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ah, the west, notable for not being obsessed with nationality
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Sep 13, 2020 04:25
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uncop posted:"Nationality" is actually a very peculiar form of semi-universalist kinship. Much like mass religion, it's an imagined community that's most eagerly taken up by people who already had their concrete familial and tribal kinship bonds broken. The obsession with nation and religion specifically speaks in favor of the basic thesis IMO (remember how today's crazy religious excesses are a rather new phenomenon, as well as the modern conception of nationhood). I mean, the thesis that nationality is a relatively modern conception has never seemed particularly convincing to me. It's always seemed, much like the Rousseauian idea of societies moving from egalitarian hunter gatherers to authoritarian agrarian societies, to be mostly a thing people say is true but is mostly not the case based on actual evidence. I don't see why modern nationality is in any way distinct from tribal identities that existed beforehand. Maybe I just don't fully understand some essential distinctness between the two, but I've never really understood the idea.
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Sep 13, 2020 18:31
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Goodpancakes posted:Nationality does differ in some important ways from tribalism, in that the modern concept of geography has changed our concept of tribal membership. The borders of a country being a national boundary, and thusly, as a portion of nationalism is distinct from the basis of a tribal grouping. A nationalist grouping being geographic, and a tribal grouping being familial. But how does that reconcile with the irredentist claims of nationalist movements? It seems just as true that the geographic borders of nationhood have just as much to do with the actions of the state to undermine any competing identity as it does with anything else. With states engaged in this direct nation building, doesn't that kinda turn this type of argument? Nations aren't distinct from tribes because of their geographic borders, they encompass most of the geographic borders because states squashed out any competing national identities via ethnic cleansing. At least, that's my understanding of how these more or less fully nation encompassing identities came from; maybe I'm not entirely understanding the history.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:26
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