Session 3: National Identities
5th Global Conference
Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria
Imagining the Nation Differently: Redefinitions of Narratives of Identity in Contemporary Irish Writing
Carmen Zamorano Llena
Dalarna University, Sweden
According to several scholars, the construction of the imagined community by Irish nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century was mostly a defensive response to colonial pressures (Carroll and King 2003; O’Mahony and Delanty 2001; O’Sullivan 2006). As argued by Carmen Kuhling and Kieran Keoane, the “construction of a monocultural homogenous Irish identity was an important part of both pre- and post-Independence projects of nation-building” (2006: 67). However, the socio-cultural and economic changes undergone by Ireland since the mid-1990s under the forces of globalisation, and the transformation of Ireland from a country of net emigration to a country of net immigration, have started to question the validity of this homogenous Irish identity construct, based on the Irish-English dichotomy, which was dominant in cultural manifestations until the second half of the twentieth century.
A number of contemporary Irish writers have reflected in their work the changes that Ireland has experienced in the last two decades, and how these changes foster redefinitions of national identity and belonging. Amongst these writers, the latest work of Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger is highly representative. Doyle and Bolger have often been concerned with challenging nationalist definitions of Irishness by focusing on those sectors of society that this homogenising sense of identity left aside. In this paper I will analyse how their work reflects a globalised Ireland in which concepts of national identity and belonging are further redefined with the arrival of the “new Irish”. I will contend that, in the work of these writers, their “narrative address” (Bhabha 1990: 3) of issues of national identity and cross-cultural encounters in contemporary Ireland aims to raise questions about the concept of Irishness and belonging, and calls for the need to re-imagine the Irish nation so as to accommodate its differences.
Good ‘Swedishness’? Expressions of Swedish National Identity in the Minority and Integration Policies
Ellinor Hamren
Stockholm University, Sweden
This paper analyses the Swedish official discourse on national identity by looking at the Swedish minority and integration policies. It looks specifically at how ‘the Good’ is constructed in these policies, in other words what type of national identity that is seen as desirable. The Swedish case is then placed within a larger theoretical debate on national identity. The paper argues that existing theory on national identity has not come to terms with the ‘civic-ethnic’ dilemma, where inclusive/voluntarist national identity is seen as the Good and exclusive/organic national identity is seen as Bad, and discusses the problems of this Good-Bad dichotomy. The paper further argues that there is a ‘Good national identity’ – an idea that a national identity that is inclusive of minorities is the Good. This has proved applicable to the Swedish case, where an inclusive ‘civic’ interpretation of Swedishness is viewed as superior to an ‘ethnic’ exclusive one. The findings show that ethnic identities are only possible for minorities, whereas the majority is largely deprived from an ethnic characteristic in the discourse. The paper concludes that the insistence on inclusion leads to an affirmation of ‘the national’ way of thinking and argues that we need to rethink the notions of Good and Bad when it comes to national identity.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Living between Countries, Living between Nature and Society: Anthropological Remarks on National and Cultural Identities
Humberto Dos Santos Martins
UTAD/CRIA, Portugal
This paper discusses the relations between nation-states by focusing on populations and more particularly on individuals who share memories and daily experiences based on border relations. The discussion is based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Portuguese-Galician border in which I followed an anthropology at the level of the individuals. Borders are political and theoretical constructions. Several anthropologies have shown differences between lived and administrative-political borders, they have shown that borders are negotiated as lived varying-size areas all over time according with practical issues. The paper approaches transnational and international daily experiences; experiences which are not new in time but goes back to a long history of cross-border relations. Memory and narration are also crucial. National and cultural identities are theoretically discussed as being permanently negotiated, having in mind personal circumstances, concrete social trajectories and a new socioeconomic spectrum brought up by the recent political and economic histories of Portugal and Spain, and in particular the inclusion of these two countries in the EU back in 1986. Despite the fact that the physical border has actually disappeared, new borders, now less territorial, less political, but perhaps paradoxically more identitary, have installed amongst those men and women, Portuguese, Galician. In this discussion it is also crucial to look at human-nature relations, having in mind that the creation of a Transiberian Park (Xerés-Gerês) is a late acknowledgment of a long-term ecosystemic experience that has assimilated Galician and Portuguese men and women. They lived as peasants, exploring and exploiting natural resources, raising cattle, constructing walls in-between meadows that actually define the “natural (social) landscape of the area”. Today, in the Galician side, this kind of family agriculture in which we acknowledge a specific eco-type is being abandoned. But Portuguese men and women keep “old” forms of making agriculture. A peasant aesthetic that unified them in the past is not anymore shared and new border seem installed.
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