How Ideas About the Nation or National Identity Have Become an Important Part of Contemporary Culture - Literature review Example

HOW IDEAS ABOUT THE NATION OR NATIONAL IDENTITY HAVE BECOME AN IMPORTANT PART OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE AND SOCIETY INTRODUCTION: Social theorysought to elaborate specifically upon the ontological and epistemological basis of sociology often independently of empirical analysis, which led it in almost every case away from the reality of social life. In the last two decades, realism has attained an increasingly central position in social theory. According to realism, society consists of a dual or stratified ontology in which the individual reproduces an already existing social structure (King 2004: 5). Following the Revolution of 1688, the English integrated Scotland and Wales, but not Ireland, into a common British nationality by means of a common Protestant identity. Britons constructed their identity in opposition to an “other”: Catholic France. Gender roles were central to this moderate Protestant national identity. By looking at eighteenth-century British writers such as Sir Walter Scott and by analyzing William Hogarths prints, it was clear how British identity was constructed as strong and “masculine” while “others” especially the French, were described as weak and “feminine” (Taylor, 2000: 63). DISCUSSION: The nation remains the main entity around which identity is shaped, states Edensor, (2002: vi). There are several dynamic ways in which nation is experienced through popular culture. National Identity as a Part of Contemporary Culture and Society: The diversity, the multitudinous cultural effects and the flexible symbols of the national produce an enormous cultural resource that is a seething mass of cultural elements. Culture, according to this conception, is constantly in the process of developing, of emerging out of the dynamism of popular culture and everyday life whereby people make and remake connections between the local and the national, between the national and the global, between the everyday and the extraordinary. However well established and institutionalised nations may become, they remain elusive, perpetually open to context, to elaboration and to imaginative reconstruction (Edensor, 2002: vi). There are several routes towards expressing identity that exist within this matrix, some branches of which wither, are renewed, and multiple connections which exist between cultural spheres according to Edensor (2002: 1) emerge. Despite the globalisation of economies, cultures and social processes, the scalar model of identity is believed to be primarily anchored in national space. Partly, then, the space in which culture and everyday life operates is indisputably the nation which is a social and cultural construct. Edensor: (2002: 3) states that the position of the state towards already existing cultures is complex, for certain cultures may be eradicated (especially in the case of ethnic or religious groups), or they may be adopted and adapted by the cultural establishment. Questions are also raised about who is left out of the national culture, how are ethnicity, religion, language and region accommodated by the state and who is marginalised or rejected as unsuitably national. Multicultural Diversity and Inclusion in British Society: The struggle for inclusion is an ongoing battle which cultural guardians cannot always control. For example, the British state permits freedom of worship but has insisted upon the provision of compulsory teaching of Christianity in primary and secondary education. Nevertheless, heterodox and dissenting religious cultures have abounded and church attendance has dwindled despite the preferential conditions provided for this official cultural consolidation. Many national education policies are shaped by a desire to transmit cultural diversity through multicultural education strategies rather than reinforcing rigid cultural norms (Edensor, 2002: 4). Including Guest Workers Into National Citizenry: Yasemine Soysal quoted in Cerulo (1997) examines the different strategies by which Western European nations incorporate guestworkers into the national citizenry. She argues that citizen collectives increasingly are defined not by their primordial ties to a territory, but according to entitlements emerging from both a transnational discourse and a set of structures celebrating human rights. Anthony D Smith (1991) quoted in Cerulo (1997) poses perhaps the greatest challenge to constructionism. Smith adopts a middle-ground approach to national identity, linking social constructionism to more essentialist views. He defines national identity as a product of both "natural" continuity and conscious manipulation. Natural continuity emerges from pre-existing ethnic identity and community; conscious manipulation is achieved via commemoration, ideology, and symbolism. Smith compliments this duality with a social psychological dimension, citing a "need for community" as integral to identity work. In Smiths view, this tri-part combination distinguishes national identity, making it the most fundamental and inclusive of collective identities (Cerulo, 1997). National Identity Found in Everyday Life: According to Morgan (1994: 4-5)1, people found their national identity more often in everyday images and material goods, such as landscape, manners, and religious rituals, than they did in less frequently experienced state-sponsored pageantry and propaganda. Second, rather than claiming a single national identity as “British subjects,” people often embraced multiple and varying national identities depending on context: “British” while on the continent, and English, Scotch, or Welsh when traveling in Britain itself. Third, Morgan moderates recent scholarship that stresses “how nations and national identity are inventions constructed at particular moments in time, rather than givens existing since time immemorial.” She argues instead that national identities are a blending of age old stereotypes which are given new meaning. Edensor (2002: vi) states that the habitual routines of everyday life also provide the basis for the development of national identity. Thus the cultural expression and experience of national identity is generated from mundane forms and practices. In recent times, social and cultural theory suggests that that the national is still a powerful constituent of identity precisely because it is grounded in the popular and the everyday. It is necessary to focus on a useful range of interrelated contexts based on identity, space, performance, material culture and representation. National identity emerges as dynamic, contested, multiple and fluid. Morgan contends that while imagination and invention have played an important role in creating modern manifestations of national identity and tradition, there are some continuities, such as the concept of liberty, that “the English in particular had imagined themselves to possess for centuries” and that was and is a central ingredient of their Britishness (p. 156). She believes that “national identity formation is not simply a matter of inventing and artificially constructing something new. National identity often rests on age-old outlooks and traditions which are continually invested with new meanings depending on circumstances” (p. 157).2 Anderson (1983: 9) defines the nation as a political community which is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign3. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know, meet or even hear of most of their fellow members. Anderson (1983: 7) quoted in Edensor (2002: 7) conceptualizes the nation as an “imagined community”, united by a “deep, horizontal comradeship” whereby national co-fellows are believed to constitute a bounded, “natural” entity. He considers that nations emerge out of contexts of social and cultural experience which are imaginatively conceived. The key to Andersons idea of the nation as imagined community is the invention of the printing press and the subsequent rise of print media, which provided a technological means for the widespread dissemination of the idea of the nation (Edensor, 2002: 7). Anderson remarks that the regular, synchronic shared reading of the daily or weekly newspaper produced the idea that readers shared a set of interests – the content and focus of the news for instance – in which they were explicitly and implicitly addressed as co-nationals. The newspaper bolsters the assumption that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. Rather than the periodic displays of spectacle, the staging of tradition and the academic classification of races, customs and nature, this cultural process operates at a more mundane level. For the idea of what constitutes the ‘national’ interest is part of that which grounds national identity in ‘common sense’. However, it is curious that there is no reference to the multiple ways in which the nation is imagined in, for instance, music hall and theatre, popular music, festivities, architecture, fashion, spaces of congregation, and several embodied habits and performances, not to mention more parallel cultural forms such as television, film, radio and information technology. For instance, as Barker says, ‘imagining “us” as “one” is part of the process of nation building and there is no medium which has been able to speak to as many people in pursuit of that goal as television’. Citing a list of sporting events, political and royal ceremonies and soap operas, he argues that “they all address me in my living room as part of a nation and situate me in the rhythms of a national calendar” (Barker, 1999: 5–6). Sport and National Identity: The relationship between sport and national identity is complex and multifaceted. Arguably it has become more so since the end of the Second World War as the far-flung empires established by Britain and other European powers in the nineteenth century disintegrated and independent states legitimised by the principle of national self-determination were created. These developments tended to raise levels of national consciousness across the globe (Porter; Smith 2004: 1). Various changes have provided the context in which sport, both within and between nations, has developed across the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Nation states, multinational corporations and diaspora have proliferated simultaneously. It is a confusing and complex backdrop. In these circumstances, the relationship between sport and national identity surfaces in a variety of forms. The idea, that sport in general, or one sport in particular, creates or fosters a sense of nationhood is important, not least because international competition generates a seemingly endless number of occasions when nations are embodied in something manifestly real and visible , according to Porter; Smith (2004: 1). Values and National Identity: Individuals ground their ethics in what they think are absolute values and construct identity on the basis of those values, which they believe to be absolute, states Taylor (2000: 58). In particular, British society has long accommodated a range of values, and the monarchy has long symbolized an equilibrium or balance within a range. There is a distinction between objective values (grounded on an absolute beyond individuals and societies) and constructed, or relative, values (constructed within a particular society and at a particular time). Emile Durkheim4 thought that sacred symbols represented a collective conscience, not objective values, and that society constructed its values. He did not say whether any particular set of values was objective. This notion of constructed core values has attracted scholars of British national identity since the 1950s, according to Taylor (2000: 58). In contemporary British society, it would be difficult to say the Church of England prescribes certain values that construct British national identity since too few people attend church. The BBC reports that fewer than two million persons regularly attend Sunday service in the Protestant Church established in England, the Church of England, and a similar, but even smaller number attend Roman Catholic services. England has an established church supported by the government and responsible, in some degree, to Parliament. The Queen is its formal governor, and the English church retains administration by bishops (Taylor, 2000: 60). In any book about Princess Diana and British national identity, the British monarchy, not the Church of England, is the key sacred symbol of national identity. Two key questions asked by Taylor (2000: 61-62), are: Does Britain have constructed identity based on constructed values? Do the monarchy and church symbolize constructed values that ground British identity? David Cannadine and Linda Colley believed that British monarchy was a symbol of constructed national identity. Historian Gerald Newman had put forward a chronological system for the construction of English national identity, suggesting it had been constructed in the eighteenth century (Taylor, 2000: 63). Morgans extensive study of more than 160 travel journals, diaries, accounts, and guidebooks representing travelers from all corners of Britain presents a convincing argument that a high politics model is not sufficient to explain the constitutive elements of national identity. Nor is it possible any longer, according to Morgan, to speak of a single British identity, or to argue that national identities are a purely modern invention (Morgan, 2002: 219). Social Theory and Contemporary Culture: In the reconfiguration of social theory and cultural criticism that has marked the past thirty or so years, at least four models of culture have emerged: culture as a symbolic system of meanings, culture as a game, culture as a drama, and, the model that is most widespread today, culture as a text. The first of these understandings of culture is structuralist: it seeks to isolate elements within a system and show their underlying structures and structural interrelations. It then attempts to characterize the general system of symbolic meanings as a coherent whole. The second of these understandings of culture is behavioralist: it seeks to analyze the strategies and rules informing social action. The third is performativist: it seeks to discern cultures as a socially constructed performance where “the plays the thing, ” where, that is, no underlying structure or rule-governed action can be ascertained. The last of these understandings of culture takes two forms in the logic of textuality and deconstruction: the model of culture as a thick, or deep, text to be read and, on the other hand, the model of culture as a planar text, a play of signifiers to be evoked (Lewandowski, 2001: 5). Whether interpretively deep or dialogically planar, a commitment to the text model in social theory is today commonplace. Whereas the first model is indebted to the hermeneutics of Ricoeur, the second model is indebted to the deconstructionism of Derrida. Though each genre of textually informed social theory rejects the other: indeed, the latter understands itself as a radicalized critique of the former, they share a fundamental methodological commitment to reading and writing, or evoking, that is deeply problematic states Lewandowski (2001: 5). CONCLUSION: Contemporary culture and society in Britain is in a dynamic state, with several factors impacting them. The ideas of nation and national identity are changing, with increasing numbers of immigrants and ethnic groups changing the culture and society into a multi-cultural and diverse one. These have been studied from social scientific and theoretical aspects. “ In Britain, there are real, practical difficulties in trying to absorb large numbers of immigrants into an already overcrowded island. It also presents a problem about national identity. The influx of immigrants causes a profound assault on the right of British people to have their own identity. To deny that right is deeply illiberal and oppressive. Moreover, the erosion of that identity means the loss of those very values: tolerance, fairness, gentleness - that have made this country attractive to migrants in the first place, and which are all deeply rooted in the culture and history of the nation” (Melanie Phillips, 2002).5 Significantly, it was found that the British found their concept of national identity to be rooted in everyday life, and not in elaborate celebrations or occassions, for example, in: newspapers, television, sports and games and common national interests. REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Web page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0860915468/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-0840869-6372815# Barker, C. (1999) Television, Globalisation and Cultural Identities, Buckingham: Open University Press. Web page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0335199542/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-0840869-6372815#reader-link Beck, Roger B. (2002). Review of Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain, H-Albion, H-Net Reviews, October, 2002. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=233971037026788. Cerulo, Karen A. (1997). “Identity Construction: New Issues, New Direction”. Annual Review of Sociology. Vol. 23: pp.385 + Edensor, Tim. (2002). National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Oxford, England: Berg Publishers. King, Anthony. (2004). The Structure of Social Theory. New York: Routledge. Lewandowski, Joseph T. (2001). Interpreting Culture: Rethinking Method and Truth in Social Theory. Lincoln, N.E.: University of Nebraska Press. Porter, Dilwyn; Smith, Adrian (Eds.), (2004). Sport and National Identity in the Post-War World. New York: Routledge. Taylor, John A. (2000). Diana, Self-Interest and British National Identity. Westport, C.T. 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