Conference Draft – For Distribution at Nationalism and National Identities Today: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, CRONEM, University of Surrey, June 13th 2007
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The Personal Contexts of Nationalism: Class, Indifference and Resentment
Robin Mann
Oxford University
(With Steve Fenton, Bristol University)
Abstract
There is an important strand of scholarship which argues that we need to explain “ethnicity” within the social and personal contexts in which ethnic identities and sentiments are created and enacted. But there has been little attempt to consider whether, and if so how, attitudes to the nation may be informed by experiences and events at the personal level. Adopting a case study approach, this paper focuses upon the lives of four “white English” individuals. Treating each respondent’s accounts of their social milieu as the analytical starting point, the paper investigates how wider self-understandings and personal experiences inform a particular orientation towards nation, place and the country. In further exploration of this it tentatively argues that the salience of “resentful nationalism” is intensified when articulated through a sense of personal or social decline and failure. This is then demonstrated through reference to those with both “resentful” and “indifferent” orientations.
Introduction
Within scholarship on nations and nationalism, there has, in recent years, been an increasing effort to document the subjective sense of national identity and belonging as constituted within everyday life. And while nationalism scholarship overall remains broadly committed to examining nations and nation-states as macrocosms of historical social change, there is now widespread acknowledgement that explaining personal, everyday and local attachments to the national community are of equal sociological import (Anderson 1983, Brubaker et al 2006, Fox 2004, Hobsbawm 1992). It is perhaps Anderson’s (1983) Imagined Communities that initially stated the need to explore people’s attachments to the nation (see also Phillips 2002). We can also recall Anthony Cohen’s (1996: 803) argument regarding the “anonymizaton of the human subject” in explanations of nationalism. As he argues:
…to see identity as being derivable from membership of a nation or group – be it an ethnic, kinship or descent group, a sect, class, gender, initiation cohort or whatever – is implicitly to deny that individuals construe their membership and their sense of themselves in very different terms. In a sense it renders these individuals as merely members of these collectivities (1996: 803).
Indeed, in the UK, there is now an established body of work aimed at both quantifying (Heath et al 1999, Heath et al 2006, McCrone et al 1998) and qualifying (Condor & Abell 2006, Jacobson 1997, Fenton 2007, McCrone et al 1998) the nature and extent of subjective national attitudes and imaginations. Despite the growing focus upon this, there has been little attempt to consider how national identification relates to experiences and events over the course of an individual’s life. National identities are commonly treated as free-standing social facts.
The value of quantitative approaches is in establishing the socially structured character of different national identifications. Equally however they are limited by a “one-dimensional” approach which treats the nation as one of a range social identities that neither overlap nor interact (Phillips 2002:598-9). Qualitative approaches are more adept at capturing the life contexts and active construction of national identity. Discourse analytical approaches for instance account for the self-management and presentation of national and ethnic identity talk (Condor 2000, De Cillia et al 1999,Verkuyten et al. 1995). The person is indeed present in these accounts, but only as isolated individuals detached from their social milieu. While we are notified of the nationality of these individuals, along with some other objective social characteristics (e.g. age, occupation, gender), we know little of the personal events and experiences that inform a particular articulation of national identity. Anthropology and cultural studies on the other hand have focused specifically upon thick descriptions of the everyday contexts and cultural icons (Edensor 2002) but often reduce individual biographies to fragments of talk (although see Baumann 1996). Rarely do studies retain a sense of the individual’s broader social experience that lies behind the extracted passage of talk. In effect they tell us how national identities are presented in conversation and social interaction, but tell us less about the social and personal location of nation-relevant statements. By failing to situate national identity as part of a wider account of a person life, we are unable to consider some key questions: To what extent does national identity form a central, or conversely marginal, aspect of their broader self understanding? How are particular orientations towards the nation informed by personal circumstances? When, and in which social contexts, does national belonging become meaningful?
While the qualitative literature documents the diversity in everyday discourses of the nation, there is no convincing argument as to what distinguishes the often contradictory representations – such as those who articulate strong, emotion-laden and highly personalised accounts of the nation from the ordinarily weak (Fenton 2007), or banal, expressions (Condor 2000). Billig (1995) and Smith (1991) provide explanations for the pervasiveness of national identity in terms of socialisation and exposure to national symbols and rituals, particularly in education, sport and media. But forms of cultural and social reproduction need not amount to anything more than an ethnic or national framing – a certain taken for granted-ness. This can be evident even among those who are indifferent to national identity, who are antithetical to nation-ness, but who nevertheless grant nationhood a certain facticity. In other words they point to its reproduction and taken for granted-ness in everyday life but not to an account of how and why it matters ordinarily to certain individual actors. Rather, in order to explain ethnic and national sentiments one needs to go beyond ethnicity (Fenton 2004) and refer to the context of “that which is not ethnic” (Eriksen 1993). Here we argue that in explaining the “national” we need to go beyond the nation.
In order to demonstrate how personal events and experiences over the course of ones life can inform ones wider sense of national belonging, a certain level of intimacy in presentation is required. In seeking to address this question, and to provide sufficient depth within the frame of an article, this article will focus on the lives of four individuals. Through this empirical exploration, we are looking to form an account of how different national orientations, indifferent, resentful and proud being key examples, are informed by personal events and experiences over the course of ones life. These micro-experiences then act as the “filling” for the otherwise empty ethnic or national category (Ruane & Todd 2004). The filling may be an ‘emotional charge’ where for example socially generated anger and resentment inform national sentiment; or the filling may be ‘meaningful’ where social and personal experiences provide layers of meaning for national orientations.
Nationalism, National Identity and Social Context
In support of the analytical approach undertaken here, a wider sociological inventory can be drawn upon. Bourdieu’s theory of practice provides a conceptual repertoire for refocusing our attention towards the individual actor, as well as providing a supporting account for the limiting of our analysis to only four individual case studies. The actor-level, yet non-subjective, perspective is most evidently captured within The Weight of the World (1999) – in which the reader is presented with around fifty accounts, or “short stories”, of male and female lives. As Bourdieu (1999) and his collaborators argue, one cannot understand ones position in the macro social order without reference to the directly experienced effects of social interaction within different social microcosms. Only through this “perspectivism” is it possible to capture the range of “ordinary suffering” generated within the contemporary social order. Following this, expressions of national belonging, particularly emotional or resentful expressions, need to be understood not simply in terms of objective social differences but with reference to a more nuanced social milieu. By emphasising the personal dimensions however, we do not mean to arrive at an individual, and potentially unsociological, explanation for nationalist sentiments. On the contrary, narratives of personal suffering will be influenced by a socially embedded “habitus” of expectations, self-understandings and values which are themselves shaped by social milieu and class position. Consequently, personal unease and resentment emerging from unfulfilled expectations and status frustrations can be found amongst both middle class and working class segments of the population.
The critical contribution of the idea of the social milieu, is that through it we can bring to life the living contexts with which class, place, and gender are experienced. As Sayer (2005:36) argues, emotional responses (so often associated with nationalist ideologies) are commonly influenced by previous experiences and often emerge around issues considered to be of social importance. It is not simply any discourse, such as a discourse of the nation, that produces an emotional response, “but discourses that refer to the kinds of things whose implications for ones well being and that of others make them matters of emotional concern” (Sayer 2005:38). With specific reference to ethnic conflict, Ruane and Todd persuasively demonstrate how intense ethnic sentiments are produced through a combination of individual and collective experiences. As such, in order to explain strongly-felt ethnic sentiments one needs to go beyond the category of ethnicity, and to consider its dependence upon “dense nested sets of linkages which themselves produce a multiplicity of ‘sub-communities’ at neighbourhood, local, town and regional levels” (2004:225). Under certain conditions, these linkages align and combine with each other to produce articulated ethnic oppositions and dualities. Following Ruane and Todd, it is entirely possible that the appeal of the discourse of the ‘nation’ is not simply connected to the ‘nation’ per se, but that the nation serves as a container through which a multiplicity of experiences can be linked together. The directly and indirectly experienced social changes, refracted through the life of an individual, are thus discursively ‘nationalised’.
A brief illustration of this can be provided with the case of Wales. In this context, the strength of boundaries between Welshness and Englishness in rural Wales surrounds the everyday experience of local changes (Bowie 1993, Thompson 1999). For example, the closing of the village primary school, changes of language use in the local shop or outside the school gates, changes in housing ownership, or changes in the nature of work such as a shift from an agriculture to tourism based economy - these are changes which, at least as far as local actors themselves are concerned, are considered to be of personal importance and can even engender a sense of personal loss (Mann 2007:218-9). Moreover, the personal and local salience of Welshness is precisely to do with its multidimensionality – that is its close interrelation with both social experiences connected to class, language, place and religion as well as particular material contexts such as housing, schooling, employment.. We find that respondents in our Leverhulme study also referred ‘country’ and ‘nation’ to tangible local contexts rather than abstract debates or symbols (such as the crown).
As Brubaker et al have recently argued, to study ethnicity in isolation from other social experiences that constitute everyday life is “to risk adopting an over-ethnicised view of social experience” (Brubaker et al 2006:15). To focus one-dimensionally on national identity therefore – that is national identity as prior and in isolation to other social identities – is to misconstrue the set of meshed, unspecified experiences from which it manifests itself. To understand why nation matters it is not sufficient to refer simply to its pervasiveness and social availability as a discourse, rather it needs also to be in a sense anchored through reference to personal experience.
Methodology
The interview data presented here is based on a research project forming part of the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship[1]. In total, 100 in-depth interviews and 10 focus group discussions were conducted between July 2004 and August 2005 across 2 research sites – Westown, a small rural town and Southdown, a multiethnic, inner city area of Bristol. In all cases, respondents were asked to take part in a study examining attitudes to social changes in Britain. The interviews were carried out using a topic guide based on four key themes – a sense of local place; work and getting on in life; national identity and attitudes to multiculturalism. The first two themes – place and work – therefore, provide the personal and social contexts to the subsequent themes of nationhood and ethnicity. In structuring the topic guide in this way, we were able to examine how the nation was indirectly articulated by respondents as part of their experiences of local place and getting on, before they had been prompted to talk about the nation directly. The aim of this analysis then is to demonstrate how different orientations to the nation relate to respective experiences, and interpretations of these experiences, over the course of individual lives. In deciding which sections of text to select, we focus upon three inter-related dimensions:
i. a sense of local and familial belonging;
ii. a sense of getting on/or having got on in life;
and finally;
iii. a particular orientation to nationhood and a view of social decline.
The central concern of the analysis is not only to uncover orientations to nation, but to see these as both expressed within and related to social and personal life.
Reported Lives and the Nation
In what follows, the article will provide an in-depth analysis of four case study individuals – Mary, Mark, Karen and Brian. While the choosing of four individuals could be considered arbitrary, having been drawn from a much larger set of interviews, the cases have been purposively selected in order to contrast two examples of ‘resentful nationalism’ with two examples of ‘indifferent cosmopolitanism’ – each mediated through different place- and work-based contexts. Indeed, this contradiction between indifferent and nationalist expression was not only evident through our corpus as a whole, but did not at first appear to relate to standard concepts of class division. As such, they do not represent the ‘only’ cases to exemplify the argument. Rather, having analysed all interviews, these cases offer the opportunity of looking closely at personal life contexts whilst exemplifying key themes in our interpretation. In presenting each of the four cases, we have tried to retain a sense of the entirety of particular passages of talk. After this, we then provide some interpretations of our respondents’ stories.