SD373 Cultural Identity 27 April 2007

Global and Local

(References- Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis & London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996; David Harvey, The condition of postmodernity : an enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford, England : Blackwell, 1989)


1. Globalization – One World or Many Worlds? :
-During the 1990’s, dominant understandings of globalization were framed in economic terms. This reflected the importance of global corporations, the role of the finance industries, and the new forms of communication and IT integrating them. This dominant view regarded the increasing integration of the world economy as leading to a convergence of societies. This view implied that the emergence and triumph of globalization involved a universal, western model of social and economic organization.

-Such perspective perpetuates a view of the global as constituted by an active, dominant centre, and defensive or subordinate reactions (fundamentalist groups or countries) forced to defend themselves against a process originated from outside. From this understanding of globalization, there is only one model for globalization, “the west” or “capitalism”, which remains within the old paradigm of modernization, understood as the universalization of a dominant social model. According this view, there is not only one sources of globalization, there is also only one process of globalization, and it travels in uni-direction (Westother regions)

-At the same time, globalization also involves cultural processes. And one of these processes involves the view that understanding globalization as an extension of abstract space and homogenous time to the globe as a whole, where space is understood as continuous in all directions (regarded the globe as a functional whole), and society/globe is understood as “a whole consisting of the simultaneous happening of all the myriad events that marks the lives of its members at that moment” (Charles Taylor). In short, according to this view, the globe is regarded as “one world”. (homogenous identity?)

-Question: but does this account of “one world” able to make sense of the increasingly complex reality?

2. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy :

-But as what the prominent Indian American anthropologist Appadurai argues: “the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre- periphery model.” And “the central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.”

-“Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about commoditization, and very often, the two arguments are closely related.” (Douglas Kellner, ‘Theorizing/Resisting McDonaldization: A Multiperspectivist Approach,’ http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell30.htm
) “What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacle and constitutions.” (examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS_XmtSFQoU&mode=related&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Et7GRWqAkY&mode=related&search=) At the same time, “it is worth noticing that for the people of Irian Jaya,… and Russianization for the people of Soviet Armenia and the Baltic republics.”

-Remark: beside of the economic and institutional, there is “something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice.” “…the imagination become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.” “The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.”

-“The complexity of the current global economy has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics.” And Appadurai “proposes that an elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures is to look at the relationship among five dimensions of global cultural flows that can be termed (a) ethnoscapes, (b) technoscapes, (c) mediascapes, (d) fiancescapes, (e) ideoscapes.” ( the suffix “-scape” points to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as well as they do international clothing style. These terms also indicate that these are not objectively given relations, that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sort of actors: nation-state, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements, and even intimate face-to-face groups)

-These landscapes are the building blocks of what Appadurai would like to call “imagined worlds”, “that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. An important fact of the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds…and thus are to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them.”

(a) Ethnoscapes: “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to hitherto unprecedented degree.” The warp of stabilities of communities and networks of kinship, friendship, work, birth, residence and etc “is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion , as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move”(that now function on larger scales)
e.g.《人民公廁》

(b) Technoscapes: “the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries.” “The odd distribution of technologies, and thus the peculiarities of these technoscapes, are increasingly driven not by any obvious economies of scale, of political control, or of market rationality but by increasingly complex relationships among money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of un- and highly skilled labour.”

(c) Fiancescapes: “the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid, and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed”, “but the critical point is that the global relationship among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, and fiancescapes is deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable because each of theselandscapes is subject to its own constraints and incentives…at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others.”
e.g.《斷背山》、《英雄》、《無間道》+《無間道風雲》



(Mediascapes and ideoscapes: closely related landscapes of image)

(d) Mediascapes: “refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, and film-production), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by theses media.” ”What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide…large and complex repertoires of images, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed.” “The lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds…”

(e) Ideoscapes: they are also concatenation of images, “but they are often directly political and frequently have to do with the ideologies of states and the counter-ideologies of movements explicitly oriented to capturing state power or piece of it. These ideoscapes are composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview, which consists of a chain of ideas, terms, and images, including freedom, welfare, rights, sovereignty, representation, abd the master term democracy…the diaspora of these terms and images across the world…has loosened the internal coherence that held them together in a Euro-American master narrative and provided instead a loosely structured synopticon of politics, in which different nation-states…have organized their political cultures around different keywords”

-The above is a tentative formulation about the conditions under which current global flows occurs: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures among ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, fiancescapes, and ideoscapes. Several points to be noted:

-“people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly non-isomorphic paths…but the sheer speed, scale, and volumes of each of these flows are now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture.” (e.g. Japanese’s hospitality to idea vs. closed to immigration)

-“Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of modern world because of brings labouring populations into the lower-class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state.”( e.g. Islamic and Hindu global fundamentalism )

-“At the same time, deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impresarios, and travel agencies, which thrive on the need of the deterritorialized population for contact with its homeland…these invented domelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provided the material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt.” (e.g. 海外保釣運動)

-Nation-state: “States find themselves pressed to stay open by the forces of media, technology, and travel that have fuelled consumerism throughout the world and have increased the craving, even in the non-Western world, for new commodities and spectacles.” (e.g. 中國入世、03SARS事件、08奥運) “On the other hand, these very craving can become caught up in new ethniscapes, mediascape, and, eventually, ideoscapes, such as democracy in China, that the state cannot tolerate as threats to its own control over ideas of nationhood and peoplehood.”(e.g. 64事件、河南愛滋村)



-“the central paradox of ethnic politics in today’s world is that primordia (whether of language or skin colour or neighbourhood or kinship) is globalized. ” These sentiments “have become spread over vast and irregular spaces as groups move yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media capabilities.” “the disjunctive and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national policies, and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality…has now become a global force, forever slipping in and through the cracks between states and borders.”

-“The globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization, but globalization involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization (armaments, advertising techniques, language hegemonies, and clothing styles) that are absorbed into local political and cultural economies, only to be repatriated as heterogeneous dialogues of national sovereignty, free enterprise, and fundamentalism in which the state plays an increasingly delicate role: too much openness to global flows, and the nation-state is threaten by revolt…too little, and the state exits the international stage…”(e.g. PRC 廣告) “the state become the arbitrageur of this form of repatriation of difference (in the form of goods, signs, slogans, and styles). But this repatriation or export of designs and commodities of difference continuously exacerbates the internal politics of majoritarianism and homogenization…” (e.g. Nationalism in PRC )


《中國可以說不》(1996年): 宋強、張藏藏、喬邊、古清生、湯正宇

-“Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another.”

-“How do small groups, especially families, the classical loci of scialization, deal these new global realities as they seek to reproduce themselves?” (cultural and identity reproduction)

-“the sort of trangenerational stability of knowledge that was presupposed in most theories of enculturation can no longer be assumed.” “As families move to new locations, or as children move before older generations, or s grown sons and daughters return from time spent in strange parts of the world, family relationships can become volatile.”

-“What is new is that this is a world in which both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux, and thus the search for steady points of reference, as critical life choices are made, can be very difficult.”

-“culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus ( a tacit realm of reproducible practices and disposition) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences.”

-“At larger levels of organization, there can be many forms of cultural politics within displaced population…., all which are inflected in important ways by media (and the mediscapes and ideoscapes they offer).”

-“In short, deterritorialized communities and displaced populations, however much they may enjoy the fruits of new kinds of earning and new dispositions of capital and technology, have to play out the desires and fantasies of these new ethnoscapes, while striving to reproduce the family-as-microcosm of culture.”

3. The Cultural Production of Locality:

-“Put simply, the task of producing locality (as a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community) is increasingly a struggle.”

-“The three factors that most directly affect the production of locality in the world of the present – the nation-state, diasporic flows, and electronic and virtual communities- are themselves articulated in variable, puzzling, sometimes contradictory ways that depend on the cultural, class, historical and ecological setting within which they come together. In part, this variability is itself a product of the way that todays’ ethnoscapes interact irregularly with finance, media, and technological imaginaries.”

“The problems of cultural reproduction in a globalized world are only partly describable in terms of problems of race and class, gender and power, although they are surely crucially involved. An even more fundamental fact is that the production of locality- always, as I have argued, a fragile and difficult achievement-is more than ever shot through with contradictions, destabilized by human motion, and displaced by the formation of new kinds of virtual neighbourhoods.”

20 April 2007 Cultural Identity in Making

Place: Cultural Identity in Making

1. Place and Identity:
(Reference- Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction; Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History)

-Place: all spaces that people have made meaningful; all spaces people are attached to in one way or another. Space is meaningful location.

-Three fundamental aspects of place as a “meaningful location” (John Agnew):

• a. location: fixed objective co-ordinates on the Earth’s surface;
• b. locale: material setting for social relations, actual shape of place within which people conduct their lives as individuals, the concrete/material form of a place. Places are material things.
• c. Sense of place: subjective and emotional attachment people have to place, the feeling of “to be there”.

-Space vs. Place: space is a more abstract concept than place. Spaces have areas and volumes. Space have been seen in distinction to place as realm without meaning. When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way it becomes a place.

-Place vs. Landscape: landscape referred to a portion of the Earth’s surface that can be viewed from one spot. In most definitions of landscape the viewer is outside of it, and this is the primary way in which it differs from place. Places are very much things to be inside of it. As a viewer, we do not live in landscapes, we look at them, and we only live in a place as an inhabitant.

-Place as a Way of Understanding: place is not just a thing in the world but a way of understanding the world. Place is a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world. When we look at the world as a world of places, we see attachments and connections between people and place, and we see worlds of meaning and experience.

-Production of Place: places are not finished products; instead, they are very much in process. Places are created by cultural practices such as literature, film and music (in short, representation), but most places are more often the product of everyday practices.

“I brought a picture with a frame and put it on the wall. Prior to this, all four walls were bare. I did this without telling them because I thought that since I paid for this room, I should be allowed to do something about it. So I arranged the room, put furniture and TV (the way I wanted them). I would leave the door open so that they (my employers) could see what’s in my room, that it’s not dull anymore.” (Mhay’s words (a Filipina contract worker in Vancouver), quoted by Geraldine Pratt)

-Places are never finished but produced through the repetition of seemingly mundane activities on a daily basis (order of everyday life).

-Everyday life appears to be a personal thing, but it is also social. People often acquire a sense of place in a particular community, and in turn people are connected (or believe themselves to be connected) through the sense of place; consequentially, a particular cultural identity is constituted.

-But places are also sites of contestation. Thus, the question concerning place is a political question. While people fight for places, they construct and maintain places as well.

-Henri Lefebvre, the French philosopher argues that every society has shaped a unique social space that meets its intertwined requirements for economic production and social reproduction. Lefebvre suggests that the production of space is essential to the inner workings of the political economy.

-Lefebvre emphasized the importance of space for shaping social reproduction. One of the consistent ways to limit the economic and political rights of groups has been to constrain social reproduction by limiting access to space.


-Examples:














Exclusion of Japaness Americans from a residential neighbourhood in Hollywood, California



Male and female students sitting separately at a lecture on physics, University of Michigan School, late 1880s



Cognitive maps of Los Angeles as perceived by predominantly Anglo American residents of Westwood, predominantly African American residents of Avalon, predominantly Latino American residents of Boyle Heights (The Visual Environment of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Department of City Planning, April 1971, pp.9-10)

-「職工盟帶過天水圍街坊”出城”，發覺她們連幾條主要隧道的名字都不知道。在文化認同上，她們只是一個” 天水圍人”，不是”香港人”」(陳惜姿﹕《天水圍12師奶》，頁159)

-Questions: how cultural identity and cultural politics of identity are constructed and shaped through the creation of meanings in place? Is it possible to intervene the cultural politics of identity through the production and technology of place?Through the preservation or constitution of social/public memories.

-One of the ways in which memories are constituted is through the production of place. Monuments, museums, the preservation of particular buildings and the promotion of whole urban neighbourhoods as “heritage zones” are all examples of the placing of memory. The very materiality of a place suggests that memory is inscribed in the landscape as public memory. Place is the realm of history-in-place.


2. Vietnam Veteran's Memorial(1982) by Maya Ying Lin (林瓔):
(Reference- Maya Ying Lin, Boundaries; Freida Lee Mock, Maya Lin - A Strong Clear Vision (DVD, 1995))

- Although administered under National Parks Service of the Federal Government, VVM was built in 1982 through the impetus of a group of Vietnam Veterans, who raised the funds and negotiated for a site on the National Mall in Washington.

-Situated on the grassy slope of the Constitutional Gardens nears the Lincoln Memorial, the memorial consists of two polished black walls of granite set into the earth at an angle of 125 degrees. The walls form an extended V almost 500 feet in length, tapering in both directions from a height of approximately ten feet at the central hinge. These walls inscribed with 58132 names of men and women who died in the war. The framing dates of 1959 and 1975 are the only dates listed on the wall; the names are listed alphabetically within each “casualty day”, though those dates are not noted.

-Virtually all of the national memorials and monuments in Washington are made of white stone and are constructed to be seen from a distance. In contrast, the VVM cuts into the sloping earth: it is not visible until one is almost upon it. The walls reflect the Washington Monument and the face of the Lincoln Memorial, but they are not visible from the base of either of those structures.

-Before it was built, the memorial was seen by many veterans and critics of modernism as yet another abstract modernist work that the public would find difficult to interpret. But they simply ignored fundamental aspects of this wall. It is not simply a flat, black, abstract wall: it is a wall inscribed with names. When the public visits this memorial, they do not go to see long walls cut into earth but to see the names of those whole lives were lost in the war. Hence, to call this a modernist work is to privilege a formalist reading of its design and to negate its commemorative and textual functions. While modernism in sculpture has been defined as a kind of “site-less-ness,” the memorial is specially situated within the national context of the Mall: the black walls mirror not only the faces of viewers but also the Washington obelisk, thus forming a pastiche of monuments.

-Before it was built, the design of the memorial was under attack not only because of its modernist aesthetics but because it violated implicit taboos about the remembrance of wars. When its design was first unveiled, it was condemned as a highly political statement, a monument to defeat. One Veteran of VVMF read it black walls as evoking “shame, sorrow, degradation of all races”; others perceived its refusal to rise above the earth as indicative of defeat.

-The primary aspect of the memorial that is responsible for the accusation that it does not appropriately remember war is its antiphallic presence. By “antiphallic”I do not mean to imply that the memorial is somehow a passive or feminine form but rather that it opposes the codes of vertical monuments symbolizing power and honour. The memorial does not stand erect above the earth, it is continuous with the earth. The shape of V has been interpreted as V for Vietnam, victim, victory, veteran, violate, valor. Yet, one also finds here a subtext in which the memorial implicitly evokes castration. The V has been read as a female V, reminding us that a “gash”is not only a wound but slang for the female genitals. To its critics it symbolizes the open, castrated wound of this country’s venture into an unsuccessful war.

-At the time the designer of the memorial was chosen anonymously by a group of eight male experts, Maya Lin was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Yale University. She was not only young and incredential, but Chinese-American and, most importantly, female. Eventually, Lin was defined not as American but as “other”. The otherness became an issue not only in the way she was perceived in the media and by some of the veterans, it became a critical issue of whether or not that otherness had informed the design itself

-Trouble between Maya Lin and the veterans began almost immediately. The initial response to Lin’s design was so divided that it eventually became clear to the veterans of the MF that they had either to compromise or to postpone the project. At the end, a plan was devised to erect an alternative statue and flag close to the walls of the memorial, and realist sculptor Frederick Hart was chosen to design it. It was erected in 1984, consists of 3 solders – one black and two white – standing and looking in the general direction of the wall.

- The Name: the chronological listing of names on the VVM provides it with a narrative framework. Read chronologically, the names chart the story of the war. As the names listed alphabetically within a casualty day swells, the intensity of the war is told.

-The incommunicability of the experience of the Vietnam War has been a primary narrative in the Vietnam veterans’discourse. It was precisely this incommunicability that rendered the construction of the VVM necessary. It was due to the fact that, the veterans had been invisible and without voice before the VVM’s construction and the subsequent interest in discussion of the war. Unlike WWII veterans, Vietnam veterans did not arrive home en masse for a celebration but one by one, without any welcome. They were marginalized in the society.

-Within the veterans’ community another group is struggling against an imposed silence: the women veterans. Upon their return, these women were not only subject to the same difficulties as the veterans but were also excluded from the veteran community. Thus, several of these women raised funds to place an intentionally apolitical statue of a woman near the VVM. In August 1990, a design competition for the memorial, to be located just south of the wall, was announced. It’s Hart’s statue that the absence of women so visible make them initiate the project.

- The VVM has been the subject of an extraordinary outpouring of sentiment since it was built. It is presently the most visited site on the Washington Mall. The memorial has taken on all of the trappings of a religious shrine – people bring personal artefacts to leave at the wall as offering. This rush to embrace the memorial as a cultural symbol reveals not only the relief of voicing a history that has been taboo but also a desire to re-inscribe that history. To the veterans, the wall is an atonement for their treatment since the war; to the families and friends of those who died, it is an official recognition of their sorrow and an opportunity to express a grief that was not previously sanctioned; to the others, it is either a profound antiwar statement or an opportunity to rewrite the history of the war to make it fit more neatly into the master narrative of American imperialism. The Memorial’s popularity must thus be seen as an integral component of the recently emerged Vietnam War nostalgia industry. (it transform guilt into duty and pride)

-As the healing process of the Vietnam War is transformed into spectacle and commodity, a complex nostalgia industry has grown.

- The National Park Service is now compiling an archive of the materials left at VVM. Originally, the Park Service classified the objects as “lost and found”. Later, it realized that the objects had been left intentionally, and they began to save them. The objects thus moved from the cultural status of being “lost”to historical artefacts.

- The subject of memorial is not limited to Vietnam War, the objects related to issues such as AIDS, homosexual, Gulf War had also been left at VVM.

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Lecture 9:Notes on: “Invention of tradition”, “imagined communities” (nationalism in making)

Lecture VIII 30.03.07

Notes on: “Invention of tradition”, “imagined communities” (nationalism in making)

By Leung Po-shan

Indicative text:
Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (1983).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1991).
John Hutchinson & Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism (1994).

Further reading:
Wu Hung, “Tiananmen Square: A political history of monuments”, Representations, no. 35, 1991, pp.84-117.
---. “The Hong Kong Clock-Public Time-telling and political time/space”, Public Culture, vol. 9 noo.3 Spring 1997, pp.329-354.

Nation in films:
Triumph des Willens = Triumph of the will

AV DVD-Video DD253.T74 DVD

__________________.

Introduction

We could hardly identify a person without acknowledging his/ her nationality, as if we could not do so without know his/ her gender. Gender and territorial are the fundamental of all , while classes , religious and ethnic are believed to be cross border, and a stronger collectivity, respectively.

“[… ] Nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” (Anderson p.15)
“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” (Quote from Gellner / Anderson p.15)

(think of the lyrics in 汪明荃 勇敢的中國人：做個勇敢中國人 熱血灌醒中國魂 我萬眾一心那懼犧牲 衝開黑暗)
(also, public and public space- which constitute the other? Further discussion on Tinannmin Square)

Four historians’ studies on nationalism:

Eric Hobsbawm
Benedict Anderson
Anthony D. Smith
Ernest Gellner

Eric Hobsbawm: Invention of tradition:
- Investigation to the rise of nationalism as a “secular religion”
- Nation-State as a project of modernity (autonomous in philosophical sense and homogenization in social sense)
- Nationalism is a cultural project: language, schooling, festival & rituals, i.e. tradition invented by the elites to legitimate their power in the age of revolution and democratization

Formation of tradition:
“’Traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented.” (p.1)

“[…] a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past. […] the peculiarity of ‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. […] It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the ‘invention of tradition’ so interesting for historians of the past two centuries.”

e.g. British parliament in Gothic architectural style (pp.1-2)

Relation to ‘custom’:

“Custom in traditional societies has the double function of motor and fly-wheel. It does not preclude innovation that it must appear compatible or even identical with precedent imposes substantial limitation on it. What is does is to give desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history.” > custom is variant;

e.g. custom is the judge while tradition is the wig & robe, the ritualized practices (p.2-3)

Relation to convention or routine:

- “not significant ritual or symbolic function” technical repetition to ease industrial standardization that require invariance ; is non-ideological (p.3)

- very often convention and tradition are in conversion (p.4)

e.g. hard-hats is practical convention while hunting pink is not

Construction of invented tradition:

- process of formalization & ritualization with reference to the past by repetition

- at the time when “ a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional carries and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise, eliminated. ” (p.4-5) (think of 打醮and charity)

- ritual complex: festival pavilions, structure for the display of flags, temples for offerings, processions, bell-ringing, tableaux, gun-salutes, government delegations in honour of the festival, dinners, toasts and oratory. (p.6)

- for political institutions, ideological movements & groups including nationalism, “were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented […] by semi-fiction or by forgery & new symbols including national anthem, national flag, personification of the nation in symbol or image (p.7)

- Old tradition not used because and in need of invented traditions because “liberal ideology failed to provide for the social and authority ties taken for granted in earlier societies, and created voids which might have to be filled by invented practices.” (p.8) This is especially the situation of believers of Enlightenment, including liberals, socialists, and communists because of the irrationalism in old traditions.

- Tradition is thus invented to segregate classes, or foster superiority of elites in a society that all members are equal de facto. Middle class is thus here the target of assimilation. (p.10)

- Old tradition were specific and strongly binding social practices; while invented practices tended to be quite unspecific and vague as to the values, rights and obligations of the group membership, thus sometimes the practices symbolizing it were virtually compulsory (p.10-11) (they are empty signifiers and arbitrary) The significance lay precisely in their undefined universality. e.g. standing up for national anthem, flag ritual & emblem

- New traditions often occupy small part of the space left by the secular decline of both old tradition and custom; the past becomes increasingly less relevant as a model or precedent for most form of human behaviour and their private life. (p.11)/ However this generalization does not apply in the field of public life of the citizen. There is no weakening especially in occasion involving bodies of men in the public service or in association with the state. People are reminded their citizenship with the presence of symbols and semi-ritual. (p.12)

- Further explanation on “secular religion”:

Invention of tradition by liberal constitutional institutions and liberal ideology, i.e. the middle class, re-discover the irrational elements in maintaining social fabric & order. (Enlightenment is “over-examination” of the intellectuality of the mankind.) Nationalism becomes a “civic religion” (p.268)

General observation since the industrial revolution (p.9):

i. establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the member of groups, real or artificial communities; (prevalent)

ii. establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority; (devised)

iii. those whose main purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour. (devised)
___________.

Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities” – in accord with Anderson that nation is an artefact.

- 1. objective modernity and the subjective antiquity on nationalism; 2. formal universality of nationality as socio-cultural concept

- ‘imagined (political) community’ – community larger than face-to-face contact

- nation is limited on territory (sovereign) and population (citizen); while legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm is destroyed. (p. 16)

- community: nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. (p. 16)

- Condition lost their ground: i. script language access to ontological truth, language was inseparable from that truth; ii. Belief in society is naturally organized around high centre, e.g. monarchs rule by cosmological dispensation; iii. Temporality in which cosmology and history was indistinguishable. (p. 40)

- *** coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, hitherto seed the ground for politico-religious purpose. Vernacular administration by monarchs fostered the erosion of the sacred imagined community. That was ‘state’, not ‘national’, languages; in administration made vernacular language prevailed. (Norman, Latin, French and early English). While there was an interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity. It was an interplay between fatality, technology and capitalism.

- Print language: i. unified fields of exchange and communications below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars; ii. New fixity to language, give a permanent form to language, it is no longer subject to individualization ; iii. Language of power replaced administrative vernaculars. (dialects suppressed)

Dynastic Realm (p.25-28)
“Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who after all, are subjects, not citizens. In the modern state conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another.”

(~ Monarchical states and marriage)

Apprehensions of time:
- Messianic time (Benjamin): “a simultaneity of part and future in an instantaneous present.” (p.30)
- “Homogeneous time”- time has lost its seasonal as well as religious meaning (p.31)
- Novel & newspaper :
“The idea of a sociological organism moving calendarically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.” (p.30)
“The significance of this mass ceremony- Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” (p.39)

(37-39)

Secular Religion & irrationalism (Anderson p.19)

“[…] in western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought […] Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. […] If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nations to which they give political expression, glide into a limitless future.” (p.19)

( ~ distinction between myth and history)

“Nor am I suggesting that somehow nationalism historically ‘supersedes’ religion. What I am proposing that somehow nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which- it came into being.” (p.19)

(~ Also see most of the heroic statuary standing in public square are in fact, victory or victim of violence. Death and immortality are tightly connected to nation. (The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing / W. J. T. Mitchell))

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More:

Gellner – "Nationalism and high culture":

Secular religion – p.65

High and low culture – p. 65-66

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Hobsbwam’s concluding chapter: Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914

Case of France:

Third Republic emphasis the recent past of the nation, nothing before 1789. e.g. Bastille Day, Marianne tricolor flag (liberty, equality & fraternity) and technological progress e.g. Eiffel Tower and expo, global conquest through colony.

Less favor gigantic statuary (for the monarchy has left enough) but emphasis on “democracy”, civilian figure and local patriotism.

Case of Germany (Bismarck & Wilhelm II):

- continuity from the Prussia

- conquest of cultural, political and military supremacy esp. Franco-German war

e.g. large masonry, architects and sculptors becomes engineer of imagination; Reichstage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Reichstag_mit_Wiese2.jpg )

Fig: Beschreibung: Reichstagsgebäude in Berlin mit Wiese

Quelle: selbst fotografiert von Johann H. Addicks

Lizenz: unter PD gestellt von Johann H. Addicks

Entstehungsdatum: Juni 2005

Fig: Golden Jubilee 2002 crowd outside the Buckingham Palace

Both monarchy and parliament states “relied on exploiting the royal person, with or without dynastic ancestors, on elaborate ritual occasions with associated propagandist activities and a wide participation of the people […] both make the ruler the focus of his people’s or people’s unity, symbolic representation of the entire past and continuity with a changing present. Yet the innovations were perhaps more deliberate and systematic where, as in Britain, the revival of royal ritualism was seen as a necessary counterweight to the dangers of popular democracy.” (p.282) “Glory and greatness, wealth and power, could be symbolically shared by the poor through royalty and its rituals. The greater the power [of the bourgeois], the less attractive […]” (p.283)

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More: Identity building in pubic/ private space:

Example- film: Do the right thing.