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Text of the page (random words):
eze in latvian the verb griezt means both to cut and to shriek the bird taking its name from the latter meaning dainas usually using both senses is a bird most often heard but not seen associated with the ripening of rye without an understanding of the relations between corncrakes grain and even dogs the sense of the song falters latvian speakers can avail themselves of resources like elina kūla braže s marvelous putnu dienas in which 25 of the most notable birds in latvian folklore fly between god s gardens and hell the adventures of the corncrake being especially interesting as a matter of fact you can now search and access more than 200 000 dainas from your mobile phone but if you ve never seen rye ripening and never heard a corncrake call you will still be at a loss on to the fatherland skaidra volūda is clearly at least superficially as primordialist as can be to use a term scholars of nationalism like anthony d smith the author of the ethnic origins of nations would employ it could be a perfect illustration of the nationalist view in contrast to the perennialist modernist and post modernist takes as summarized here for example smith concludes none of these formulations seems to be satisfactory history is no sweetshop in which its children may pick and mix but neither is it an unchanging essence or succession of superimposed strata in the riveting warwick debates the nation real or imagined smith identifies three problems with the modernist theories their generality their materialism and most crucial since it stems from their commitment to modernism the idea that nations and nationalisms are the product of modernisation what this systematically overlooks is the persistence of ethnic ties and cultural sentiments in many parts of the world and their continuing significance for large numbers of people eric hobsbawm indeed goes so far as to deny any connection between the popular proto national communities that he analyses and subsequent political nationalisms introducing an approach he terms ethno symbolic it is here that smith parts company with his teacher ernest gellner this is exactly where i disagree modern political nationalisms cannot be understood without reference to these earlier ethnic ties and memories and in some cases to pre modern ethnic identities and communities i do not wish to assert that every modern nation must be founded on some antecedent ethnic ties let alone a definite ethnic community but many such nations have been and are based on these ties including the first nations in the west france england castile holland sweden and they acted as models and pioneers of the idea of the nation for others and when we dig deeper we shall find an ethnic component in many national communities since whether the nation was formed slowly or was the outcome of a more concerted project of nation building smith s opening statement is entitled nations and their pasts in his response do nations have navels gellner wanders into our part of the world there are very very clear cases of modernism in a sense being true i mean take the estonians at the beginning of the nineteenth century they didn t even have a name for themselves they were just referred to as people who lived on the land as opposed to german or swedish burghers and aristocrats and russian administrators they had no ethnonym they were just a category without any ethnic self consciousness since then they ve been brilliantly successful in creating a vibrant culture this is obviously very much alive in the ethnographic museum in tartu which has one object for every ten estonians and there are only a million of them the museum has a collection of 100 000 ethnographic objects estonian culture is obviously in no danger although they make a fuss about the russian minority they ve inherited from the soviet system it s a very vital and vibrant culture but it was created by the kind of modernist process which i then generalise for nationalism and nations in general and if that kind of account is accepted for some then the exceptions which are credited to other nations are redundant later in his response gellner says that the estonians created nationalism ex nihilo in the course of the nineteenth century gellner passed away prior to the planned third lecture smith offered memory and modernity reflections on ernest gellner s theory of nationalism in his stead though it s unavailable at the london school of economics asen site without a password tamil nationalists offer it here i could quibble here and say that the issue was not whether the estonians created nationalism ex nihilo in the nineteenth century but whether the estonian nation was created by the estonian nationalists ex nihilo and while we would both agree that estonian nationalism indeed any nationalism was modern where ernest and i would differ is whether the nations that nationalism creates are wholly modern creations ex nihilo now here lies the rub if we pursue the analogy we recall that god created adam fashioning his body and then breathing life into it not even the most megalomaniac nationalist has claimed quite that power they have of course seen themselves as awakeners but the body of the nation merely slumbered it was not without life should we confer on nationalists that divine power to create ex nihilo of course ernest wants to confer that power through nationalism ultimately on modernity on the growth society on industrialism and its cultural prerequisites for ernest the genealogy of the nation is located in the requirements of modernity not the heritage of pre modern pasts ernest is claiming that nations have no parents no pedigree except the needs of modern society those needs can only be met by a mass public literate specialised and academy supervised culture a high culture preferably in a specific language which allows context free communication a high culture is the only cement for a modern mobile industrial society and this is the only kind of society open to us today for ernest the world was irreversibly transformed by a cluster of economic and scientific changes since the seventeenth century traditional agro literate societies were increasingly replaced by growth oriented mobile industrial societies the rise of high cultures and nations is a consequence of the mobility and anonymity of modern society and of the semantic non physical nature of modern work today what really matters is not kingship or land or faith but education into and membership of a high culture community that is a nation smith observes that the estonians did have a navel after all the kalevipoeg as the finns had the kalevala both epics traced the descent of the finns and estonians to iron age culture communities and thereby provided these dispossessed and subject peoples with a sense of their dignity through native ancestry and an ancient and heroic ethnic past in this way they confirmed the worldwide belief in the virtues of national geneologies to dismiss this by attributing it to the ubiquitous influence of nationalism again begs the question of why so many people have been mobilised on the basis of this particular belief in the genealogy of nations besides nationalists have usually managed to find some historical antecedents for their nations to be albeit often embellished and exaggerated and this suggests that there are mechanisms at work which ensure some connection and even continuity between the modern nation and one or more pasts smith goes on to discuss high culture key to gellner s theory in an interesting section of nations and nationalism ernest contrasts the high culture of modern societies with the low cultures of agro literate societies a high culture as we have seen is a literate sophisticated culture serviced by specialised educational personnel and taught formally in mass public standardised and academy supervised institutions of learning it is a highly cultivated or garden culture a low culture by contrast is wild spontaneous undirected and unsupervised these are the cultures that readily spring up unbidden in societies where the great mass of the population are food producers servicing the needs of tiny specialised elites clerisies aristocracies merchants and the like who are almost completely cut off socially and culturally from the peasant masses in such a society there is neither need nor room for nations and nationalisms since the many low cultures of the peasants are local and almost invisible thus in agro literate societies in ernest s words culture tends to be branded either horizontally by social caste or vertically to define very small local communities now for ernest all these low cultures are doomed they are cut off like so many umbilical cords because they are simply irrelevant in an impersonal mobile modern society if they are remembered at all it is only through some symbols in the same way that navels remind us of our origins nationalism ernest claims is basically a product of modernity it is he says essentially the general imposition of a high culture on society where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority and in some cases the totality of the population it is the establishment of an anonymous impersonal society with mutually substitutable atomized individuals held together above all by a shared culture of this kind in place of a previous complex structure of local groups sustained by folk cultures reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro groups themselves that is what really happens nothing could be clearer the many old low cultures vanish they are replaced by a single new high culture or nation this is the true meaning of nationalism but there are two problems here of which ernest was well aware some low cultures are not severed instead they become high cultures the finns and the estonians clearly fall into this category as do many of the cultures of the other smaller subject peoples of eastern europe and the former soviet union the other problem is that certain old elite cultures become high cultures the literary cultures of the jews the armenians and the greeks clearly fall under this heading as do several of the cultures of western peoples like the catalans scots and french awareness of the difficulties posed for modernism by both these problems is an important source of its ambivalence how do low cultures become high cultures why does estonian win out over german swedish and russian cultures in estonia and finnish over swedish and russian cultures in finland both these cultures were local popular largely confined to the peasants at least at first why do these ruritanians become conscious of their local folk cultures and seek to turn what were low cultures into high ones for the nation to be or were they really such low cultures and is the contrast between low and high cultures as sharp as ernest alleges in the case of estonia we know of estonian language religious texts during the reformation and certainly by the seventeenth century with the establishment of the university of tartu and later forselius school system the basis of a literate estonian culture emerged a century and a half before the arrival of the romantic movement in the baltic states in the mid nineteenth century nihil ex nihilo is smith s conclusion no primordialist he however he stresses the fact that that pre modern ethnies are not nations but what they do have and what they bequeath albeit selectively to modern nations is a fund of myths symbols values and shared memories some distinctive customs and traditions a general location and sometimes a proper name without these shared memories and traditions myths and symbols the basis for creating a nation is tenuous and the task herculean so to paraphrase rousseau a nation must have a navel and if they have not got one we must start by inventing one and it is because nations have navels and because those navels and the memories and traditions myths and symbols they represent mean so much to the people that have them that we are so unlikely to see the early transcendence of nations and nationalism i ve quoted smith at such length though i do hope readers will read the warwick debates and the memorial lecture in full because anyone familiar with political and historical discourse in latvia will immediately call to mind many a local specific that sheds light upon and or is illuminated by smith s ethno symbolic approach gellner s remarks about the estonians they were just referred to as people who lived on the land echo pastor brasche s response to the young latvians for instance he called them a jung bauernstand a peasant class without a past see this wikipedia article about the movement which has remained curiously intact since i wrote it smith again what 1 am arguing here is that most modern languages and cultures are not invented they are connected to and often continuous with much older cultures which the modernising nationalists adapt and standardise by ernest s criteria many of these older languages and cultures were high cultures but even where they were low or lower spontaneous popular cultures they could become the basis for a subsequent high culture ernest hints at this when he speaks of ruritanians in the metropolis of megalomania who faced with the problems of labour migration and bureaucracy soon come to understand the difference between dealing with a co national one understanding and sympathising with their culture and someone hostile to it this very concrete experience taught them to be aware of their culture and to love it or indeed to wish to be rid of it in other words it is the old low culture to which they cling or not as the case may be and it is the old low culture which far from being cut off and thrown away will soon become the modern high taught culture albeit for several hundred thousands or millions of people these processes stand out prominently in latvian history since krišjānis valdemārs assimilation and resistance to it the interplay of continuity and discontinuity and the creation of a high culture on the basis of a low culture as well as the exaltation of the low culture and its reshaping to meet expectations of what a national culture ought to look like according to this german or that russian or diverse ideologues dreamers and fantasists of our own not rarely grotesquely the photograph is from a gallery at delfi of events marking bear slayer s day posted by pēteris cedriņš at 10 59 15 comments 18 december 2008 baby bathwater books my parents crossed the ocean to begin their new life in the new world with only four crates three of those crates held books much of my father s library which continued to grow even after his death the last volumes he had subscribed to still arriving lines the walls here in daugavpils now the core of my own collection latvian publishing was astonishingly continuous frail pamphlets were published in the d p camps even before the war s end high quality reappear...