Tolerant exclusion: expanding constricted narratives of wartime ethnic and civic nationalism1

ABSTRACT. During war, the demarcation ‘enemy alien’– whether on ethnic or civic grounds – can lead to loss of political, social or economic rights. Yet not all minorities are excluded even though they pose problems for civic and ethnic national categories of belonging. This article explores the experiences of an ethno‐religious minority who posed an intriguing dilemma for ethnic and civic categorisation in North America during World War II. The Mennonite experience enables a close examination of the relationship between a minority ethnic (and religious) group and majority concepts of wartime civic and ethnic nationalism. The article supports arguments that both ethnic and civic nationalism produce markers for the exclusion of minority groups during wartime. It reveals that minority groups can unintentionally become part of majority ‘nationalisms’ as the content of what defines the national ideal shifts over time. The experiences also suggest that a minority group can help mobilise symbolic resources that participate in transforming what defines the national ideal.     

The importance of national parks to nation‐building: Support for the National Parks Act (2000) in the Scottish Parliament

In 2000 Scotland finally introduced legislation to enable the establishment of its first national parks, 50 years after England and Wales. This paper considers interpretations of this event and reflects on the importance of national parks to nation‐building. Grounded within a framework which holds landscape to be an important signifier of national identity, these issues are explored through a case study of the Cairngorms National Park. This study found that it was the ‘nation‐building’ agenda which was a key factor in securing the unanimous support of the Scottish Parliament for the National Parks Act (2000) but that this agenda hid competing definitions of what shape Scotland's landscapes should be. This suggests that the National Parks Act appealed as a form of institutional, as opposed to cultural, nation‐building.     

The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1

ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’‐based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta‐conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.     

神话与宗教中理想景观的文化地理透视

神话与宗教是原始的哲学和宇宙观,理想景观是其中一个重要组成部分。根据文化圈的不同,世界神话与宗教可划分为三种地域类型:中国式、希腊式和希伯莱式。它们各有其不同的理想景观类型。理想景观是人们对于环境的选择和改造,它的形成受自然环境和文化的双重作用,其中自然环境的作用是潜在的、基础性的,而文化的作用是直接的和本质性的。不同的文化通过神话和宗教中的理想景观类型来表达自己的景观理想,又依据这些理想,通过地理回归在现实中使其物化,实现对地理环境的影响。     

Painted Glass

The consideration of contemporary ‘designed landscapes’ around late medieval castles is now well-established. However, all too often the consideration of such a landscape is not accompanied by an equally detailed study of the building from which it was viewed, particularly the ‘viewing windows’—windows suggested to be deliberately placed within a building to provide a view over, across or towards a specific element of a designed landscape or the wider natural landscape. This paper discusses such windows, and also wall-walks, within the architectural context of one particular castle. It identifies three basic questions which should be asked in relation to any view (how did the viewer look, what were they looking at and why did they choose to look at it?), and seeks to demonstrate that windows and wall-walks intervene between the viewer and the view to the same degree as they facilitate the act of looking. An appreciation of these processes is crucial to understanding late medieval concepts of viewing.     

Operationalising national identity: the cases of the Scottish National Party and Frisian National Party

The article sets out to examine the complexity of national identity and to provide a more nuanced understanding of how inclusive and exclusive characteristics of national identity, which appear theoretically contradictory but show empirically considerable compatibility, relate to each other. In order to empirically investigate the nature of national identity, the article develops a multidimensional model – consisting of an ethnic, cultural, territorial and civic dimension. The article explores the understanding of national identity in two specific groups: members of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the United Kingdom and members of the Frisian National Party (FNP) in the Netherlands. The evidence presented is based on data from two full membership studies, and the model is operationalised using a confirmatory factor analyses. The conclusion is that national identity can be conceptualised as consisting of one, or several, base layer(s) that can be ‘topped‐up’ with secondary layers.     

All aboard? Women working the spaces of gentrification in Toronto's Junction

Despite early attention being paid to the connections amongst ‘gender, work and gentrification’ in the urban geography literature, there have been few attempts to examine the experiences of women as workers in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This gap leaves open critical questions about the nature of the links between the production of gendered work practices and the production of gentrified urban landscapes. In this article, I explore how women working in a variety of differently precarious situations – as struggling small business owners, self-employed workers and part-time workers – manage the tensions and contradictions of struggling for economic survival while attempting to support community-building efforts and social reproduction needs in a gentrifying area. Using data drawn from interviews and urban ethnographic methods in Toronto's ‘Junction’ neighbourhood, I argue that precarious conditions of work in the context of gentrification engender a variety of diverse economic and social practices – developed through immaterial and affective labour – that, in turn, produce particular, and often contradictory, social and economic landscapes of gentrification. I will explore the ways in which gendered vulnerabilities and insecurities are ironically produced, in part, by the feminized consumption landscape, which primes neighbourhoods for widespread gentrification. Through examining these dynamics, we can begin to theorize the structural production of precarity, and in particular, gendered precarity, through urban processes such as gentrification.     

From universal to local: perspectives on cultural landscape heritage in South Africa

The concept of cultural landscapes relates to the multifaceted links between people, place and identity. From a professional perspective, the concept refers to a category of designated conservation areas with specific biocultural heritage values. From a local perspective, it may refer to a landscape that is associated with the provision of a culturally-specific sense of identity and belonging. We explore these two perspectives through a comparative analysis of three cultural landscapes in South Africa, the ‘expert’ designated Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape and the Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape, and the local associative landscape of emaXhoseni, which is not formally recognised. We propose that a biocultural diversity perspective of heritage not only recognises the inextricable relationship between nature and culture, but it also gives prominence to the beliefs, values and practices of local people, and to strengthening their agency to safeguard their heritage in ways and forms that are relevant to them.     

From ‘Problem City’ to ‘Promise City’: Gentrification and the Revitalisation of Newcastle

The city of Newcastle is a complex and changing landscape. Once regarded as Australia's ‘problem city’, Newcastle's identity is being significantly transformed. This identity transformation draws significantly upon the emergence of more cosmopolitan landscapes within inner Newcastle associated with the gentrification of these areas. The discourse of gentrification is inherently post‐industrial, providing a cleaner and more positive identity as Newcastle seeks to erase the stigma of its’ industrial heritage. However, as landscapes are the amalgam of multiple identities, Newcastle's industrial heritage periodically re‐emerges to problematise the city's newly adopted cosmopolitan identity.     

J.B. Priestley: Bradford and a provincial narrative of England, 1913–1933

J.B. Priestley's writing has been used to explore aspects of landscape and Englishness. Through an analysis of Priestley's early journalism in the Bradford Pioneer and the Yorkshire Observer, we argue that his critical disengagement to most of the landscapes of England was based on a connection to the landscapes of his youth in Bradford where he first developed his fictional and documentary narrative style. In his early journalism, Priestley articulated a sense of dwelling in Bradford that was rooted in the experience of two distinct local landscapes: the spaces of the city and the nature of the surrounding upland and moorland. Priestley's geographical ideal balanced the civility of the Edwardian city embedded in a landscape that offered escape to and commune with nature. The existential balance between the two was, we argue, central to the narrative geographies developed by Priestley in his fiction which is illustrated through an analysis of his two early novels: The Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930). We suggest that the ways in which Priestley's interwar writing expressed dwelling in local landscapes might be thought of as a critical provincialisation of London and England.     

The Macedonian–Albanian political frontier: the re‐articulation of post‐Yugoslav political identities

Abstract. The article examines the re‐articulation of national identity in Macedonia since its independence in 1992. Both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political identities have been engaged in a complex process of redefinition. Two ethnic groups had previously been strongly influenced by the Marxist paradigm and its Yugoslav official interpretation. During the 1990s, the elements of the old paradigm were combined with elements of the new – liberal democratic – concepts of nationhood. While some of the concepts developed within the old Yugoslav framework are still in use, the new liberal‐democratic political paradigm finds it difficult to include them into an official discourse on nationhood. At the same time, introduction of the concepts inherent to the liberal‐democratic paradigm has disturbed the fragile balance achieved through the old Yugoslav narrative. In new circumstances, the ethnic Macedonians transformed themselves from the ‘constitutive nation’ to ‘majority’. However, the ethnic Albanians found it more difficult to accept the status of ‘minority’, which was once (in Yugoslav Marxist narrative) considered to be politically incorrect. Thus, they insist on being recognised as a ‘nation’, equal to ethnic Macedonians. In its essence, the conflict in Macedonia is – to a large extent – a conflict between two different concepts of what is Macedonia and who are Macedonians. The questions posed are: is the minority (ethnic Albanians) part of the nation? Could two nations exist peacefully within one state? The article maps out differences between two different discourses on the identity of the new Macedonian state.     

Identifying Scotland and Wales: types of Scottish and Welsh national identities

Abstract. How are national identities and the ‘imagined communities’ ( Anderson 1991 ) upon which they are based linked? This article demonstrates that Q‐methodology, which allows each participant to express his or her own ‘personal nationalism’ ( Cohen 1996 ) while simultaneously highlighting how these individual assessments aggregate into coherent, shared types of national identity, provides a means of empirically assessing the linkage between the micro‐ and macro‐components of national identity. When applied to the cases of Scotland and Wales, the six types of national identity – three each in Scotland and Wales – highlight distinctions that reflect, as well as challenge, the ubiquitous academic division between civic and ethnic national identities. They also illuminate the differing natures of contemporary Scotland and Wales, with particular emphasis on the observation that the Welsh imagined community appears to be fundamentally more contested than the more easily forged Scottish imagined community.     

Introduction: The state and historic buildings: preserving ‘the national past’

Historic buildings are important in nationalism through their roles in building and reinforcing national identity. As part of the expanding ‘heritage industry’, they are also of growing economic and political importance. Despite their physical existence, historic buildings are ‘created’ – they must be constructed as ‘historic’ through processes of choice and the attachment of significance. The state can perform these functions through policies that define and select buildings for protection, by ownership and funding, and by its uses of buildings for nationalistic purposes. Yet state actors can have good reasons – nationalistic and economic – to destroy or fail to preserve historic buildings. The paper examines why, when and how state actors pursue policies to protect historic buildings. It offers arguments about patterns of state action that part of state strategies to promote national identity and cultural nationalism.     

Reconfiguring the French nation: Public debates on the Left and national identity

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalisation has shaped the fate of local and national cultural productions, from movies to music, from entertainment to food. How did French intellectual and political elites respond to this unprecedented challenge? What were the implications for the politics of nationalism and national identity? Two books respond to these questions, although in very different ways – the first directly and the second indirectly. Vincent Martigny's Dire la France explains how a new way of narrating French national identity emerged in the 1980s within an internationally oriented French Left, attentive of the coming challenges of cultural pluralism. Patrick Boucheron's (ed.) Histoire mondiale de la France advances into a more challenging direction by skilfully unsettling the ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ clichéd narrative. French history is thus redefined by moving away from the Frankish/Gallic myth of descent, thereby reconfiguring national identity along new lines. This article identifies how crucial debates on the cultural nation and cultural identity emerged in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, asking how much they contributed to the current shape and meaning of French national identity. It thus reviews what can be described as a new historiographical turn in French history.     

National identity,devolution and secession in Canada,Britain and Spain*

ABSTRACT. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it examines whether devolution fosters the rise of dual identities – regional and national. Second, it considers whether devolution encourages secession or, on the contrary, it stands as a successful strategy in accommodating intra‐state national diversity. The article is divided into three parts. First it examines the changing attitudes towards Quebec's demands for recognition adopted by the Canadian government from the 1960s to the present. It starts by analysing the rise of Quebec nationalism in the 1960s and the efforts of the Canadian government to accommodate its demands within the federation. It then moves on to consider the radically new conception of Canadian unity and identity embraced by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and its immediate impact upon Quebec. The paper argues that Trudeau's ‘nation‐building’ strategy represented a retreat from the pro‐accommodation policies set in place to respond to the findings of the 1963 Royal Commission on Biculturalism & Bilingualism (known as the B&B Commission). Trudeau's definition of Canada as a bilingual and multicultural nation whose ten provinces should receive equal treatment alienated a significant number of Quebeckers. After Trudeau, various attempts were made to accommodate Quebec's demand to be recognised as a ‘distinct society’– Meech Lake Accord, Charlottetown Agreement. Their failure strengthened Quebec separatists, who obtained 49.4 per cent of the vote in the 1995 Referendum. Hence, initial attempts to accommodate Quebec in the 1960s were replaced by a recurrent confrontation between Canada's and Quebec's separate nation‐building strategies. Second, the article explores whether devolution fosters the emergence of dual identities – regional and national – within a single nation‐state. At this point, recent data on regional and national identity in Canada are presented and compared with data measuring similar variables in Spain and Britain. The three modern liberal democracies considered here include territorially circumscribed national minorities – nations without states ( Guibernau 1999 ) – endowed with a strong sense of identity based upon the belief in a common ethnic origin and a sense of shared ethnohistory – Quebec, Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland. Third, the article examines whether devolution feeds separatism by assessing support levels for current devolution arrangements in Canada, Spain and Britain. The article concludes by examining the reasons which might contribute to replacing separatist demands with a desire for greater devolution.     

Wilderness gained,wilderness lost: wildlife management and land occupations in Zimbabwe's southeast lowveld

This paper explores the physical and imaginative construction of the Zimbabwean ‘lowveld’ landscape. A powerful legacy of the colonial encounter with Zimbabwe was the notion that the lowveld is a wilderness. This logic underpinned attempts to preserve or rehabilitate parts of the lowveld landscape as pristine and glorious pieces of national heritage and, more recently, attempts to exploit sustainably ‘wilderness quality’ and wildlife. The landscape has been physically modified accordingly – often to the detriment of many of its inhabitants. This has played out in oxymoronic attempts to manufacture wilderness in a national park, conservancies and game ranches. But this vision has recently come under its most severe attack to date as these new wildernesses have been re-peopled, and the politics of land and the needs of black smallholders, pushed to the top of the national agenda. The land occupations since 2000 by both state-sponsored war veterans and peasant farmers have revealed starkly contrasting ways of seeing and understanding this landscape which have radically different implications for conservation and development policy.     

Matching Geospatial Concepts with Geographic Educational Needs

In this paper, we assume that learning to comprehend the geospatial environment would be significantly facilitated by developing a multi‐level task ontology that identifies various levels and complexities of geospatial concepts. We suggest that, apart from four spatial ‘primitives’– identity, location, magnitude, and space‐time – all geospatial concepts involve ‘inheritance’ characteristics. The more complex and abstract the concept, the larger the inheritance links that need to be appreciated to enhance concept understanding. For example, many basic geospatial concepts – such as direction and distance – are first‐order derivatives from the ‘location’ primitive, whereas concepts such as spatial association, map projection or interpolation are high‐order concepts that require several layers of geospatial concepts in their derivation. Having offered a five‐level ontology for concept organisation, we suggest sets of tasks that could establish an understanding of concepts, thus directly making the environment more legible in a spatial sense. We develop this framework in the context of the teaching of geography in grades from kindergarten to the final years of high school (grade 12 in the United States system). Our conceptualisation is grounded in the US school system – in which geography is usually absent in the curriculum.     

Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.     

Elements of a theory of Ukrainian ethno‐national identities

Despite winning independence in 1991, Ukraine remains an amorphous society with a weak sense of national identity. One possible explanation is ‘late’ nation‐creation, but in this article emphasis is laid on a continuing plurality of identity projects and the legacy of the ‘failed’ identity‐building projects of the past. Ukraine’s most important distinguishing feature – the existence of a substantial middle ground between Ukrainian and Russian identities – has considerable capacity to resist the logic of consolidating statehood.