400 Words NOW #2

So I'm taking an anthropology course called National Identity, which is interesting, and not only because the nationality of the man teaching it is still unclear (Polish? Swedish? Danish?).

I was interested in the topic of national identity for reasons I won't go into now.

FLASHBACK: In an intro to something-or-other class early in my Marshall career, I had a very interesting professor who completely understood that the majority of his students didn't care about him or the topic he was covering, and stuffed the class-time full of mindblowing information with very simple take-home messages for the test.

One of these messages that we only spent about a day on was that a nation is not the same thing as a state. As defined by him, loosely, a nation is a group of people and a state is a political boundary, and many of the problems in the world today stem from the fact that political lines do not (and probably cannot) give each nation its own state.

Suddenly, a whole mess of things started making sense: Jews (including modern Israel and the Holocaust), Chechnya, Canada (and Quebec), Scotland (and Wales, and Ireland), the intifada in France, China (and Tibet, and Taiwan), etc. etc. Across the world, and across time, there have been hundreds and thousands of different peoples and millions of different lines drawn on maps and what we have today is a bizarre mash of treaties, threats, conquests, compromises, stagnation, trade and what have you.

FLASH FORWARD:

Where was I? Oh, yes, national identity. So the first book we've read on national identity goes into great detail about how thinking about people as nations with a shared mindset, habits, etc. didn't come about until the industrial era, and sees it as completely linked with capitalism, state education and a number of other things.

He links these things together, I'm told, because he's a structural-functionalist, which are something like the Mac users of the anthropology word. Or maybe the circular reasoning aficionados. Or the eternal optimists. Basically, they study the way things are set up and then proclaim that they work because they were set up properly. Structural-functionalism went out of style about 50 years ago, which brings up the question of why we were reading the book, which is a fascinating answer in and of itself

SEGUE: Gellner, the author of our book, describes many differences between agrarian and industrial societies, but one that I'd like to speak about briefly is that agrarian societies emphasize social stability, while industrial societies prize social mobility; the good of the group versus the needs of the individual. Of course, there are thousands of paradoxes and details, but the point normally remains the same.

SEGUE: I was watching a Russian version of the Little Mermaid last night with my girlfriend and a Turkish friend of ours, and we talked about how stories and entertainment reflect these attitudes, because the Russian version is the sad one, in which the titular character is turned into foam because the prince marries another.

CLIFFHANGER: