryn Woolard (1989) has shown how routine shifts between Spanish and Catalan make ethnic afliations momentarily transparent in everyday interactions. Similarly, Monica

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Hellers research from Quebec (1999) has revealed how spoken French is both deployed and perceived as constitutive of Frenchness. And Katharine Jones (2001) has examined how English people living in the USA develop strategies for self-consciously deploying English accents to preserve and advertise their Englishness to others. These discursive strategies and linguistic conventions make nationhood momentarily salient in everyday talk and interaction. They turn nominally interethnic interactions into experientially interethnic interactions. This is nationhood as it is meaningfully embodied, expressed and sometimes performed in the routine contexts of everyday life. The nation as a discursive construct is reproduced not only through direct discursive engagement, but also as it is implicated tangentially through talk and interaction. It is the practical accomplishment of ordinary people talking about themselves and their surroundings in ways that implicate and reproduce a national view of the world (Fox, 2004a). These are the micro-settings for the invocation and reproduction of nationhood in everyday life.

CHOOSING THE NATION

Nationhood is also implicated in the choices people make. People choose the nation when the universe of options is dened in national terms. Reading a nationalist newspaper or sending ones child to a minoritylanguage school can thus be dened and experienced as national choices. Nationhood can also be the contingent outcome of other (non-national) choices. Thus, choosing (or approving) marriage partners or socializing with friends, while not necessarily explicitly national, can structure the trajectories of future choices in ways that reinforce nationhood as a salient idiom of belonging.

Making national choices

There is a growing body of scholarship on the ways in which institutions and their organizational logics shape experience (Brinton and Nee, 1998; Powell and DiMaggio, 1991). Institutions organized according to national logics legitimate and propagate a national view of the world (Brubaker, 1996). From nationally dened schools in Wales and Quebec to self-government in Catalonia and South Tyrol, educational, media, governmental, cultural, religious and other institutions can be formally or informally arranged according to national logics. These institutions present those who encounter them with a menu of nationally dened options. In Transylvania, for instance, Hungarian minority schools and (de facto) churches operate alongside their Romanian majority counterparts. Decisions about whether

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to send ones child to a Hungarian school or to get married in a Romanian Orthodox church can thus confront mothers and fathers and husbands and wives with opportunities to momentarily (if not durably) become Romanian and Hungarian. National belonging is implicated and sometimes explicitly reected upon, hashed over and debated in the institutionally mediated choices people make (Brubaker et al., 2006: 2723, 297). On the one hand, nationally dened institutions can offer their claimants symbolic rewards: the chance to be (or become) national. In some cases, choosing a national minority school for ones child can be viewed as a form of insurance against assimilation. On the other hand, institutions can also offer their claimants material rewards: the incentive to be (or become) national. In many parts of the world, nationality and ethnicity have been institutionally adopted, operationalized and legitimated as the preferred language of claims-making (Koopmans and Statham, 1999; Olzak and Nagel, 1996). Afrmative action programmes in the USA, multiculturalism in Canada and pillarization in the Netherlands have all rechristened and partitioned the social landscape as an ethnocultural landscape. In these contexts, questions of who gets what can be determined (or perceived to be determined) by who is what in ethnonational terms (see, for example, Banton, 1983). For the ordinary people encountering these institutions, national and ethnic attachments just became worth something. Institutional congurations that offer material rewards according to national or ethnic criteria encourage their claimants to view nationality or ethnicity as a resource that can be strategically deployed (or concealed or manipulated) to secure access to these rewards. Thus, the reconguration of political opportunity structures according to ethnoracial criteria in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s encouraged and even (re-)invented Native American as a materially (and ultimately symbolically) viable category of belonging (Nagel, 1996). In the Baltics following the collapse of the Soviet Union, legislation that made language a criterion of citizenship compelled ethnic minority Russians to recalculate the benets of learning the titular languages of the countries in which they lived (Laitin, 1998). And in Romania, admissions quotas for ethnic minority students at the multicultural Babes-Bolyai University invited applicants to consider and claim minority status to improve their chances of admission (Fox, 2004b). By literally (or guratively) ticking boxes, people choose ethnonationality, momentarily invoking it and making it materially salient. Categories of belonging that may have had little symbolic signicance can nevertheless become materially consequential when linked to the politics of redistribution. This does not mean, however, that nationally marked institutions always make nationhood experientially salient. They dont. In many situations, the institutions people encounter are seen less as gateways to material (or symbolic) rewards than as simple sorting mechanisms. Krisztina, a

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Transylvanian Hungarian history student enrolled in a Hungarian line of study at her Romanian university explained that she never considered enrolling in the Romanian line. Why would I want to study in Romanian?, she asked, genuinely perplexed. Transylvania is a Hungarian region, Hungarian is my native language, I know Hungarian . . . better than [Romanian], so? After having attended exclusively Hungarian minority schools all her life, Krisztina did not choose to continue her studies at the university in Hungarian. Rather, she chose to study history. It was selfevident that such choices would be made within an institutionally prescribed Hungarian universe (Fox, 2004b: 878; see also Brubaker et al., 2006: 27273). Choosing a minority school can thus be like choosing a toilet the signs on the doors tell people where to go. In this sense, choosing is hardly a choice: its unreective, automatic. Nationhood operates as an unselfconscious disposition: it underwrites peoples choices without becoming a selfconscious determinant of those choices (Bourdieu, 1977: 166; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977: 5467; see also Foucaults (1995[1977]: 17784) notion of normalization). To conceal nationhood in this way, however, is not to enfeeble it. Rather, institutions powerfully reinforce their national logics by reproducing nationhood as a taken-for-granted xture of the social world (Billig, 1995: 3742). Nationhood denes the parameters, but not the content, of peoples choices.

Making choices national

Institutions do not only structure choices at the point of entry; they also mediate subsequent choices that occur inside and outside of their connes. Friendship and partner choices can be deeply structured according to the logics of the institutions in which people are embedded. Nationally delineated institutions thus make nationhood a powerful but mostly invisible parameter of social relations by offering a template for the formation and reproduction of social relations according to their national logics (Brubaker et al., 2006: 2735). They shape social relations by proscribing the limits and rules of interaction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; see also Bourdieu, 1977: 1647; Foucault, 1995[1977]: 17784). In nationally circumscribed universes, then, choices are usually made according to non-national criteria. Emese, a classmate of Krisztina introduced above, did not choose to socialize at the university with other Hungarians because they were Hungarian. She chose them because they were there. Friendship choices were ordered according to other criteria: boys and girls in the rst place, she explained, then . . . shared interests, like theres this girl Im good friends with because we like the same kinds of lms, we go to the same lectures, we have lots of things in common. In nationally dened institutions, people dont have to choose friends on the

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basis of national afnity because the institutions, in effect, do it for them (Fox, 2004b: 11316). Nationhood does not experientially frame friendship choices; rather it is the contingent outcome of unselfconscious choices mediated by nationally dened institutions (see, e.g. Tilly, 1998: 7983). Peoples choices can thus become important occasions for the enactment and reproduction of national sensibilities. When ordinary people encounter institutions displaying national menus of options, nationhood can become an experientially salient frame for the choices they make. When these same people are already embedded in nationally circumscribed institutions, nationhood silently structures the logic of subsequent choices they make. This is nationhood not only as the practical accomplishment of peoples national ponderings, but also as the contingent (yet durable) outcome of other institutionally mediated choices. Nationhood shapes, and is shaped by, peoples choices.

PERFORMING THE NATION

Nationhood is also given symbolic meaning in the ritual performances of everyday (and not-so-everyday) life. Symbols are the cultural ciphers through which meanings are assigned to phenomena and attachments made between people and things (Geertz, 1973: 216). National symbols ags, anthems, statues and landmarks are neatly packaged distillations of the nation: they are the linchpins that connect people to the nation (Cerulo, 1995; Smith, 1986). Rituals provide occasions for the visual and audible realization of these symbolic attachments. Through the choreographed exhibition and collective performance of national symbols, those in attendance are united in the transitory awareness of heightened national cohesion. The electricity of the crowd, momentarily subsuming the individual to the collective, generates the experience of collective effervescence (Durkheim, 1995[1912]: 21718; see also Turners (1969: 1326, 153) notion of spontaneous communitas). While such experiences of exultation are necessarily infrequent and ephemeral, their impact on the national sensibilities of the ordinary people who engage in them can be more durable. This is everyday life characterized not by its banality, but rather by the ordinary individuals who people it. Indeed, these events do not belong to the realm of the ordinary; rather, by denition, they are extraordinary events. They occur infrequently, punctuating the monotony of life at regular, xed intervals as contrived occasions for the crystallization of national awareness (Mosse, 1975). Public spaces adorned with the symbolic accoutrements of the nation ags, banners, songs and speeches provide explicitly national parameters to facilitate the organization and experience of national solidarities (on the integrative function of symbols and rituals, see

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Turner, 1967, pp. 22, 4850). Songs sung, chants chanted, banners unfurled and ags waved, all in unison, make the bonds that join one another momentarily visible and audible (Cerulo, 1995). By expressing the social unity tangibly, Durkheim (1995[1912]: 2312) explains:
it makes the unit itself more tangible to all . . . [F]or the emblem is not only a convenient method of clarifying the awareness the society has of itself: It serves to create and is a constitutive element of that awareness . . . It is by shouting the same cry, saying the same words, performing the same action in regard to the same object that they arrive at and experience agreement.

National bonds dont simply become transparent through their ritual performance; they are constituted through the collective act of performance. Whether through the sacred liturgical observances staged by the Nazis at Nuremberg (Mosse, 1975), the elaborately orchestrated dramas performed by Italian Fascists in Rome (Berezin, 1997), the festive pageantry of Soviet baton twirlers and nuclear missiles parading through Red Square (Petrone, 2000), or simply the ritual reworks and backyard barbecues celebrating the Fourth of July in the USA (Spillman, 1997), national holiday commemorations are key sites for the afrmation and reafrmation of national bonds.

Mixed messages
But the explicitly national designs of these public performances do not, in themselves, ensure the generation of explicitly national solidarities. Most of the scholarship on national symbols and the rituals that deliver them has focused on their elite production. Yet the actual ways in which the meanings of these symbols are consumed perceived, interpreted, negotiated and constituted by those in attendance does not unambiguously follow from their elite designs. The national messages conveyed by symbols are mixed if not missed altogether (Kolst, 2006). They are mixed because symbols are inherently multivocal and multivalent: they mean different things to different people at different times. While the state or polity may have the upper hand in afxing national meanings to symbols, both their meanings and valences remain subject to negotiation and reinterpretation by their receiving audiences. People are not just consumers of national meanings; they are simultaneously their contingent producers. The meanings and uses ordinary people make of national holiday commemorations cannot be simply deduced from the intentions of their architects (Kligman, 1983). To what extent do Fourth of July celebrations in the USA engender the sort of collective effervescence described by Durkheim? Are the principles of libert, galit and fraternit experienced and constituted by the ordinary French citizens attending Bastille Day commemorations? The nationalist passions of the multitudes are not always

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ignited by national holiday commemorations. Rather, such events often become occasions for family outings or consumer spending rather than the public afrmation of national pride. The national symbols adorning these commemorations are viewed by many as commercialized accessories, denuded of their ofcially sanctioned national venerability. In other parts of the world, ofcial commemorations become sites for protest and struggle. Flag-waving is replaced by ag-burning as the cherished symbols of the nation are inverted and subverted by would-be revolutionaries. These unintended uses of national symbols undermine their ability to generate the unambiguous experience of national allegiances (Fox, 2006: 22122). This is not to suggest that national solidarities are no longer publicly performed. The venue, however, has changed. While collective attachments are not typically generated on the stage of national commemorations, they are on the pitch of international sporting competitions. Indeed, in many countries, its sports not holidays that capture the (national) imagination and inspire the (national) passions of the masses. Shifting the analytical focus from the producers of national symbols to their everyday consumers entails a concomitant search for the sites where those symbols are wielded and manipulated by ordinary people. The international proles of World Cup football, the Olympics and other international sporting competitions provide explicitly national parameters for the organization and experience of collective belonging. Fans display their loyalties to their team by borrowing the symbolic repertoire of their respective nations the ags, the anthems, the colours and even the myths. Ordinary people who might otherwise show little interest in their national attachments are nonetheless capable of displaying their allegiances at sporting competitions with passion. The dramatic unfurling of national ags and poignant singing of national anthems at the medal ceremonies of the Olympics can bring tears to the eyes of adulating fans. God Bless America, sung during the seventh inning stretch of baseball games, generated similar responses among some of the post-9/11 crowds. And the exuberance of fans saluting their teams at World Cup matches is unrivalled. Indeed, in these and other cases, fans momentarily become the physical embodiment of the nation. Singing the same songs, chanting the same chants and responding to the rhythms of the competitions in unison with their faces painted, ags draped over their shoulders, and their t-shirts, scarves and jackets emblazoned in the national colours these fans physically encapsulate and communicate national allegiances. Sports are able to succeed where holidays fail due in part to the drama inherent in competition (Elias and Dunning, 1986: 408). This drama keeps those in attendance xated on the action as it unfolds, providing them with a common focus (conveniently dressed in national colours) for their collective engagement. As Eric Hobsbawm (1991: 143) observed: The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people;

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the football team exemplies and concretizes the nation (see also Eriksen, 1993: 1011). And through television, the boundaries of this imagined community extend far beyond the connes of sporting stadiums. Transxed to their screens in bars and living rooms around the world, fans everywhere experience excitement, tension, hope and dejection at precisely the same moments. These shared experiences unite them in a spatially dispersed community virtually connected through television and temporally bounded by the duration of the competition (Moores, 1993: 868). This is the nationalism that attracts the masses.

Missed messages
But neither sporting competitions nor holiday commemorations can claim the loyalties of those who simply dont show up or tune in to them. National holiday commemorations tend to inspire more scholarly investigation than popular participation; and sports produce and reproduce a heavily masculine version of the nation. The meanings of national symbols on parade at these events are simply missed by large segments of their potential audiences. No matter how carefully orchestrated or creatively manipulated, national holidays and sporting events can only engender solidarities for those who are physically or virtually present. Even the most impressive symbols ensconced in statues, monuments and landmarks vary in their ability to attract attention (Brubaker et al., 2006: 1456). When new, such symbols might capture the public imagination, instilling people with a sense of national pride. After 9/11, there was an explosion of ags (and patriotic fervour) across the USA. Flags (already a prevalent feature of the American national landscape) proliferated like never before, hanging from front porches, afxed to car windows, pasted on billboards and stitched into clothing. For a time, it was impossible not to notice this explosion of red, white and blue. But only for a time. As time passed, the extraordinary became assimilated into the ordinary, and the American consciousness absorbed these changes as a part of a new standard in ag bearing. Their colours faded and their fringes frayed, symbols that once inspired national attachments become camouaged against the backdrop of the familiar. Over time, the ags became an unremarkable xture of the environment, neither requiring (nor receiving) much attention. Once impossible to ignore, the ags now became impossible to notice. Symbols like these miss their mark. Unseen, unheard and unnoticed, symbols do not and cannot generate national attachments. But this does not in itself render them ineffective. Indeed, there are relatively few moments when ags are exuberantly waved, monuments solemnly venerated and national anthems proudly sung. Most of the time, symbols draw their power in other more invisible (if not invidious) ways. Flags hanging limply from buildings and monuments as inconspicuous as trees or lampposts are

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effective not because they attract attention but because they dont attract attention. These symbols stealthily concoct and legitimate a world of nations without inviting critical engagement. [N]ational identity in established nations is remembered, Michael Billig (1995: 38) explains:
because it is embedded in routines of life, which constantly remind, or ag, nationhood . . . [T]hese reminders, or aggings, are so numerous and they are such a familiar part of the social environment, that they operate mindlessly, rather than mindfully. The remembering, not being experienced as remembering, is, in effect, forgotten.

Flags thus dont have to be saluted or waved to work their national magic. The near complete assimilation of nationhood into the realm of the ordinary not its sporadic or spectacular invocations testies to its prosaic power. Some rituals also belong to this realm of the ordinary. Flag ceremonies or school prayers, for instance, are occasions not for the heightened experience of national belonging but for the veiled reproduction of national sensibilities (Kolst, 2006: 6778). The pledge of allegiance that starts the school day in classrooms across the USA relies neither on reworks nor amboyance but rather on the unthinking and unquestioned performance of the nation (Rippberger and Staudt, 2003). The daily repetition of this ritualized national text does not and indeed cannot inspire the experience of collective effervescence. Rather, its dull, rote repetition, performed mindlessly and dispassionately, is a national genuection, instilling in the pupils taken-for-granted loyalties to the abstract notion of the nation. Its effectiveness is measured not in moments but in lifetimes. There are many ways in which national symbols intersect with the lives of ordinary people, from the extraordinary to the ordinary, from the obvious to the oblivious, from the profound to the prosaic. Much of the scholarship on national symbols and their ritual platforms, however, has focused either on their formal properties or elite production. To understand symbols popular meaning and resonance, the lens needs to be refocused on the ordinary people who engage and interpret and ignore and deect them (Fox, 2006; Zubrzycki, 2006).

CONSUMING THE NATION

Nations are not natural or enduring givens, but politically contested and historically contingent social constructs. They are the products (and in some cases unintended consequences) of various standardizing, universalizing, bureaucratizing and culturally indoctrinating processes more or less coordinated by states and their agents. National holidays, as we have just seen, are

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produced and performed to induce and reproduce national solidarities. Museums present a more static display of the nation, assembling people, places and events of the nation into a coherent national narrative to be viewed, learned, remembered and venerated (Anderson, 1991; Zubrzycki, 2006). State-run media also play a key role in the production of national ideologies and the dissemination of national ideas (Moores, 1997). And schools are perhaps the most important sites for developing and transmitting the content and contours of the nation (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Weber, 1976). Their ofcially sanctioned curricula, conveniently packaged in textbooks, displayed in national emblems and performed in ritual practices, inculcate the students with the values, myths and norms of the nation (Hahn, 1998; Soysal and Schissler, 2005). Taken together, these more or less coordinated efforts of the state give narrative structure, internal coherence and emotional weight to the nation. Nationalism, in this sense, is an act of production. But who then are its consumers? While nationalists throughout history have viewed the people as the ultimate repository of national values and the bearers of national traditions, the people have not always viewed themselves in the same way. Ordinary people are not simply uncritical consumers of the nation; they are simultaneously its creative producers through everyday acts of consumption (Billig, 1995; Edensor, 2002; Foster, 2002; Palmer, 1998). Yet while the state-sponsored production and propagation of the nation have been well documented, less attention has been focused on the precise ways in which these national products and projects are received and consumed by the people at whom they are aimed. Consumption constitutes, reinforces and communicates social membership: it makes visible and stable the categories of culture (Douglas and Isherwood, 1996[1976]: 38; see more generally 3652). Various studies have explored how such diverse axes of social differentiation ranging from class (Bourdieu, 1984[1979]) and gender (Ang, 1985) to race (Lamont and Molnr, 2001) and national belonging (Foster, 2002; Edensor, 2002) are constructed and concretized through the routine consumption practices of everyday life. This is not the collective effervescence evinced through ritual performance, but rather the quotidian experience of sameness a vague self-awareness of shared dispositions that materialize through consumption (see Edensor, 2002: Chapter 3). We shift our attention here to this consumption side of the equation.

Consuming national products

Some products are conceived, designed and disseminated as more or less national products. The ag is not just a symbol of the nation; it is also a thing that can be bought and sold, copied and distributed. It can be hung from agpoles or windows, draped over shoulders or cofns, stitched into jackets

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or baseball caps and stuck on to car bumpers or envelopes. This is the commodication of the nation: national (and nationalist) literature, media, music, costumes and food provide people with nationally marked (or markable) products for their national consumption needs. In the postSoviet context, Melissa Caldwell (2002) has shown how ordinary people have reclaimed and rearticulated their Russianness through the consumption of what is seen (and therefore constituted) as Russian food. Their consumption preferences and practices become everyday sites for defending and dening the socialist values of Russian nationalism against the onslaught of global capitalism (Caldwell, 2002: 30513). Consumers dont simply buy national commodities; they constitute national sensibilities, embody national pride, negotiate national meanings, thus making nationhood a salient feature of their everyday lives. Consumption doesnt only occur only at the cash register. School curricula the preferred purveyors of national (and sometimes nationalist) meanings, myths and memories are also consumed and imbibed (and sometimes deected and subverted) by pupils in classrooms around the world. Students are not merely passive receptacles of nationalist messages, nor are their teachers their unquestioning conduits (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1993). Rather, as Miller-Idriss (forthcoming) has demonstrated in the German case, both students and teachers are active participants in the creative interpretation and constitution of understandings of nationhood that may bear little resemblance to those packaged in ofcial curricula. Media that are national in scope, content and/or format can also contribute to the activation and reinforcement of national sensitivities. Readers of nationalist newspapers and viewers of cultural programming are not only aligning themselves with their putative nations but actively interpreting and expressing the meaning of those alignments. And nationally marked and decorated spaces and places public squares, national landmarks and entire regions (Lfgren, 1989; Molnr, 2005) can similarly be seen, appreciated and therefore consumed in ways that highlight and privilege national attachments. Joshua Hagen (2004) has shown how the medieval German town of Rothenburg was transformed and contrived as the epitome of Germanness in the 1930s. Local residents became actively engaged in the production and consumption of their own exalted values of Teutonic cleanliness, order and beauty (Hagen, 2004: 21418). The commodication of the nation supplies ordinary people with moreor-less nationally marked products whose consumption can engender and reinforce a national view of the world (Edensor, 2002: 1089). Through shopping and tourism, school lessons and television viewing, ordinary people make a national world visible to themselves and, potentially, those around them. The consumption of these national artefacts denes, demonstrates, and afrms the consumers national afnities. It marks the products and the people who consume them nationally.

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Consuming products nationally

The consumption of products with explicitly national contents and parameters can help make nationhood a meaningful feature of everyday life. But intrinsically national products do not always engender explicitly national sensibilities. Literary gures that may be cherished as national treasures by their compatriots might simultaneously enjoy cosmopolitan reputations in international circles. Music that might be celebrated as evoking the national heritage of some nations might appeal to amazon.com shoppers as world music (Haynes, 2005). And food that might be a favourite national dish for some might simply be lunch for others. Indeed, while nationally minded consumers give expression to their national sensibilities through the consumption and display of their own national artefacts, others consume the same artefacts, rechristened world culture, to demonstrate and perform their (ostensible) cosmopolitanism. It is not the intrinsic properties of these products but rather the shifting modalities through which meaning is attached to them that distinguishes national consumption from other forms of consumption. The focus in the literature on consumption of cultural artefacts with seemingly national qualities overlooks the extent to which consumption is simultaneously itself an act of production. The consumption of non-national products in nationally distinct ways can thus also engender national distinctions. Indeed, even the most global products can be subject to local appropriation in different, sometimes national, ways. Daniel Miller (1998), for instance, has shown how the consumption of Coca-Cola, the symbol of globalization par excellence, is appropriated by African and Indian Trinidadians to construct and maintain local ethnic and racial distinctions. In Scandinavia, Anders Linde-Laursen (1993) has shown how washing up becomes an everyday site for ordinary Danes and Swedes to perform and produce national difference. And Daphne Berdahl (1999) has examined how east Germans have been incrementally purchasing Germanness (in its western variant) through their appropriation and emulation of postcommunist patterns of consumption. Public spaces can also become endowed with national meaning not only through the intentions of their architects but also through the interpretations of their everyday users. Restaurants, bars and cafs become national hangouts through practice rather than design; squares, parks, buildings and neighbourhoods similarly get marked in ways that can make nationhood a salient feature of those who encounter them. In multiethnic Romania, certain establishments are seen and therefore marked as Hungarian, not by the signs hanging in front of them but rather through the everyday consumption practices of their Hungarian clientele (Brubaker et al., 2006: 296). And years after reunication in Germany, the internal design and organization of police stations in Berlin mark them unambiguously as

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eastern and western to the ofcers who inhabit them (Glaeser, 1999). The preferences and practices of spatial consumption mark and constitute the places of everyday life in nationally relevant ways. The media, too, can be nationally consumed even when theyre not national in scope, content or format. The consumption preferences of nationally delineated audiences for non-national media can engender and reinforce the experience of shared national belonging (Moores, 1997, 1993). Viewers tuned into the same broadcasts or readers ipping through the same papers acquire shared cultural competencies (Moores, 1997: 230), the boundaries of which coincide with those of the viewing or reading public. Opening the pages of the newspaper, explains Moores (1993: 87), and, we might add, switching on the news bulletin at the same time every evening . . . are ritual practices which enable us to imagine ourselves as part of a social collectivity that shares in the same anonymous, simultaneous activity (see also Anderson, 1991: 346). It makes people national, but not necessarily nationalist. In Transylvania, many Hungarians read the local Hungarian paper not for its nationalist commentary but rather for the death notices and television listings of the Hungarian community to which they see themselves (and therefore constitute themselves) as belonging (Brubaker et al., 2006: 2934). Nationally demarcated media can organize the wholly nonnational content of their audiences cultural repertoires along national lines (Storey, 1999: 11319).5 In these and other ways, it is not the inherent national qualities of the products consumed but the consumption of non-national products in nationally discernable ways that contribute to the emergence of nationally dened communities (of consumers). Shared national consciousness need not be premised on the practical mastery of the same national (or nationalist) canon; it can also congeal within parameters that are explicitly dened as national. Routine consumption practices thus become important modalities for the production of national sensibilities. They provide people with occasions for establishing, upholding and reproducing national difference in ways that follow not from elite designs but rather correspond to the contingencies of their daily lives.

CONCLUSION, OR HOW TO STUDY EVERYDAY NATIONALISM

The broad brush strokes favoured by macro-analytical approaches to the study of nationalism blur (and sometimes obscure) the ner grains of the nation that are embedded in the routine practices of everyday life. We cannot properly appreciate the variable meaning and salience of nationhood in everyday life by only studying its state-sponsored construction,

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modern industrial context or elite manipulation. This is not to suggest that everyday nationhood should be studied independently of these phenomena. But this is where our study begins; not where it ends. Nations are not just the product of structural forces; they are simultaneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaging in mundane activities in their everyday lives. We have attempted to shift attention to everyday life as a domain in its own right for the study of nationalism. This does not mean the nation pervades everyday life (cf. Billig, 1995); most of the time, it doesnt. Even in parts of the world characterized by intractable and polarizing nationalist politics, ordinary people are often indifferent to national(ist) claims made in their names (Brubaker et al., 2006; Fenton, 2007; Fox, 2004a). This popular indifference to the more stylized rhetoric peddled by politicians suggests that there is a disjuncture between nationalist politics on the one hand and the ways in which ordinary people understand and represent themselves and their predicaments in national terms on the other (Brubaker et al., 2006; Fox, 2004b; Herzfeld, 1997). Nationalism does not resonate evenly or resoundingly in everyday life. The actual ways in which the nation does come to matter to ordinary people cannot therefore be inferred from its political robustness. Our aim here has been to specify the actual practices and processes through which nationhood is reproduced in everyday life by its ordinary practitioners. We take Hobsbawms call to study nationalism from below seriously by elaborating some of these ways in which people enact, constitute, legitimate and sometimes undermine the idiom of the nation in the diverse contexts of their everyday lives. In a sense, ours is a plea to take social constructivism seriously. The nation and its derivatives are not simply discrete objects traded in elite discourse or constructed by the state; they are also everyday processes: ways of doing, seeing, talking and being that implicate, enact, ratify and uphold a national view of the world (Brubaker, 2004). But while all agree that nations are social constructs, few have operationalized empirically grounded methodological agendas to systematically uncover the ways in which ordinary people participate in this national construction. We therefore build on the approaches elaborated in the previous sections to develop and propose a methodological agenda that studies the everyday construction of the nation in its own right. In what remains, we briey consider a mixture of methods that can be fruitfully deployed to study and appreciate nationhood in everyday life. This methodological agenda is guided by two interrelated domains of enquiry. First, we ask what is the nation in everyday life? This is the nations everyday meaning and contents. Then we turn to the question, when is the nation in everyday life? This is the nations everyday salience and contexts. We consider appropriate methods for the study of each set of questions.

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What is the nation?

What, then, does the nation mean to ordinary people? We propose a methodology that looks not rst to political speeches, newspaper articles or history textbooks for the nations everyday meanings, but rather puts the questions to the audiences of the speeches, the readers of newspapers, and the pupils of history and to those who dont listen to speeches, read papers or do their history lessons. Survey research can be particularly useful in this regard. Questions about political and cultural attitudes, in-group and out-group stereotypes, and social distance scales shed light on the diversity of ways in which ordinary people understand themselves and the world around them in national terms. Surveys are effective instruments for gaining a general overview of the national sensibilities of relatively large segments of the population. Surveys are less well suited, however, for capturing variation in the nuance and texture of everyday nationhood. For this, more qualitative modes of investigation are helpful, such as interviewing and focus groups. These methods (used in conjunction with survey methods) can provide a richer and more balanced picture of the scope, depth and content of the everyday meanings of the nation. Interviews and focus groups provide researchers with opportunities for exploring ordinary peoples discursive representations of nationhood in terms chosen by the interviewee not the interviewer. They also record the sorts of non-verbalized manifestations of everyday nationhood that are missed by survey methods. The nation is not only expressed discursively; it is also embodied in non-discursive forms the shrugs, grimaces, chuckles, winces and snorts that accompany (and sometimes replace) ordinary peoples more articulate representations of nationhood. These embodied embellishments, missing from spreadsheets, can transform sincerity into cynicism, afliation into disafliation and commitment into indifference. Ordinary peoples talk (and body talk) reveals their capacity for articulating their understandings of the nation and aligning themselves with those understandings in discursive and non-discursive ways meaningful to them.

When is the nation?

But just because people can talk nationally in these research settings doesnt mean that they do talk nationally in other contexts of their everyday lives. Ordinary peoples practical mastery of the idiom of the nation, reproduced for social scientists in research settings of their own choosing, does not, in itself, explain the salience of such idioms in everyday life. Rather, it reects a basic familiarity with the content and contours of nationhood that, when elicited, can be more-or-less competently deployed. But when is it elicited? Aside from those few odd times that students of nationalism come

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knocking at the doors of ordinary people with their grab bags of national questions, when if, indeed, at all do ordinary people engage the nation and its contents? Other methods of data collection are needed as a corrective to contextualize national talk. While surveys and directed interview questioning can provide insight into what the nation means for ordinary people, they cannot, in themselves, explain when the nation matters to them. But the everyday contents of the nation cannot be properly appreciated detached from the everyday contexts in which they are invoked and evoked (Glaeser, 1999: 10, 212; see also Wimmer, 2004). Different contexts from the microinteractional to the macro-structural produce different types of talk and even substantively different views from the same people (Verkuyten et al., 1995: 2624). Directed interview and survey questioning supply people with one set of contexts for talking nationally. But such talk must simultaneously be recognized as an artefact of the research settings in which it is solicited. Nationally framed questions typically elicit nationally framed answers. Strategies that pre-emptively tag the nation as a relevant frame of interpretation are less sensitive to the larger everyday contexts in which the nation spontaneously happens to the extent it does so at all. Left to their own devices, ordinary people may simply ignore or discard national categories in favour of other categories that are more suitable for their quotidian needs and wants. We therefore propose a research agenda designed to leave people to their own devices. Rather than continually equipping interview subjects with our own national categories, we also adopt a wait-and-listen approach to see how and when nationhood comes up in the discursive and interactional contexts of everyday life. Participant observation is best suited for this sort of investigation. More than any other method, participant observation is sensitive to context not as it is supplied by the researcher but as it is constituted by ordinary people according to the contingencies of their everyday lives. Participant observation provides a window for viewing the nation in everyday life. This is the nation as it is marked in accents and codeswitching, displayed in dress and demeanour, cued by sights and sounds, and responded to in news broadcasts and history classrooms. And this is the nation as it is also deected, ignored and subverted in these same and other contexts. These quotidian uctuations in nationhood can easily be missed in interviews or distorted by surveys. Researchers interested in the salience of nationhood in everyday life therefore need to spend some time in everyday life. This requires a wait-and-listen approach because most of everyday life is devoid of national inection. But such is the study of everyday nationalism: nationhood, it turns out, is not salient across time or space. The contexts in which it matters to ordinary people need to be specied. Indirect questioning in interview and focus group settings can also prove

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useful for assessing the everyday salience of the nation. But rather than only asking questions about what the nation means to ordinary people, strategies need to be formulated for asking questions about when the nation matters to them. Nationhood can manifest itself not only as a topic of conversation, but also as an interpretative frame for making sense of other topics of conversation. Researchers should thus consider questions on topics that allow (but do not compel) those being interviewed to frame their responses in national terms. Such methods are useful for gauging when, how and in what (discursive) contexts the nation becomes a meaningful frame for ordering difference, explaining predicaments and interpreting social phenomena. Like participant observation, these strategies also entail a wait-and-listen approach, as much talk is simply non-national. Ultimately, the contents and contexts of the nation are best studied in tandem. A singular focus on the nations contents fails to take into account the everyday contexts in which those contents are embedded. Too much focus on the contexts of the nation, however, ignores the ways in which peoples non-verbalized mastery of national idioms can invisibly undergird routine talk and interaction. We propose, therefore, a mixed-methods approach that is sensitive to the variable meaning and contextual salience of nationhood in everyday life (Brubaker et al., 2006: 3805; Fox, 2004b: 249). We have explored just some of the ways in which the empirical study of everyday nationalism might be undertaken. In the aggregate, the varied approaches elaborated in the preceding sections contribute to a burgeoning scholarship on the quotidian meanings, uses and salience of nationhood. Our goal here has been to harness these contributions under the banner of everyday nationhood and develop a research agenda for the systematic study of the phenomenon. This is the view of nationalism from below.

Acknowledgements
We thank John Hall for his critical feedback on an earlier version of this paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal, August 2006. We are also indebted to Rogers Brubaker, Steve Fenton, Gail Kligman, and Andy Thompson for their comments.

Notes
1 There is a substantial scholarship on everyday life growing out of French (see especially de Certeau, 1984) and German traditions (the Alltagsgeschichte school of historiography). More recently, renewed interest in the eld has come from a variety of social scientic perspectives (witness Routledges New Sociology series with all 12 of its titles on everyday life). While recognizing the intellectual traditions out of which this scholarship has grown, our own use of everyday life is a bit more everyday. That is, we dene everyday life as a domain of enquiry. Though its boundaries are not easily marked or maintained, in the study

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of nationalism everyday life is to be understood as a realm for the routine (and sometimes not so routine) activities of ordinary people. In this sense, everyday life is to be distinguished from that eld of activities coordinated and pursued by (national) elites. Broadly speaking, our interest is in the relationship between politicized forms of collective belonging on the one hand and their everyday analogues on the other. Practically speaking, however, we limit our discussion to nations and nationalisms on the one hand and everyday nationhood on the other. While we will occasionally refer to ethnicity and its derivatives (particularly when such terminology is employed in the studies we reference), we do not treat such instances of ethnicity as analytically distinct from nationhood. This is not to say that nationhood and ethnicity are the same thing. Rather, it is to acknowledge that there is conceptual overlap in the ways in which ordinary people use such terms in their everyday lives. Our usage follows the practices and preferences of these ordinary people. The question could also be posed as where is the nation? Our aim here is to situate the nation not only temporally but also spatially in the routine contexts of everyday life. Other non-linguistic cues also signal membership in the nation. Visual and embodied markers, such as style of dress, physical comportment, phenotype and behaviour can make ethnonational afliation transparent (Edensor, 2002; see also Goffman, 1959). Many visual cues (particularly phenotypes) can function as conspicuous (and at times inescapable) markers of ethnonational belonging. Miller-Idrisss research in Germany (forthcoming) shows how the national afliation of non-ethnic Germans is imputed by others based on phenotype and/or dress. Julia, a twenty-something Palestinian who came to Germany as a child, reported feeling like a foreigner as an adult. How can I explain it?, she asked. Actually, my habits are German, because Ive been living here since I was nine. But people separate you off in a lot of ways: Yeah, what are you doing here? Mehmet, another twenty-something born in Germany to Turkish parents, explained that despite feeling German, he was not accepted as one of them: How can you feel like a German?, Germans say to him. How can I not feel like a German?, he responds: I was born here. While there were situations in which their non-ethnic German backgrounds were less relevant, neither felt they were entirely escapable. Despite both being German citizens and seeing themselves in some way as culturally German, Julia and Mehmet were regarded as foreigners by their German interlocutors. Membership in a people, Karl Deutsch (1966: 86100) reminds us, essentially consists in a wide complementarity of social communication. It consists in the ability to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large group than with outsiders (1966: 97). It matters precious little, adds Ernest Gellner (1983: 127), what has been fed into them [the community]: it is the media themselves, the pervasiveness and importance of abstract, centralized, standardized, one to many communication . . . quite irrespective of what in particular is being put into the specic messages transmitted.

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Olzak, Susan, and Joane Nagel, eds (1996) Competitive Ethnic Relations. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Palmer, Catherine (1998) From Theory to Practice: Experiencing the Nation in Everyday Life, Journal of Material Culture 3(2): 17599. Petrone, Karen (2000) Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Powell, Walter W. and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds (1991) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rippberger, Susan J. and Kathleen Staudt (2003) Pledging Allegiance: Learning Nationalism at the El PasoJurez Border. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Smith, Anthony (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhog and Hanna Schissler, eds (2005) The Nation, Europe lu and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition. New York: Berghahn Books. Spillman, Lyn (1997) Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Storey, John (1999) Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life. London: Arnold. Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Michael D. Kennedy, eds (2001) Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Thompson, Andrew (2001) Nations, National Identities and Human Agency: Putting People back into Nations, The Sociological Review 49(1): 1833. Thompson, Andrew and Graham Day (1999) Situating Welshness: Local Experience and National Identity, in Ralph Fevre and Andrew Thompson (eds) Nation, Identity and Social Theory: Perspectives from Wales, pp. 2747. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Tilly, Charles (1998) Durable Inequality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Turner, Victor (1967) The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, Victor (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Verdery, Katherine (1991) National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescus Romania. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Verkuyten, Maykel, Wiebe de Jong and C.N. Masson (1995) The Construction of Ethnic Categories: Discourses of Ethnicity in The Netherlands, Ethnic and Racial Studies 18(2): 25176. Weber, Eugen (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 18701914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wetherell, Margaret and Jonathan Potter (1992) Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. New York: Harvester. Whitmeyer, Joseph M. (2002) Elites and Popular Nationalism, British Journal of Sociology 53(3): 32141. Wimmer, Andreas (2004) Does Ethnicity Matter? Everyday Group Formation in Three Swiss Immigrant Neighbourhoods, Ethnic and Racial Studies 27(1): 136. Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart (1999) The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Woolard, Kathryn A. (1989) Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zubrzycki, Genevive (2006) The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

JON E. FOX is a Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. Address: Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol. BS8 1UQ, UK. [email: jon.fox@bristol.ac.uk] CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS is Assistant Professor of International Education and Educational Sociology in the Steindhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Devleopment at New York University. Address: 246 Greene Street Suite 300, New York, NY 10003, USA. [email: cmi1@nyu.edu]

The limits of everyday nationhood

ANTHONY SMITH
London School of Economics, UK

Some brilliant early essays by John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton and Ernest Renan apart, the study of nationalism is barely a century old. But, starting with the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner in the 1900s, and the historical analyses of nationalist ideology by Carlton Hayes, Louis Snyder and Hans Kohn from the 1920s, there has been a burgeoning literature on every aspect of nations and nationalism. In the post-war period, social scientists like Karl Deutsch (1966) and Ernest Gellner (1964 and 1983) joined the historians in their quest to uncover the intertwined causes of nationalisms appeal and the proliferation of nation states in the wake of decolonization. The high point of this social science approach was reached in the late 1970s and the 1980s with the publications of Michael Hechter (1975), Tom Nairn (1977), John Armstrong (1982), John Breuilly (1993[1982]), Benedict Anderson (1981[1982]), Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (1983),Anthony Smith (1986) and John Hutchinson (1987). The works of each of these scholars contained a grand narrative of nationalism: an overall account of why and how the world became divided into nations, and why nationalism became the dominant ideology of the modern

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epoch. Of course, as one would expect in any eld of study, there have been sharp divisions over key issues such as the denition of the nation, the antiquity of nations and nationalism, and the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. Yet, there was also a surprising degree of agreement over the need for a broad theoretical and historical approach to the many issues in the eld a consensus reinforced in subsequent works by Eric Hobsbawm (1990), Liah Greenfeld (1992), Walker Connor (1994), Adrian Hastings (1997) and Steven Grosby (2002). Yet, the same decade of the 1990s saw a clear rejection of the grand narratives and the causal-historical rationale behind these accounts. Inuenced by the cultural turn of postmodernism, and drawing on a number of sources the works of Benedict Anderson (1991[1983]) and Michael Billig (1995), discourse analysis, gender studies, cultural studies and political philosophy the new wave of research in the eld has turned its back on macro-analytic studies and focused instead on specic issues raised by the multicultural type of liberal society characteristic of the late 20th and early 21st century West. In particular, there has been a rejection of elite-centred studies. Nationalism, it is argued, following Walker Connor, is after all a mass phenomenon. This is the burden of the article by Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. Their basic claim is that To make the nation is to make people national. Unfortunately, they argue, macro-structural analyses have focused on nationalism from above, that is, from the perspective of the state and the elites; the people in whose name nations are constructed are curiously missing from much of the scholarship. But, they continue, we cannot assume that the masses to whom nationalist projects are directed are always in tune with the nationalist messages of the elites. Rather, their responses need to be studied in relation to their own concerns and their own everyday experiences. This constitutes a new eld of study, the eld of an everyday nationhood. The bulk of Fox and Miller-Idrisss article is then given over to a systematic delineation of such a eld under four headings: Talking the Nation, the discursive construction of the nation through everyday speech; Choosing the Nation, the decisions made by ordinary people about nationhood (and ethnicity); Performing the Nation, the ritual enactment of symbols invoking the nation; and Consuming the Nation, the expression of national differences in the daily tastes and preferences of ordinary people. As the authors point out, none of these aspects is new; there is already a very considerable literature on each of them. What is new here is their synthesis of these aspects and their literatures, and their attempt to establish on this basis a separate eld of enquiry and counterpose it to the role of elites and elite discourse discussed in much of the scholarship about nations and nationalism. I nd much that is attractive and valid in Foxs and Miller-Idrisss

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approach, and their review of the literature in these subelds is insightful, sane and balanced. They are quite justied, as Hobsbawm recognized, in asking us to problematize and pay much greater attention to the role of non-elites than the grand narratives appeared to permit. For all that, their claims raise some fundamental issues about the denition of the eld and the purposes of a study of nations and nationalism. To begin with, one might question the assumption of an undifferentiated ordinary people at the heart of the enterprise. Either the people (folk) is a construct of nationalism itself, as in We, the people . . .; or it is an unsociological category that needs to be broken down into its constituent parts, be they individuals, or various organized groups of people (e.g. movements, parties), or different interest and status groups (castes, classes, ethnic communities). From this perspective, we may speak of various non-elites, not simply ordinary people. But the studies cited by our authors give for the most part little clue about the non-elite segment of the people that is being studied, and how it relates to wider issues of nationhood and nationalism. Of course, in a sense this hardly matters, if ones purpose is simply to describe and analyse the national actions and sentiments of non-elites. On the other hand, it becomes vitally important, the moment one wishes to engage in a causal analysis of the bases of nations and nationalism. But, interestingly, while Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss ask both what is the nation? and when is the nation? (talked about, performed, etc.), they do not touch on the main question behind much of the previous scholarship in the eld, namely, why is the nation?, let alone who is the nation?. This gives to their presentation a curiously four-square and static aspect. On the one hand, there are elites propounding their nationalist messages; on the other hand, there is the people who receive or ignore the message, and for whom, it appears, for most of the time nationhood is implicit, but of little overt concern. There is no sense of any interaction between elites and the people, or among groups of non-elites, and between them and the elites, which would give us a much more complex, nuanced and dynamic picture. It is a picture to which only a sociohistorical approach could hope to do justice, and history is what is conspicuously missing in Foxs and MillerIdrisss prospectus. Theirs is a here-and-now conceptual apparatus and programme of research, which takes no account of the heritage of communities or the traditions of successive generations, each building on (or destroying) the groundwork laid by others before them. While they concede that everyday nationhood should not be studied independently of state construction, industrialism and elite manipulation, they claim that nations are not just the product of structural forces; they are simultaneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaging in mundane activities in their everyday lives. True enough, but ordinary people and their activities are situated in an

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historic context, and one that is central to the very idea of a nation progressing, as Benedict Anderson memorably reminded us, through linear, empty homogenous time (Anderson, 1991[1983]). Under the rubrics of the authors research programme, there is little room for temporal questions, for the widespread sense of the nation existing, if not in nature, then in immemorial time. Indeed, it would be interesting to discover how far the perceptions of time on the part of different groups matched those of the elites. More important, raising the why and who questions would inject a sense of process and movement over time into a research programme that could so easily turn into yet another example of the ahistorical blocking presentism that characterizes so much recent writing in the eld. (See Anderson, 1991[1893]; Peel, 1989) This lack of historical imagination is reinforced by the tacit ethnocentrism and state-centrism of Foxs and Miller-Idrisss programme. As regards the rst of these, questions of choosing and consuming the nation make sense in the industrialized West, where relatively liberal regimes allow a range of national (and other) choices and ethnic preferences, though even here, there are limits. As Michael Billig remarked:
One can eat Chinese tomorrow and Turkish the day after; one can even dress in Chinese and Turkish styles. But being Chinese or Turkish are not commercially available options. (Billig, 1995: 139, emphasis in original)

This constraint is even more marked in the many parts of the developing world where hot nationalisms predominate and where, even for those who may be indifferent to the nationalist messages of their leaders, the wrong choice could prove fatal, and where there is little room to display individual tastes and ethnic preferences. Even talking the nation, except in prescribed ways, could prove dangerous in Burma, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. If this is correct, then everyday life as a domain of the study of nationalism in its own right is necessarily conned, conceptually as well as practically, to the democratic West (including postcommunist Europe). Not only can it not serve as a universal subeld; it has actually little or nothing to say about the most intractable current problems of nation building and nationalism in large areas of the world. This is a serious limitation, and once again we see that at its heart lies the attempt to separate everyday nationhood from historic nationhood, and to sever the actions and responses of non-elites from those of elites in the common historic processes and problems of nationhood and nationalism. To this involuntary ethnocentrism is allied the state-centred basis of the authors research programme. This is partly a matter of the methodological nationalism that inheres in most questionnaires and quantitative surveys, as well as in the extrapolations from the ethnographic investigations that they recommend. But it also stems from the tacit equation of the everyday nation with the nation state, the failure to separate state from nation, and

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the questionable decision to assimilate ethnic difference and community to the nation and national identity. What then is talked about, chosen, symbolized and consumed is the nation qua national state a conclusion reinforced by the brief opening denition of nationalism drawn from Ernest Gellner: the project to make the political unit, the state (or polity), congruent with the cultural unit, the nation (1983: 1). But this state-centrism creates a double limitation in Fox and Miller-Idrisss research programme. The rst is their failure to specify the relevant frame of reference in the case of those nations without states such as Catalonia, Scotland and Kurdistan, where there may be a conict of loyalties or concentric circles of allegiance. Is it Spain or Catalonia, Britain or Scotland, which is the relevant cultural unit? And what is the relevant frame of reference of the various immigrant communities in western states? Here, the failure to separate ethnic community from nationhood conceals as much as it reveals in particular, the very different perceptions, decisions and consumption of nationhood that members of ethnic minorities may hold and display. But the second and more serious limitation is the authors failure to step outside the ring of an existing national state and consider the interactions of elites and non-elites in the formation of nations and the origins and development of nationalist movements. In other words, the research programme developed by Fox and Miller-Idriss assumes the framework and boundaries of an already functioning national state in which ordinary people, for the most part citizens of the national state, talk, choose, enact and consume the (their?) nation. It has little or nothing to tell us about the sentiments and activities of non-elites either in earlier ethnic communities or during the formation of nations, or as part of a nationalist movement aiming to create a nation out of pre-existing ethnic groupings. Moreover, partly because of the nature of the methodologies proposed, it is only modern national states that can furnish the necessary arena for the study of everyday nationhood, and so everyday nationhood is revealed as another species of modernism. Once again, we are locked into the present epoch in the name of ordinary people. Ahistoricism; ethnocentrism; nation-statism; the failure to specify the people: these are serious limitations and problems for the study of everyday nationhood propounded by Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, and they stem, I think, from an underlying rejection of the causal-historical methodology common to previous scholarship in the eld. Much of the understanding and insight gained by these scholarly efforts came precisely from their readiness to embrace the task of providing an overall account of nations and nationalism. By concentrating on the what and when of the nation as talked, chosen, performed and consumed by ordinary people, and neglecting the why and who, the study of everyday nationhood becomes restricted to the micro-analytical and descriptive rather than the causal and sociohistorical. Its insights are therefore conned to a narrow frame that

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excludes the larger issues of enquiry into the origins and development of nations which exercised earlier historical sociologies of nationalism. I do not wish to be understood as implying that the study of everyday nationhood has no place among the approaches to our understanding of nations and nationalism. On the contrary, such studies are vital, but only if they are part of wider approaches. But, though Jon Fox and Cynthia MillerIdriss are critically respectful of previous scholarship, they clearly oppose it to the study of everyday nationhood. Their assumption is that previous accounts were more or less exclusively elite-centred (though they cite the exception of Eric Hobsbawm). However, such an assumption is in part misleading. Admittedly, someone such as Elie Kedourie (1971), with his concern for ideas, concentrated on the intellectuals, the marginal men. But Karl Deutschs analysis of the growth of nations focused exclusively on mass sociodemographic variables such as urbanization, literacy, communications and voting. Ernest Gellners rst theory of nationalism (1964: Chapter 7) highlighted the role of the recently urbanized proletariat as one of the two prongs of nationalism (the other being the intelligentsia). Tom Nairn (1977) spoke of mass sentiments and of the nationalists inviting the masses into history in countering the depredations of capitalist imperialism in the colonies. In John Breuillys (1993[1982]) historical account, the function of nationalism is to mobilize, coordinate and legitimate the needs and interests of various groups in society; while for Walker Connor (1994), the sense of belonging of the mass of the population is the sole criterion of national existence. Clearly, there has been no lack of concern for the ideals and sentiments of non-elites, even if that concern has been less than systematic; and the same can be said of ethno-symbolist and perennialist scholars such as John Armstrong, John Hutchinson, Steven Grosby, Adrian Hastings and myself. But, the central point is that in all these accounts, the emphasis falls not on the thoughts and actions of the mass of a designated population (the nonelites), but on the relations and interplay between them and the elites within a wider national, or international, framework. Unlike the study of everyday nationhood, this kind of analysis can never be an end in itself, only an essential part of a wider account of why nations and nationalism emerge and why they have become such central features of the modern world. There is a further point. What counts in the study of this relationship are the links that bind different strata to each other and to their leaders. For several scholars, these links are to be found in the various symbols, memories, values, myths and traditions that resonate among different segments of the designated population. Contrary to Hobsbawms argument that there can be no connection between premodern religious, linguistic and regional communities and the modern quest for a territorial nation state (1990: 47), one can demonstrate that some of these communities along with their traditions, myths and symbols formed the bases upon which

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later generations actually sought to create a territorial national state. It is easy, but quite misleading, to see this relationship simply in terms of elite appropriation, manipulation and justication. On the contrary: in many cases, the prior existence of linguistic, ethnic and religious communities formed the basis of subsequent nationhood, and endowed it with its everyday qualities. For example, the national states of western Europe were formed over the centuries around ethnic cores (the English, northern French, Castilians) with their particular cultures and symbolisms; without these, it would have been difcult, if not impossible, for a modern state, however strong and efcient, to have forged the nation. (We can see the problems of forging nations and national states in the ethnically deeply divided (ex-colonial) states of sub Saharan Africa and elsewhere). On the other hand, without the actions and institutions of the strong, centralized state, we might still have had only the untutored and largely unselfconscious ethnicity of premodern life (Fishman, 1980). Hence, the importance of the continuing interplay between the ethnic traditions, myths, symbols and memories of various strata of the population and the political institutions and programmes of the elites. Only through analysis of this relationship and of the resonance of these myths, symbols and traditions among non-elites as well as elites, can we begin to account for the formation of nations and their subsequent persistence and changes (Marx, 2003). Now, perhaps the most obvious cultural link in this relationship is the one that Fox and Miller-Idriss highlight: the importance of mass ritual performance. In this connection we tend to think of great state occasions inaugurations, coronations, marriages, jubilees, funerals for which non-elites provide audiences and spectators rather than active participants. But there are also independence holidays that call for solemn rejoicing on the part of non-elites in processions, parades, ag waving and choral singing. We also have the mass Remembrance Day ceremonies in memory of those fallen in two world (and other) wars, in which an ofcial performance by the political, military and religious elites is followed by an unofcial and more informal procession of war veterans, as occurs each November at the Cenotaph in Londons Whitehall, and across Britain. It is interesting to recall that both this ceremony and the parallel one in Paris were initiated by a combination of elite and non-elite action. The original ceremony after the First World War was extempore and meant to be solely for a single occasion. But popular demand, and political fears at the time, quickly convinced the authorities to turn it into an annual institution and entrust its organization to the veterans association (Mosse, 1990; Winter, 1995: Chapter 4). The popular element is even more in evidence in the annual Australian ANZAC Day ceremony, both at the central Memorial in Canberra and at local monuments across the country. Here, much of the day, after the more

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formal processions organized by veterans associations are completed, is given over to drinking and celebration of the comradeship (mateship) of those who fell at Gallipoli in 1916. We can nd an interesting parallel, albeit with greater formality, in modern Switzerland. A similar combination of state organization and local popular action was responsible for the 600th anniversary celebrations in 1891 of the Everlasting Alliance of the Swiss Confederation and the original Oath of the Rutli of 1291. Here it was a case of local groups, notably in Berne, initiating the summer festival, but soon the federal state stepped in to organize it on a grander, nationwide scale (Kapferer, 1988; Zimmer 2003). The same interplay between elite ideals and non-elite traditions and attachments characterizes issues of landscape and homeland. This was, of course, a key part of the nationalist crusades: human beings were to return from the citys corruption to the purity of Nature, and there nd their roots in the (as yet) unspoilt landscapes and unchanging peasant life. One can see this in the ways in which North American artists such as Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt sought out the vast wilderness of the American interior; even when they admired modern progress and its achievements, they looked to untamed nature to nd spiritual exaltation. A similar search for roots opened the eyes of Russian artists and composers to their vast steppes and the life of the peasants, even as modern industry was beginning to erode it. It was the traditions and attachments of the peasants to their landscapes that was taken up, albeit selectively, by the nationalist intellectuals as key elements in their programmes to secure a viable and recognized homeland and to mobilize the mass of its population to support the movement for political autonomy and independence. (Ely, 2002; Wilton and Barringer, 2002). Of course, elite programmes did not always carry the non-elites with them, as John Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss rightly point out. The number of Irish who could fathom the complex symbolism of the conjoint martyrdom of Christ and Cuchulain, which Patrick Pearse propagated in 1916, must have been severely limited. On the other hand, the equally distant symbolism of the Finnish sage Vainamoinen and the hero Lemminkainen, the protagonists of the Kalevala, which Elias Lonnrot had edited in 1835 out of the Karelian ballads that he had collected, was widely disseminated and became increasingly popular in Finland, especially through the postindependence school system and the music of Sibelius. More generally, heroes and golden ages fed the pride of downtrodden as well as dominant ethnic communities, and cults of such gures as St Joan, Arminius or King Arthur could touch the lives of millions through public enactments and schooling. This too became part of everyday nationhood, even if such cults tended to originate with sub-elites. Moreover, where the cult could be assimilated to pre-existing religious traditions, as with St Joan to Roman Catholicism, or the martyr Hussein to Shiite Islam, the line between elite

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and non-elite nationhood became well nigh invisible. Both have become assimilated into an historic nationhood, the sense of national identity constructed in and through ethno-history (Branch, 1985; Gildea, 1994; Keddie, 1981; Lyons, 1979). We can perhaps see the inuence of historic on everyday nationhood most clearly by considering the ideals of mission and chosenness, which play so vital a part in various religions, particularly in the monotheistic tradition. Religious dimensions hardly gure in Fox and Miller-Idrisss analysis and research programme, reecting the wider failure to place nationalism within the long-term cultural and religious traditions out of which it emerged. We may never know how widely a sense of ethnic election was shared by the populace at large in pre-modern times, except in some well-documented cases such as the Armenians, Greeks, Irish and Jews, as well as among the Puritan Dutch, Swiss, Scots, American colonists and Afrikaners. But, given the proximity of the Church in both the eastern and western traditions to the villagers and peasants, and, for all its universalism, its strong practical and organizational emphasis on the vernacular and ethnicity, we should not be surprised if a sense of ethnic election and mission became widely disseminated among non-elites. A sense of mission was also an important motive in, and consequence of, state warfare, particularly on the borders of Christendom against the Muslims, as in Catalonia or Hungary; though how far mobilized peasants came to share the knights or ghazi sense of religious or ethnoreligious mission we may never know. Certainly, accounts of battles fought and won (or better, lost) became the staple of later legend and lore, as well as of works of drama and ction. Clearly, this is an area that merits further research. (See Akenson, 1992; Armstrong, 1982: Chapter 3) From these brief examples, we can begin to sense the need for a larger framework, one that brings together the concerns of Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller-Idriss and the scholars on whom they draw, and those of other scholars for whom historic nationhood is a prime construct. While studies of the everyday national concerns of non-elites are important in indicating the degree of t between them and elite ideals and programmes, they need to be situated within a broader and more dynamic enterprise, one that locates concepts of the nation and nationalism within a longer time-span, thereby revealing their profound historicity and their capacity for development and change. In this context, we need to remember that nationalism, despite its unifying core doctrine, comes in different forms, and this variety not only adds to the subjects complexity, but also makes it necessary to place the study of the manifestations of everyday nationhood within both their specic historical and geo-cultural contexts and the broader development of an overall sense of nationhood and nationalism in history. How far such an ambition is likely to be realized, will largely depend on the willingness of scholars of different theoretical persuasions to pool their

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resources and agree on a common strategy for resolving the many problems of understanding in the eld of nations and nationalism.

References
Akenson, Donald (1992) Gods Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Anderson, Benedict (1991[1983]) Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edition. London: Verso. Armstrong, John (1982) Nations before Nationalism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Billig, Michael (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Branch, Michael, ed. (1985) The Kalevala, the Land of Heroes, trans. W.F. Kirby. London: The Athlone Press. Breuilly, John (1993[1982]) Nationalism and the State. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Connor, Walker (1994) Ethno-Nationalism, The Quest for Understanding. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deutsch, Karl (1966) Nationalism and Social Communication (2nd edition). New York: MIT Press. Ely, Christopher (2002) This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Fishman, Joshua (1980) Social Theory and Ethnography: Neglected Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity in Eastern Europe, in Peter Sugar (ed.) Diversity and Conict in Eastern Europe, pp. 6999. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio. Gellner, Ernest (1964) Thought and Change. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gellner, Ernest (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gildea, Robert (1994) The Past in French History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Greenfeld, Liah (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grosby, Steven (2002) Biblical Ideas of Nationality, Ancient and Modern. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Hastings, Adrian (1997) The Construction of Nationhood: Religion, Ethnicity and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hechter, Michael (1975) Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 15361966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hobsbawm, Eric (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchinson, John (1987) The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Modern Irish Nation State. London: Allen and Unwin. Kapferer, Bruce (1988) Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Keddie, Nikki (1981) Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kedourie, Elie (1971) Nationalism in Asia and Africa. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Lyons, F.S. (1979) Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 18901930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Anthony (2003) Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mosse, George (1990) Fallen Soldiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nairn, Tom (1977) The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: Verso. Peel, John (1989) The Cultural Work of Yoruba Ethno-genesis, in Elisabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald and Malcolm Chapman (eds) History and Ethnicity, pp. 198215. London: Routledge. Smith, Anthony D. (1986) The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell. Wilton, Andrew and Tim Barringer, eds (2002) American Sublime: Painting in the United States, 18201880. London: Tate Publishing. Winter, Jay (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zimmer, Oliver (2003) A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 17611891. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ANTHONY SMITH is Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Government Department at the London School of Economics. Address: Department of Government, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. [email: Nations@lse.ac.uk]

The here and now of everyday nationhood

JON E. FOX
University of Bristol, UK

CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS
New York University, USA

Anthony Smiths brief but pointed reply to our debate article, Everyday nationhood, reminds us of what inspired us in the rst place in our own scholarly pursuit of nationalism. This time, however, we nd ourselves in the crosshairs of Professor Smiths critical focus. In the limited space provided

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to us here by the editors of Ethnicities, we aim to respond to what we see to be his two most central criticisms. First, Smith argues that our work is ahistorical. Second, he faults our research agenda for neglecting the question of the relationship between elite and non-elite versions of nationalism. We take each of these criticisms in turn. Professor Smith accuses us of playing fast and loose with history in our account of everyday nationhood. Coming from an historian of Smiths stature, this is a difcult criticism to ignore. Our response comes in two parts. First, we acknowledge that the primary focus of our research agenda is not historical. We are, as Smith characterizes us, interested in the here and now of nationhood: the everyday contexts in which nationhood becomes (or is made) meaningful for (or by) ordinary people. In a sense, this is a reection of the methodological assumptions we bring to the study of everyday nationhood: as both sociologists and ethnographers, we have a professional interest in the here and now. Smith is critical of this narrow focus and elaborates an approach that is more sensitive to the historical origins and development of the nation. We do not view these approaches as incompatible but rather as guided by different concerns. Our primary focus is not on Smiths moment of ethnogenesis (for which his work on the topic remains denitive); rather, we concentrate on the ways in which ethnonational idioms once in circulation are enacted and invoked by ordinary people in the routine contexts of their everyday lives. Indeed, we are indebted to scholars such as Smith for demonstrating the precise ways in which such idioms have entered circulation. But the availability of such idioms over the longue dure does not in itself explain when, where or how those idioms actually get manipulated by their end users: ordinary people in the here and now of everyday life. This is what our research agenda seeks to explain. Second, we challenge Smiths point that history is conspicuously missing from our account at least on a narrow reading of history. Just because we do not elaborate an exclusively historical approach to the study of everyday nationhood does not make our work ahistorical. Indeed, the more general temporal dimensions of nationhood referred to by Smith constitute a cornerstone of our research agenda. To be sure, our when question is not explicitly measured in centuries (though see the rst half of Foxs (2006) book with Brubaker et al. (2006) on the history of east central Europe). But neither does it necessarily exclude such a timeframe. Rather, we propose a context-sensitive approach to the study of nationhood where context is understood in multiple temporal and spatial dimensions. Such an approach neither rejects nor insists upon an exploration of the meanings of the nation accumulated over the centuries. We acknowledge that todays quotidian instantiations of nationhood are encrusted with multiple layers of meaning accumulated through the years. But we dont simply assume the contemporary salience of these historical meanings; rather, we try to specify them

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empirically. Miller-Idrisss research on nationhood and citizenship in Germany (forthcoming) searches not for the origins of Germanness in past millennia, but for its more contemporary reworkings in recent generations. Indeed, her aim is to explain how German nationhood and citizenship are the collaborative accomplishment of successive generations of ordinary Germans. In the study of everyday nationhood, time has many dimensions. We suggest a variable salience to nationhood. We should consider not just its historical developmental dimensions, but also its micro-interactional moments, its institutionally embedded and repetitive routines, and the xed intervals and eeting effervescences of holiday commemorations and sporting competitions, to name but a few. In each case, the multiple and overlapping temporal contexts of nationhoods everyday salience should be empirically specied rather than surmised from their historically rooted genealogies.1 Professor Smiths second main criticism is that our research agenda fails to problematize the relationship between elite and non-elite understandings and uses of nationhood. To this charge we plead guilty. Our goal in the present article has been more modest: to draw attention to the paucity of research in the eld of nationalism on the non-elite side of the equation. Exploring the complex relationship between elites and non-elites (to the extent discrete categories of each can be identied and maintained in the rst place) is a more ambitious undertaking than we recommend in the present study (although again see Miller-Idriss work (forthcoming) on the ways in which teachers and students mutually constitute the meanings of nationhood in classrooms in Germany). We instead propose, following Hobsbawm, that more (and more serious) attention be paid to the non-elite side of the equation (Hobsbawm, 1991: 10).2 Only when this bias is corrected can we hope to gain a greater appreciation of the relationship between elites and non-elites. Ultimately what distinguishes Smiths approach from our own is that each is guided by different research questions. Professor Smith wants to know how nations were forged by both elites and non-elites. Indeed, his elaboration of this approach in his reply is not just a call to scholarly arms; it is simultaneously a description of much of the excellent work that he and his like-minded colleagues have already undertaken. Our interest, in contrast, is in examining how nations, once forged, are evoked in everyday life by ordinary people. This does not entail a rejection of the claims of these more historical approaches. Rather, we wish to build on these ndings while simultaneously refocusing attention on the everyday meaning and salience of the nation in the world today. This is a question that Smith neither answers nor asks. But the historical emergence and development of the nation does not in itself explain its everyday invocations in the world today. We hope that we have been able to develop a research agenda that sheds some light on this latter and no-less important question.

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Notes
1 We respond similarly to Smiths contention that our state-centric denition of nationalism is inherently (if unintentionally) ethnocentric. We concede that our denition does somewhat narrowly link the nation to the state (and thereby carry a Eurocentric bias). But our denition of nationhood in everyday life does not. Indeed, we submit that it is Smith who assumes such a linkage between the political and the national in the realm of the everyday. For us, this is again an empirical question: how, if at all, ethnicity and nationhood are politically inected in everyday talk and interaction. Such questions must be asked not only in the west, but in the east, north, and south as well. 2 Smith, too, is sympathetic to increased attention to the role of non-elites. But his primary interest in the public performance of national rituals still privileges this preferred domain of elites. While national commemorations are indeed important venues for non-elite participation (see Fox, 2006), they are not the only such venues. The danger of focusing immediately on the linkages between elites and non-elites is that such investigations often take elite sites of nationalism as their starting point. We, in contrast, propose beginning our investigation of nationhood from below before looking for the linkages with elite brands of nationalism.

References
Brubaker, Rogers, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox and Liana Grancea (2006) Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fox, Jon E. (2006) Consuming the Nation: Holidays, Sports, and the Production of Collective Belonging, Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(2): 21736. Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1991) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia (forthcoming) Blood and Culture: Race, Citizenship, and National Belonging in a Re-Imagined Germany. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.