hey same task as every week read the reading answer the questions and leave out question 6 and provide a discussion question insteadNEED WRITER 53958
ANTH3021 DISCUSSION PREPARATION GUIDE Name________________________________ Date___________________ Reading: Author / Title__________________________________________ __________________________________________ 1. What was the reading about? State in one complete sentence the theme of this work. 2. How did the author get the information? How did they put together and present this information? Was there a particular structure to the work? Was it qualitative, quantitative, and/or comparative? Was it based on textual research, observation, and/or participation? Etc. 3. What did you learn from this reading? Be specific and concrete. a. b. 4. Note words that are unfamiliar or seem to be used in a special manner to create a particular impression. Define the word in the context of the phrase where you found it. a. b. 5. What questions does this selection bring up for you? Write one or two questions that open the space for discussion about key points in the articles, gaps in the knowledge, new research questions raised. Avoid "yes/no" questions, try to open the space for people to share opinions without trying to lead them to particular conclusions. a. b. 6. (To be filled out in class during discussion) What are some of the best ideas that you heard from other people in your discussion group? © ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2011 Religion and nationalism: four approachesn ROGERS BRUBAKER University of California Los Angeles ABSTRACT. Building on recent literature, this article discusses four ways of studying the relationship between religion and nationalism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The article concludes by reconsidering the much-criticised understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon. KEYWORDS: ethnicity; Islamism; nationalism; Reformation; religion; secularisation Introduction ‘Religion’ and ‘nationalism’ have long been contested terms. Both terms – on almost any understanding – designate large and multidimensional fields of phenomena. Given the lack of agreement on what we are talking about when we talk about religion, or nationalism, it is no surprise that one encounters seemingly antithetical assertions about the relation between the two - for example, the assertion that nationalism is intrinsically secular, or that it is intrinsically religious; that nationalism emerged from the decline of religion, or that it emerged in a period of intensified religious feeling. Because both ‘nationalism’ and ‘religion’ can designate a whole world of different things, few statements about nationalism per se or religion per se, or the relation between the two, are likely to be tenable, interesting or even meaningful; a more differentiated analytical strategy is required. Rather than ask what the relation between religion and nationalism is – a question too blunt to yield interesting answers – I seek in this article to specify how that relation can fruitfully be studied. Building on the literature produced by a Nations and Nationalism ]] (]]), 2011, 1–19. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00486.x n Thanks are due to Matthew Baltz and Kristen Kao for their assistance, to anonymous referees for their comments, and to Bernd Giesen and Philip Gorski for the opportunity to present an early version of this article at a conference on ‘Nation/Religion’ in Konstanz. 18 (1), 2012, 2–20. EN ASJ OURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY AND NATIONALISM NATIONS AND NATIONALISM © ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2011 Religion and nationalism 3 recent surge of interest in the topic1, I delineate, develop and critically engage four distinct ways of studying the connection between religion and national- ism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. I conclude by defending a qualified version of the much-criticised understanding of nation- alism as a distinctively secular phenomenon. Religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena Consider first the strategy of treating religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena. One way of doing so is exemplified by efforts to define or characterise nationalism by specifying its similarity to religion, or by simply characterising nationalism as a religion. An early statement of this approach, which can be traced back to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1995: 215–16, 221ff, 429; Smith 2003: 26), is found in the work of Carlton Hayes, who devoted one chapter of his 1926 book Essays on Nationalism to ‘nationalism as a religion’. According to Hayes, nationalism mobilises a ‘deep and compelling emotion’ that is ‘essentially religious’. Like other religions, nationalism involves faith in some external power, feelings of awe and reverence, and ceremonial rites, focused on the flag. Straining a bit to sustain the metaphor, Hayes argued that nationalism has its gods – ‘the patron or the personification of [the] fatherland’; its ‘speculative theology or mythol- ogy’, describing the ‘eternal past and . . . everlasting future’ of the nation; its notions of salvation and immortality; its canon of holy scripture; its feasts, fasts, processions, pilgrimages and holy days; and its supreme sacrifice. But while most world religions serve to unify, nationalism ‘re-enshrines the earlier tribal mission of a chosen people’, with its ‘tribal selfishness and vainglory’.2 More recently, Anthony Smith has provided a more sophisticated, and more sympathetic, account of nationalism as a ‘new religion of the people’ – a religion as ‘binding, ritually repetitive, and collectively enthusing’ as any other. According to Smith, nationalism is a religion both in a substantive sense, in so far as it entails a quest for a kind of this-worldly collective ‘salvation’, and in a functional sense, in so far as it involves a ‘system of beliefs and practices that distinguishes the sacred from the profane and unites its adherents in a single moral community of the faithful’. In this new religion – which both ‘parallels and competes with traditional religions’ – authenticity is the functional equivalent of sanctity; patriotic heroes and national geniuses, who embody and exemplify such authenticity and sacrifice themselves for the community, are the equivalent of prophets and messiah-saviours; and poster- ity, in which their legendary deeds live on, is the equivalent of the afterlife. It is © ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2011 4 Rogers Brubaker this religious quality of nationalism, in Smith’s account, that explains the durability and emotional potency of national identities and the ‘scope, depth, and intensity of the feelings and loyalties that nations and nationalism so often evoke’ (Smith 2003: 4–5, 15, 26, 40–42). While such characterisations of nationalism as a religion are suggestive and fruitful, I want to propose an alternative strategy for considering nationalism and religion as analogous phenomena. Rather than characterise nationalism with terms drawn from the field of religion, as Hayes and, to a certain extent, Smith do – faith, reverence, liturgy, cult, god, salvation, scripture, sacred objects and holy days – it may be useful to connect both phenomena to more general social structures and processes. Without any claim to exhaustiveness, I want briefly to discuss three ways of considering religion and nationalism (and ethnicity as well) under more encompassing conceptual rubrics: as a mode of identification, a mode of social organisation and a way of framing political claims. Ethnicity and nationalism have been characterised as basic sources and forms of social and cultural identification. As such, they are ways of identifying oneself and others, of construing sameness and difference, and of situating and placing oneself in relation to others. Understood as perspectives on the world rather than things in the world, they are ways of understanding and identifying oneself, making sense of one’s problems and predicaments, identifying one’s interests and orienting one’s action (Brubaker 2004). Religion, too, can be understood in this manner. As a principle of vision and division of the social world, to use Bourdieu’s phrase, religion too provides a way of identifying and naming fundamental social groups, a powerful framework for imagining community and a set of schemas, templates and metaphors for making sense of the social world (and, of course, the supra-mundane world as well).3 Secondly, like ethnicity and nationalism, religion can be understood as a mode of social organisation, a way of framing, channelling and organising social relations. I’m not referring here to churches, ethnic associations or nationalist organisations per se. I’m referring rather to the ways in which religion, ethnicity and nationality can serve as more or less pervasive axes of social segmentation in heterogeneous societies, even without territorial con- centration along religious, ethnic or national lines. This is in part a matter of what van den Berghe, in an effort to distinguish social pluralism from cultural pluralism, called ‘institutional duplication’ (van den Berghe 1967: 34). Even when they are territorially intermixed, members of different religious, ethnic or national communities may participate in separate, parallel institutional worlds, which can include school systems, universities, media, political parties, hospitals, nursing homes and institutionalised sporting, cultural and recreational activities as well as churches and ethnic associations (Brubaker et al. 2006: chapter 9).4 Even outside such parallel institutional worlds – though more often in conjunction with them – religion, ethnicity and nationality can channel © ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2011 Religion and nationalism 5 informal social relations in ways that generate and sustain social segmenta- tion. The key mechanism here is religious or ethnic endogamy, whether more or less deliberately pursued from the inside, or imposed from the outside.5 Religious injunctions against intermarriage, together with clerical control or influence over marriage, have often helped reproduce socioreligious segmen- tation. This, in turn, has helped reproduce religious, ethnic and national communities over the long run and has worked to prevent their dissolution through assimilation (Smith 1986: 123). Finally, from a political point of view, claims made in the name of religion – or religious groups – can be considered alongside claims made in the name of ethnicity, race or nationhood. The similarities are particularly striking in so far as claims are made for economic resources, political representation, symbolic recognition or cultural reproduction (the latter by means of institutional or territorial autonomy, where institutional autonomy involves control of one’s own agencies of socialisation such as school systems and media). These claims are part of the general phenomenon of politicised ethnicity, broadly understood as encompassing claims made on the basis of ethno-religious, ethno-national, ethno-racial, ethno-regional or otherwise ethno-cultural identifications, which have proliferated