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

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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))

________.

More:

Gellner – "Nationalism and high culture":

Secular religion – p.65

High and low culture – p. 65-66

________.

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.