Performing Identities on a Dutch River Dike: National Identity and Diverging Lifestyles

By Kees Terlouw

Volume 13, Issue 2, pages 236-255

Abstract

The creation of a national identity shared by the whole population becomes increasingly difficult in individualizing and globalizing national societies. The national population fragments into many lifestyle groups with very different social and cultural orientations. The enactment of these different lifestyle identities during leisure activities accentuates these differences. However, these different identities are sometimes performed on the same spatial stage. The main part of this article analyses the use of the dike along the river Linge, a part the Rhine estuary, which, lined with apple trees, cuts through an iconic Dutch river landscape with polders, old villages and meadows with quietly grazing cattle. Especially during the weekends, it is a stage crowded by walkers, cyclists, classic car drivers, and motorcyclists. The importance attached to this river dike is linked to a shared traditional form of Dutch collective national identity. The different uses of the river dike are based to the diverging values on which the different lifestyles are based. This results in conflicts over the use of and access to the dike. The role of the state in regulating these conflicts results in a more limited form of national identity.

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Motherhood as Armenianness: Expressions of Femininity in the Making of Armenian National Identity

By Sevan Beukian

Volume 14, Issue 2, pages 247-269

Abstract

This article explores the discourses on gender roles and the place of Armenian women in the Armenian nation-building process, especially focusing on the changes since the 1988 national movement formation. This study is based on extensive interviews conducted in Armenia and Karabakh in 2011. Although Armenian women were praised for their role during the nationalist movement of 1988 and the Karabakh war, they went back into their ‘traditional’ role in the aftermath. Motherhood is a strong concept in Armenian women’s (self-)identification with their nation, constructing it as a unique Armenian trait that distinguishes Armenian women from ‘others’. The self-expression of women highlights the authenticity of Armenian constructions of femininity as motherhood, embedded in the national and ethnic self-identification of Armenian women. The concept of Armenian motherhood is therefore a particular expression filtered through a distinct history of national struggle and genocide, and upheld by Armenian women through that perception.

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Tastes and Fragrances from the Old World: Memoirs by Egyptian Jewish Women

By Nefissa Naguib

Volume 9, Issue 1, pages 122-127

Introduction

History tells us that cosmopolitanism for the Jews has been an adaptive instrument for a persecuted people without a homeland, a people who always had to be prepared to flee and move on to another refuge. It is also true that cosmopolitanism is a deeply rooted feature in classical Arab-Islamic cultural heritage. The geographical location of the Arab Mediterranean, extending across frontiers and in different historical periods, from Spain to the Levant and beyond, has always made it a commercial, intellectual, strategic and sacred place visited by merchants, scholars, soldiers and believers of many ethnicities and cultural traditions. As such, it has served as a virtual cauldron of globally significant and critical events. The historical record tells us that cosmopolitan qualities and this region’s identity as a cross-roads of global encounters rendered it particularly tolerant to the Jewish presence. Arab Andalusia is, of course, particularly exalted as embodying Arab cosmopolitanism. Recently, scholars of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arab world have been keen to point to the Mediterranean basin as more richly embodying cosmopolitanism than might be suggested by certain events witnessed during that period: phenomena such as the rise of geographically specific nationalisms, such as Egypt’s, belie the cultural, political, economic and intellectual inclusiveness that in fact attracted Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews to the region, and that housed the Karaaite Jewish community for centuries. […]

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The Dual National Identity of the Korean Minority in China: The Politics of Nation and Race and the Imagination of Ethnicity

By Jin Woong Kang

Volume 8, Issue 1, pages 101-119

Abstract

This article explores the historical changes in the national identity of the Korean minority in China from the period of Japanese colonial invasion through to the present. Existing studies have taken an ethno-cultural approach to the Korean minority’s dual identity, but they have ignored the importance of political identity-formation which creates, re-creates, and transforms national identity. The Korean minority’s national identity has been determined by political and economic factors rather than ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In this regard, the Korean minority’s double-minded self-understanding of its own nationhood has shifted from an ethnicity-centred dual identity to a nationality-centred dual identity. This article notes that the Korean minority’s national identity has been created and re-created by political identity-formation, and its imagination of ethnicity has been transformed through this political process.

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Post-communist extremism in Eastern Europe: The nature of the phenomenon

By Othon Anastasakis

Volume 1, Issue 2, pages 15-26

Abstract

The recent electoral gains of extreme right parties in many countries of Europe have made European citizens realise that the extreme right is not to be regarded exclusively as a fringe phenomenon but as a force that can penetrate mainstream democratic politics. The resilience and occasional rise of the radical right poses a serious challenge for social scientists and policy makers. Social scientists are called upon to examine the nature of the phenomenon, the factors conducive to the existence and resilience of the forces of extremism and the impact of far right political mobilisation within national societies and Europe, at large. Governments and policy makers for their part explore ways to marginalise these forces in order to sustain, in Western Europe- and consolidate, in Eastern Europe, democracy in the continent. But while there is ample analysis of the West European experience, there is an inadequate understanding of the conditions and circumstances that breed extreme right forces in Eastern Europe. In what follows, the paper will attempt to address the academic debate on the causes and nature of the contemporary East European extreme right. It will assess the relevance of a western oriented approach in the East European context. The article mostly refers to extremism in countries like Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. These countries are, by and large, functioning democracies, where extreme right parties compete in elections and in some of them are quite influential. All of these countries are applying to become members of the European Union, and this membership is subject to strict political criteria, requiring democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights.

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