Speech, Speech!

Jeg ved, der er gaaet lang tid siden mit sidste indlaeg, hvilket selvfoelgelig, ulogisk nok, er et tegn paa at der er sket en hel masse. Ogsaa udover, at denne blog er blevet kategoriseret som Porno af GBS' netsikkerheds-system, og ujeg derfor ikke kan komme ind paa den derfra. Mens jeg forsoeger at faa skrevet et indlaeg, hvor jeg kan samle op paa alle de ting, der er sket, taenkte jeg, jeg lige ville laegge det oplaeg, jeg holdt for alle laererne i afdelingen, op. Det er et forsoeg paa at forklare for dem, hvad det egentlig er, jeg har gaaet og lavet; en information, jeg gaar ud fra nogen af jer ogsaa ville kunne bruge. Det maa ogsaa goere op for den projektbeskrivelse, jeg aldrig har faaet lavet. God fornoejelse!

First of all I would like to thank you for everything that has happened to me during the course of my stay. As I wrote in the little letter that I sent I you have all made me feel so welcome, and I have really enjoyed my stay, and I really truly feel saddened that it’s nearing it’s end. I hope this little presentation will shed a little light on what I have been doing here, and the purpose of my sometimes kind of odd behavior, and hopefully satisfy some of your curiosity.

The presentation will be focused around three major pillars, the topic and theoretical background for my project; my methodology how I came to choose it and my guesses regarding how my analysis and will eventually turn out. Of course I have done very little of the actual data analysis so far, so I won’t be able to get very specific, and there is a good chance that some of what I say today will change as I bury myself deeper in the data, but this is the way I see it at this point, and just based on my intuitive sense of the data as I have collected them. Most likely when I’m done the reaction you’ll sit back with is “ Was that it?” ,“Is that all he got from hanging on to our coattails and distracting our classes for all these weeks?”. And well, yeah it is kind of. The work I’m doing goes in to a very specific theoretical context, and the purpose of the research relates quite intimately with this theoretical framework, and deals with the usability of it a context similar to the one I have been working in. I know Suzie believes, that I during this presentation will reveal myself as a genuine A-hole who has been taking terrible advantage of you, and secretly only want bad things for you guys. I truly hope, that is not the perception you are left with after this presentation.
I don’t know exactly how much time we have, and I also don’t know exactly how long this presentation, but I really hope we have time before this bell rings, for you all to comment and ask questions, I would very much like to hear your opinions, or if you think there’s something I’ve gotten all wrong. If we don’t have time to get to all of your questions today, you know I will be around the office for a couple of more weeks, so we can continue the discussions over the lunch table….

So anyway, I might as well get down to it. The overall topic of my study and of the work that I have been doing in my last couple of various projects is the everyday production of nation identities, or as it is frequently referred to “Banal Nationalism”. Now when most people hear the word nationalism, they think of it in sense of one of the three following categories any combination of those: Historical Nationalism. The creation of the ideas and later of the practical reality of nation-states or movement aimed towards political organization based on ethnical or otherwise historically determined boundaries. This is a phenomenon primarily pinpointed to Europe around the turn of the 19th century, primarily seen as part of the romanticist movement combined with geopolitical shuffles in relation to the redrawing of the European map after the Napoleonic wars. Seperatist Nationalism in Modernity. The broad specter of political movements across the globe in the 20th and 21st centuries aimed at redrawing pre-modern boundaries or grant political autocracy to regions or groups based perceived ethnical or cultural boundaries. Examples of this would be the postcolonial movements in Africa, or the so-called Balkanization of Eastern and Southeastern Europe. And finally Political Nationalism, a political movement centered around a series a policies based in perceived cultural values or the right to national autonomy, frequently associated with extreme right-wing policies, with notions of supremacy over others, and with political violence. So either a historical occurrence, a geopolitical movement or an ideology. In most academic literature, as well as the use of the word Nationalism I everyday speech presupposes a definition of the connection that encompasses all of these to a certain degree, and in a way, which might not even be aware of the differences between the three. But even a clear-cut definition of the concept which takes the obvious separateness of the three uses of the word are, in my opinion, missing an important part of the point, when It comes to the role of nationality and national identity in a practical sense.

Of course at basis of a research such as this lies a certain degree of a constructivist approach towards the formation of identity in individuals as well as a communal phenomenon. Identity is seen as not something nature-given to the individual but as a psychosocial phenomenon embedded I a wide variety of culturally and ritually laden practices, conceptualizations and institutions. The reason communities exist is as such the fact that people act as if they existed, and that their existence I presupposed linguistically, institutionally, visually etc. et.c The British Social Theorist in his groundbreaking book “Banal Nationalism” phrased it:

”Banal Nationalism possesses a low key, understated tone. In routine practices (…) the idea of nationhood is regularly flagged. Even the daily weather forecast can do this. Through such flagging, established nations are reproduced as nations, with their citizenry being unmindfully reminded of their national identity”.

The study of Banal Nationalism thus deals with the manor in which national categories, nationalist notions, rhetoric and ideological assumptions as well as the idea of national specificity are reconstituted on a daily basis in well-established, stable nation-states whose existence is not threatened or even questioned. This question is particularly relevant, when considering the thorough and basically irrefutable deconstruction the concept itself as well as its ideological baggage have gone through and the fact that we are supposed to be living in a glocalized state, where nation-state level policymaking and inter-nation-state relations are supposed to be dwindling in importance as a result of the Internet, economic interdependency, network-based relations and internationalizing elites. In spite of all this I believe there is reason to believe, that the world is currently seeing, although changed, but still more nationalism as supposed to internationalism or a-nationalism, rather than less, if you define the term as I did before. It is important however to state, that there in it self nothing normative about the term, in spite of highly inflammatory felling usually related to it. Banal Nationalism is , in fact, something we all have, or rather do, and it is in determining the form and content of it the actual research lies. Also I believe, there is reason to believe that gaining a better understanding of the Banally Nationalistic practices in a community is a valuable entrance way to gaining an understanding of the culture as a whole.

Now, as I said, Michael Billig, the person who developed this theoretical framework, is British, and in spite of the enormous impact his work has had on academia in Europe, he is still very rarely read over here, and the work that he has previously inspired is are to an overwhelming degree centered around European examples and based on a European context. This is additionally surprising when you take in to account the fact that Billig himself uses the waving of the American flag as the prime example of Banal Nationalistic behavior, and the fact that the exclusion of non-European modernized states such as the US from your scope of research gravely undermines it’s credibility in terms of the universality of your basic categories and assumptions. There are certainly reasons to believe that some of the conclusions that have been made in research projects centered on a European context would not be applicable on the US: The US is a much larger country; its based on expansion; it’s based on quite recent waves of immigration; it has a decidedly decentralized structure of governance; it has a wide number of self-conscious and well-organized political minorities, but without any serious political separatist movements representing either of them. None of which can be said of any European state. Based on the standard definition of the term the US isn’t even a nation-state, because here are no direct correlation between political and ethno-cultural boundaries. And yet the political, rhetorical, visual and institutional make-up of the US is laden with stuff which only be described as fitting the definition of Banal Nationalism like a glove.

So in short it is this dilemma, as well as this apparent gap in the theoretical literature, that I am in all modesty trying to open a path towards solving with this little project. Other kinds of research project inspired by this or similar schools of thought are frequently carried out by analyzing large (or sometimes not so large) amounts of quantitative data: The use of particular words in newspapers or movies, questionnaire surveys, the amount of money spend on certain products, the language and references used in advertisements and so forth: I myself did a study of the frequency and usage of institutionally recognized national symbols in the New York Times, People Magazine and USA Today on selected dates. But I’ve always felt that the best, however also the most vulnerable, way of gaining an understanding of someone’s everyday life is, in fact, to observe that everyday life. And my use of the anthropological approach came from there. Again surprisingly little anthropological research is done by European researcher in the US. In my opinion this stems in a certain degree to an inherit tradition in the field to focus either on the very familiar of the very distant. But apart from that it also stems from a very real concern among anthropologists that America as an abstract notion is far too big, too complex and too diverse for it to be possible to do any kind of valid or even remotely generalisable. And this is certainly true to a wide extent, but in my view that certainly shouldn’t discourage one from doing research altogether. I’ll get back a little later to how a have hoped to avoid the worst traps of this dilemma as well as the specific design of the research. But first I will just do short rundown of the theoretical background for this type of research for those of you who don’t deal in cultural studies or sociology on a daily basis.

Sociologically speaking I think it as appropriate, however not, chronologically accurate, place to start with the French structuralists around the middle of the 20th century who picked up the torch from the classical notion in early sociology, that results on the individual level should best be explained by causes at the structural or societal level. Claude Levi-Strauss rediscovered Freud’s notions of Totemism, and used it to explain the development of structures in society, as well as individual submissiveness towards them. The given state of a given society can be explained functionally and psychologically be referring to the individual and collective necessity of establishing an external regulator of individual or collectively destructive behavior. Roland Barthes continued on the methodological approach of Levi-Strauss, but continued to demonstrate how this process in stead of just establishing a few Leviathan-like institutions, necessitated the creation of a wide range of mythologies and the permeation of these into every aspect of the individual lives, sometimes with remarkable ideological consequences. This way of thinking not only gives an important key to where to look for the production and evolution of culture, it also gives a hint towards understanding the stubbornness in persistence of even easily deconstructed notions or communities.

After WWI The first actual theorizing of the nations since the days of classic National Romanticism of Rousseau or Herder was being done, and was very early on split into two major schools of thought: Essentialists, who believed in the originality of Nations or Ethnical Entities, and constructivists who asserted the notion of culture as being a result of random historical circumstances. For obvious reasons the essentialists suffered some setbacks as a result of WWII and later on the Civil rights movement, but it certainly didn’t die out in every-day public discourse, and current day theoretics as mentioned have to deal with the fact that nations and nation-states turned out to be more difficult to get rid of, when what might have been expected.

And even this split, or the apparent victory of constructivist theories have been challenged by an even more radical post-colonialist school of analysis, where even the attempts towards achieving geopolitical equality was criticized as being Euro-centric in the focus on westernly defined categories of individuality and societal life. With his book “Orientalism” Edward Said”, shifted the focus for cultural studies towards the studies of the processes of “othering”, which in his view determines the very core of communal self-understanding.

From the seventies and up till today a number of thinkers under the category of post-structuralism or post-modernism, have attempted to combine all of these various critiques and understandings in creating a new broad framework for understanding the world. Henri Lefebvre claimed, that the Everyday Life and the production of spatial categories and assumptions should be moved to the forefront of social studies. Michel Foucault combined sociological with linguistic structural Saussure-style linguistics in describing a world where the internalization of self-regulatory norms embedded in discourse was the significant form of alienation in modernity, and Jean Beaudrillard, the bad boy of post-structuralism stated, that the best way to describe the current state of affairs could best be described as a state of simulacrum, where the boundary between every-day life and ritualistic behavior had once again been blurred, but this time on the terms of globalized capitalism.

I hope all at that made sense, but in any case it does show, the complicated world view, every-life studies nowadays have to deal with or write themselves into. The most important cultural notions lie not in the exceptional but in the trivial, and banality in it self is a statement towards the strength of a notion. The necessity to externalize an idea be referring it to outside sources of legitimacy or “rational” explanations on the other hand is a sign of discursive struggle and the inability of that notion to achieve paradigmatic hegemony.

Anyway, turning back to the practicalities of my work most of you have already heard the basics of the story of how I got to GBS. As I said earlier, doing anthropological research within the US is usually considered rather pointless, unless you have a very specific group, you want to gain knowledge about, since talking about any kind of average-ness is pointless, when you take into the account the vas differences between north and south, east and west, urban and rural, poor and wealthy, whiten and non-white, English-speaking and non-English-speaking. However I felt it was important to try to make that attempt anyway, since it is obvious that the importance of the policies and Economic as well as cultural output America produces is impossible to overlook. The choice of using a high school environment as the basic scene for a research such as this one is quite an obvious one. High School is the level of education where you can be as certain as possible to get a broad reflection of the general population, and it is a scene, where the discussion or discursive reference to questions of values, beliefs and ideas are guaranteed due to the nature of the classes taught. In facing the question of representativity, I decided that a Northern, upper middle-class, predominantly white, suburb to one of the major cities, was as close as you were going to get to the archetypal image of at least that part of the population who will in future help determine the political agenda, the cultural production and the iconic image of American-ness which both the country and the rest of the world relates itself to.

As you know I have family in the area which is why I focused in on the North Shore in particular, and then I just started mailing to all the High Schools in the area, which turned up on a Google search. As I have learned to always go straight to the top I immodestly contacted the principals directly, which probably wasn’t a good idea, as most of the principals apparently just discarded my letter as some Nigerian money grabbing scam without looking at it. Which is why I got extra excited once I got a hold of Brian [Rektor] and later on of Terry [chefen for Social Studies-afdelingen], and learned that they were interested in allowing me to come here to GBS. They were literally the only ones who even took me and my project seriously, and I just don’t know how to repay for that. Because I don’t know what I would have done without it. In any case, once I arrived. Most of you probably remember that day, I just started going to as many classes as possible. Originally it was my intention do just sit in on HWC and regular level US History classes, because I felt the regular level compulsory classes would give me the most random and broad group of students to follow. I did, however, shortly discover that I simply was not able to retain my concentration and alertness by sitting in on the same classes being taught three or four times during the day. I therefore decided to broaden my research a little more and follow a wide range of classes for a diverse period of time and focus in stead on the classes, where I felt something was going on, that could be described as typical but at the same time but which at the same time had some personalities or group dynamics, which would ensure the flow of the debates in the classroom. After each day I have typed up my daily field notes, so I do have notes from every single class I have observed, but I believe that I will in the end focus in my report on the classes I have followed most intensely and for the longest periods of time. These being; 2 HWC classes[History of World Civilisations, obligatorisk,1. aar], 1 regular level US History [obligatorisk, 3. aar], one AP US Hiostory [niveauet over Regular} and 1 Political Science class {Valgfag, 4. aar}. The other observations however will probably serve merely as control data in my attempt to eradicate my from findings any inaccuracies due to individual teaching styles or dynamics of the individual class. Of course it is too early days for me to say anything in detail about it but it is my current impression, that I can to a large extent say that my findings were unaffected by those factors.

I had before I started my research based on my theoretical readings and previous work developed a series of categories and theses around which I initially based my note-taking. I’ll get back to these categories in a little while, but in any case I have had to tweak them a little bit over the course of my study in order to ensure precision and nuance in the terminology. Nevertheless they did structure the way I took notes over the first couple few weeks at least until Spring break or maybe even a couple of weeks after that. I would jot down during the class anything of interest and the at the end of the day, I would try to relate it to the categories or theses. In the last few weeks of my observations I decided in stead to focus on one or two specific things pr. day in order to give light to some of the areas my previous work had neglected to touch upon.

As you know, I have over last couple of weeks conducted four group interviews with at total of 16 students with representatives from all of the classes I have been focussing on. The purpose of these obviously was to both strengthen and enrichen the data gained from the observation studies. The interviews were structured about a series of word association games as a jumping of point for conversations about the students on a mixed selection of topics, some with a superficially speaking totally trivial content, some with an explicitly political or ethical content and some with more of an abstract construct. The object was to gain in insight into the way the students spoke as well as interacted when dealing with these various topics as well as the way they would change when moving from one topic to the other. All in all a pretty standard classic way of working. I have not yet transcribed the interviews, but my impression is that they do provide me with a kind of insight I could not have gained otherwise.

Finally, which I don’t know if I will use, I have taken I large number of picture of the school and of the classrooms after school, to get an image of the visual environment that dominates the field in which I did my research. I have never worked with that type of Data before, so I may just discard, once I get down to it, but other studies I have read kind of inspired me to see the kind of insights such a type of data might provide.

So with that I think it’s finally time to get down to the actual overview of the data itself. As A said previously, before I started the fieldwork and during the first couple of weeks of it I created five general categories of nationalism or, more correctly, Banally nationalistic behavior, I would be looking for, and which would structure my data gathering, and which will probably also play an important role in the way I will structure my analysis and report. I think we have probably already spent to much time on the theoretical details, so I won’t bore you the play-by-play of where I got these notions from, but if anyone is interested I would be more than happy to draw up a list of important references and inspirations. I will try to structure the run-through in a way so that I, for every category initially talks about what the category entails or means, then I will address shortly, why I felt that this category was particularly interesting or important, the Ill try and give an example of what I would be looking for in the classroom in relation to this category and finally my initial assessment of in what direction my analysis will go regarding each category so here we go:

The first category is what I have termed Nation-State Centered Nationalism. This is The archetypal form of Banal nationalism, where the individual or group in an unreflected way presupposes the existence and validity of the Nation-state as a framework of reference and Identity and as a geopolitical actor in its own right. As Michael Billig puts it:

“[Nationalism] is not confined to national borders, but its assumptions have been diffused internationally. George Bush in announcing the start of the Gulf War was addressing “the world”. He was speaking as if all nations would ( or should) recognize the morality of nationhood”.

In discourse this would for instance express itself in constant unreflected references to Nation-states as eternal or essential entities, or to them as actors in or propellers of historical events or developments. Simply referring casually to America or Brazil or Denmark without taking into consideration the historical and ideological flux these concepts where developed by and under is accepting to some degree or at least reproducing the paradigm of the Nation-State. This category is obviously important, because it is vital in claiming the discourse as banally nationalistic in the first place, but it’s certainly not just a formality. As I said there would be, and in deed there are researchers who would claim, that the specific American conditions would entail, that you can’t talk of Banal Nationalism in the US at all. I however found this type of behavior and discourse to just as wide a degree as my own and other projects have found all over Europe. If anything I would probably say that this type of discourse is more predominant over here rather than less. Not only is it completely dominant and unreflected, in student’s statements and rationalizations, it totally permeates the curriculum and the textbooks,, which is structured around themes such as “China” and “India”, and which is full of maps and charts, which does not only illustrate a Nation-State based world but which also designates Nation-States as entities with specific characteristics and patterns of action. “Because Germany was such-and-such, Russia did so-and-so”, and so forth.

The second category is what I call Decentralized Nationalism. This category would examine whether he students, at least when it came to there own country, so to speak, would recognize the Nation-State as just one among many policy making level, not qualitatively different from others. Now this category was of particular interest to me , because it strikes down to the core of the debate of the notion of Banal Nationalism. Some researchers would claim, that the Nation-State currently is dwindling in importance politically as well as cultural, due to the increase in power of a wide range of supranational, sub-national or trans-national entities or networks. There is in my mind probably no point in denying the truth of this in terms of the actual distribution of power and risk, but the research on the cultural or community-related consequences of this have certainly been inconsequential at best As Ulrich Beck put it:

“The irreversibility of the actions of contemporary society transcends class and borders (…) and as the production of risk becomes a-geographical so should the production of risk management”.

It is my belief, that this piece of research would give valuable insight into this question, since the US due to it’s history and constitution, probably have more experience with the power to sub-national entities and the legitimization of the nation-state level on these than any other western country. And also things like the internet, multinational corporations and a-geographical network organizations are as widespread here as anywhere, which should mean that this American experience to some extent should be a good foreshadowing of the future I relation to this question. In the classrooms this would for instance expose itself by having the kids referring to other references of identity, such as Illinois, The North Shore, Glenview or anything else with equal or similar strength as the national one as well as the recognition of the clash between the nation-based world of there textbooks or the historical narrative and the a-geographical world they live in, and there parents participate via their jobs and so forth. In fact, I believe that my research has shown very little of this , which hints towards the strength of the nation-state centered paradigm. Furthermore it does point towards a future increased gap between the perceived centers of powers and the actual ones, which in it self might be an interesting subject to study

The third category is what I have labeled racial or geographical nationalism. It is the belief that there is particularly important relationship between a geographical area and the people who live there. IN classical nationalism this is especially connected to what is described as the “German” state type, where the legitimacy of the state comes from the connection and representatively of the people it represents. The state is supposed to look like it’s people. The ideological heritage of this from the likes of Johan Gottfried Herder and Jean-Jacques Rousseau is found for instance in the, in European discourse so dominant “Tree-metaphor”. A person has “roots”, in the area where he “grows up”, and where is life and ideas are “grounded”. As the founder of modern post-imperialism Edward Said wrote

“The strength of this system of references where each separate instance of individual behavior could be deduced backwards and downwards was considerable in the formation of modern nations”

Certainly there was reason to believe that the American history of immigration and conquest would undermine or at least challenge this kind of thinking or metaphor. The idea of American-ness can in no way be as based in essentialist notions of race and culture as the notion of Danish-ness or German-ness, one would think. I my research have certainly, and unsurprisingly, showed this to be true. The idea of the correspondence between a particular race or culture with the category of this nation is all but eradicated, at least from the politically correct framework of thought as it is expressed in the classrooms of Glenbrook South. That there might still be traces of it in the debate over immigration or the Hispanic community is something I, unfortunately, will probably have to exclude from my research due to the practical limitations of it. However an interesting aspect of this question, which I will have to express in my work is the fact, that this expressed, and certainly understandable and important deconstruction of racial stereotypes and categories, has in some part apparently been replaced by a certain level of reductionism and essentialism when it comes to the way cultures are talked about. Race is considered a construct, but national or other cultures are thought of as factually existing and essential. Which certainly carries with it the ideological baggage of culture being something you “have and is an eternal and essential part of you, rather than as being something you “do”, and which is nothing more than the accumulative sum of individual actions. Although perhaps the use of the roots metaphor is less predominant here than in Europe, there is nothing to indicate that the students, in general challenge the notions of American-ness, Japanese-ness or Russian-ness as such. Although it would be considered extremely inappropriate to say that “African Americans are such and such”, saying that “Americans or Chinese are such and such”, is not only considered appropriate, it is a vital cornerstone in the curriculum, and tests are given on it.

The fourth category is what I call Geopolitical Nationalism, which refers to the idea that the nation-state is legitimized to some extent by the role it plays in a nation-state-centered world and institutions. Both in the sense of the geopolitical responsibilities and interests of the nations and the role of the state in protecting the individual from extra-terrestrial risks and dangers. When it comes to understanding the actions of a particular state or culture, the particular form or value given to this is extremely interesting because, it not only gives and insight into which values and beliefs are superimposed on the category of the nation-state, but also how the psycho-social process of recognizing the state, whether it be as totem or Leviathan, works. IN class I would pay specific attention to the use of community-constructing terms such as “we” or “here”, and in what ways these were connected with unreflected normative statements on the proper way of things, and to which degree these statements were challenged or even noted in class. I must say, I have found less of this than I probably expected, and I don’t believe, that there is any reason to say that in spite of the fact, that American are usually in Europe described as exceptionally flag-waving and certain of the particular normal values and responsibilities related to the nation and the symbolizations of it, to claim that this is anymore predominant in discourse here that what previous studies have found elsewhere, although the particular form of it light be different, and this difference might give an illusion of powerfulness. As identity theorist Benedict Anderson puts it:

“It may seem paradoxical that the objects of all these connections are all imagined,anonymous, faceless (…) butamor patriae does not in this regard differ from other types of affection, which always has an element of imgination. (…)What the eye isto the lover,the language or flag is to the patriot”.

The fifth and final category is what I have labeled Historical Nationalism. The idea that the past in some way in it self provides the individual with a specific set of characteristics and responsibilities. In traditional nationalism this is particularly connected to what is referred to as the French or constitutional nation-state type, where the conditions of the formations of the nation-state and the construction of it in itself gives legitimacy to it. The metaphor of “inheritance” is vital to this idea, and it would be interesting to see whether or not the students used or was introduced to this type of thinking, especially since the relative brevity of American national history on one hand, and the apparent emphasis on the construction of a national historical Canon speaks in opposite directions towards what might be expected. The way I see it, there is, based on my observations and interviews nothing to indicate, that this kind of indicate that this kind of thinking is any less predominant here than anywhere else. Contrarily it is apparently a cornerstone in the construction of the American nation to state that the present state of affairs is to a remarkably wide extent the result of a very limited number of historical events and figures. And canonically about history is received by the students with so little objection, that there is plenty of reason to state that it in fact a discursive nodal point in a wide range of cultural and everyday practices. As the founder of post-structuralist Everyday life-studies Henri Lefevbre puts it:

“The production of power and space in society must be subject too the same principle of alienation as the production of goods in a society increasingly erasing the boundary between the two.”

Now what all this means when you put it together, I think it is too early to say anything about at this point. But what is certain, is that I believe that I have a very interesting bit of work before me, and I am proud to say that I hope something very good will come out of this data, which brings me back to where I started, by expressing my extreme gratitude towards all of you for permitting me to do all of this work, and by letting me into your workplace and into your lives. I have had an exceptionally positive experience here, both on a professional and on a personal level, and as I wrote in my letter to all for you, I have seen nothing but competent inspirational teaching, and there is certainly no doubt that you can all be very proud of the educational work that’s being done here in the department. So with that I think we should probably go to a few quick questions as we are rapidly running out of time.