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.
.
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.
.
5. What questions does this selection
ing 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.
.
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: fou
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
econsidering 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 - fo
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, o
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
lunt to yield interesting answers – I seek in this article to specify how that
elation can fruitfully be studied. Building on the literature produced by a
Nations and Nationalism ]] (]]), 2011, 1–19.
DOI: XXXXXXXXXX/j XXXXXXXXXX00486.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
ecent 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
ace, 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 o
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 earlie
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
eligion 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 Brubake
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
iefly to discuss three ways of considering religion and nationalism (and
ethnicity as well) under more encompassing conceptual ru
ics: 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 (Brubake
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 refe
ing here to churches, ethnic associations o
nationalist organisations per se. I’m refe
ing rather to the ways in which
eligion, ethnicity and nationality can serve as more or less pervasive axes of
social segmentation in heterogeneous societies, even without te
itorial 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 te
itorially 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
ecreational 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 interma
iage, together with clerical control o
influence over ma
iage, 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 te
itorial 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,
oadly 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