民族学家与西南民族文献的发现

历史上,由于封建统治者对少数民族的歧视,西南各民族的文献只能在民间传播,官方没有做过系统的调查和整理,许多文献也湮没于历史的长河之中,人们并不太了解西南各族中有多少种文献.     

Forging a nation: the Ethiopian millennium celebration and the multiethnic state

Due to a different calendric system, Ethiopia celebrated the turn of the millennium in September 2007. This paper investigates how Ethiopia's coalition government, associated by many Ethiopians with minority rule, set up and mobilised a year‐long millennium project to propose new idioms of nationhood redefining Ethiopia's identity to deal with the challenges of ethnic federalism and to accommodate its multiethnic society. I argue that the millennium celebration sought to find a solution to the divisive effects of the politics of ‘difference’ derived from a policy of ethnic federalism, and to the existing outdated metaphors of nationhood rooted in Semitic culture and Orthodox Christianity. It proposed more suitable idioms of common identity based on the idea of ‘unity in diversity’. This paper contributes to our better understanding of the role of symbolism, commemorative events and appropriation of the ‘sites of memory’ in the complex process of the transition of multiethnic societies into nation states.     

Environmental insecurity and fortress mentality

This article explores the political, economic and ecological context within which environmental insecurity emerges and feeds back into a fortress mentality. Shortages of food, water and energy sources are the trigger for nefarious activities involving organized criminal networks, transnational corporations and governments at varying political levels. The consequences of such activities contribute to even more ruthless exploitation of rapidly vanishing natural resources, as well as the further diminishment of air, soil and water quality. These developments, in turn, exacerbate the competitive scramble by individuals, groups and nations for what is left. The accompanying insecurities and vulnerabilities ensure elite and popular support for self‐interested ‘security’. Accordingly, the ‘fortress’ is being constructed and reconstructed at individual, local, national and regional levels—as both an attitude of mind and a material reality. Fundamentally, the basis for this fortress mentality is linked to decades of neo‐liberal policy and practice that have embedded an individualizing and competitive self‐interest that, collectively, is overriding prudent and precautionary policy construction around climate change and environmental degradation. The net result is that security is being built on a platform of state, corporate and organized group wrongdoing and injustice, in many instances with the implied and/or overt consent of relevant publics. Yet, as long as the fortification continues apace, it will contribute to and further exacerbate varying levels of insecurity for all.     

The nation of the people: An analysis of Podemos and Five Star Movement's discourse on the nation

This article empirically explores how populist actors talk about the nation. This is a research area mostly tackled in studies on right-wing populism, with other forms of populist politics usually left out of the analysis. To fill this academic gap, we focus on the Spanish party Podemos and the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S). The former is a paradigmatic example of radical left populism, whereas the latter is commonly considered as a catch-all populist party with no clear ideological connotation. Through a discourse analysis on leaders' speeches and official public declarations, we focus on the role that national identity plays in the strategies of Podemos and M5S and on the type of nation they discursively construct. Whilst Podemos' populist strategy purposely aims at contending to the right ideologically loaded concepts and signifiers to construct an idea of nation fitting the party's leftist values, M5S's strategy mostly aims at appropriating valence issues, such as the “Made in Italy” brand and the concept of “national interest”. Thus, our analysis contributes to clarify the differences between the leftist political culture of Podemos and the “post-ideological” one of M5S, as also reflected by survey data confirming strong differences in “nationalist” attitudes between their respective electorates.     

Gendered insecurity in the Rohingya crisis

The purpose of this piece is to analyse the data on pregnant women and new mothers in the Rohingya refugee population in Bangladesh to determine if it can be used as an indicator of increased conflict related sexual violence and ethnic cleansing. The reported data is problematised in the context of the notorious unreliability of data in emergencies. By comparing the available data with known birth rates among the Rohingya and the broad demographic patterns seen in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide the piece shows there is cause for the concerns of increasing conflict related sexual violence and ethnic cleansing. When taken with qualitative data from international organisations responding to the humanitarian crisis and refugee testimony, the paper reliably concludes the quantitative data can tell a reliable story of conflict related sexual violence and ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State. The paper also highlights the need for improved sex- and age-disaggregated data collection in emergencies.     

Memories of a time forgotten: the myth of the perennial nation

ABSTRACT. This article questions the persistent view of the Balkans as a place where ethnic and national identities were sustained over centuries of Ottoman and Habsburg rule. It concentrates on the Serbian historical narrative and challenges the picture of the Serbs as an ethnic community who gathered around their bards and priests to cherish memories of their ancient kingdom. Rather, it is argued that we can speak of two competing narratives, one ecclesiastical and the other vernacular, neither of which was even remotely national or historical, and that the Serbs, as we know them today, are not the product of centuries of cultural formation but were carved out of a Slavic mass as were the Croats, relatively recently.     

To justify a nation: Inter-war soviet nationalism

In 1972 an anonymous author wrote in the Soviet journal Veche: Why during the Fatherland War, when mortal danger hung over the country and when extraordinary strength of spirit was needed did “Soviet patriotism” prove insufficient, and it was necessary urgently to call to remembrance the Church, Aleksandr Nevskii, Peter I, and Suvorov that is princes, tsars and reactionary generals? Why were not the cult of the heroes of the civil war and the cult of the heroes of the class struggle not enough? ¹      

The dilemmas of ontological insecurity in a postcolonising Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

Since the signing of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland has made significant progress towards a postcolonising transformation of its political culture and its major political and social institutions, as it has shifted away from violence and the dominance of political ideologies structured by the friend–enemy distinction. These ideological formations and the practices of social and political antagonism that they prescribed have been challenged by adversary–neighbour ideological formations that construct identities and relations through more inclusive norms of recognition and that support a more complex emotional constellation. However, as this cultural transformation has been neither thoroughgoing nor universal, Northern Ireland finds itself in the somewhat counter-intuitive situation in which the shift away from the violence of the past has increased, rather than reduced, the ontological insecurity of its citizens. Moreover, as ontological security may be supported by either friend–enemy or adversary–neighbour ideological formations, two distinct ways in which ontological security may collapse or re-configure have emerged in Northern Ireland.     

The idea of a Jewish nation in the German discourse about emancipation

This article compares the German conservative conceptualization of Judaism and Jewish emancipation with that of liberals, from the Vormärz (1830–1848) to the Neue Ära (1858–1861). It argues that both conservatives and liberals understood Judaism not merely as a religion but also as a nationality. Yet while liberals acknowledged the national dimension of Judaism as a secularized culture, and even supported Jewish emancipation, conservatives developed a different concept. Since the 1830s, conservatives accommodated nationalism while investing the Christian State ideal with national meaning. This national‐religious construction was imposed on Judaism, which was similarly interpreted now as a synthesis between religion and nationality. In accordance with this conceptualization, conservatives rejected Jewish emancipation on national ground while advocating for the establishment of a Jewish nation‐state. This thesis diverges from the existing literature, in which the reluctance of conservatism to embrace nationalism until the 1870s stands as the consensual view.