‘A genealogist's paradise’: France,Québec and the genealogics of race

Genealogy, or the study of one's ancestral patri-lineage, has a long and esteemed pedigree in French Canadian and Québécois history. From Cyprien Tanguay's late-nineteenth-century encyclopedias to René Jetté's updated versions more than a century later, genealogy has been an important component of French Canadian nationalisms. Tracing one's ancestry back to the early St. Lawrence settlement in the seventeenth century has provided Québécois subjects with opportune political and social capital with which to make territorial and national claims legitimate. Through a case study approach, I explain how genealogy provides the grounds upon which Québécois and French subjects remember a shared past. Specifically, I examine a variety of sites of memory in the French countryside, including a museum that relies on ‘genealogics’ to call the French Canadian Québécois back to its roots. As such, I demonstrate how the biological, read as a contemporary articulation of Balibar's notion of the racial supplément necessary to nation building, travels across the Atlantic.     

The magic of the national flag

This paper aims to explore the question of the cult of the national flag from a few selected angles. I focus in particular on the magical dimension of the national flag. My argument is that the central position of the flag in nationalism has much do to with a magical mode of thinking. However, this type of thinking cannot simply be regarded as the legacy of so-called primitive or pre-industrial societies. On the contrary, I will argue that national flags are modern phenomena. The magic of the flag causes some people to behave as if the flag constituted an integral part of the nation. Damage of the flag is feared as desacralization, which may have direct consequences for the nation and threatens its existence. The magic of the flag is based on the confusion of two ontological domains: symbolic-metaphorical and metonymical-causal.     

Possibility Theory: A New Approach to Uncertainty Analysis? (3 pp)

Background, Aims and Scope The problem of the evaluation of practitioner's belief and belief-related uncertainties on LCA results obtained from different methodological choices has been addressed so far by scenario modeling, Cultural Theory perspectives and probabilistic simulation. The direct evaluation of belief and related uncertainties could be of interest, e.g. when the information available (resulting from classical uncertainty analysis or the application of the precautionary principle) do not allow one to choose between methodological alternatives leading to different LCA results and conclusions. The difficulty of modeling belief arises from the additive nature of classical measures, e.g. probabilities. Since the 1960s, non-additive measures (e.g. possibilities) have been developed and applied to model belief in real world problems. The aim of this paper is to discuss the application of possibility measures in LCA for uncertainty analysis in complement to classical approaches. Methods The nature and the meaning of possibilities are briefly introduced by comparison with probabilities (subjective or not) in order to enlighten strengths, drawbacks and complementarities. A tentative possibilistic approach based on the evaluation of a posteriori possibilities of final LCA results depending on a priori possibilities of the methodological choices behind the calculations is described, also by means of an application example. Results and Outlook. A new approach for the modeling of practitioner's belief and belief-related uncertainties in complement of classical methods of uncertainty analysis has been proposed for discussion. Uncertainty can be characterized by confidence intervals and indexes that could help practitioners in making methodological choices and could improve the interpretation and reliability of LCA results, still increasing its sophistication.     

Between global racial and bounded identity: choice of destigmatization strategies among Ethiopian Jews in Israel

Abstract

Our research explores how Ethiopian Jews in Israel apply local and global cultural resources when forming their reactive strategies to stigmatization. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with adult men and women, we examine class variations in the destigmatization strategies of working-class and middle-class Ethiopian Jews. Working-class Ethiopian Jews rely on their local bounded identity, that of Jews, rather than identity politics, which stresses phenotype in formulating destigmatization strategies. The former provide is Ethiopians of all classes with the network of meaning necessary for active participation in the broader society, whereas the latter is primarily the province of a small number of highly educated middle-class individuals, those who had access to social networks of highly educated liberals and could mobilize valued global black cultural resources (e.g. music, art) to their advantage in the local context.     

Constituted through Conflict: Images of Community (and Nation) in Bulgarian Rural Ritual

Following the 20th anniversary of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this article extrapolates how attention to actual notions of community might redirect his important intervention. It suggests that locally and culturally specific ideas about collectivity shape the experience and expectations of national-level projections. To demonstrate this outcome the analysis focuses on Bulgarian mumming—spectacular winter rituals in which threatening masked figures transverse villages to banish evil and bring good fortune. While these rituals clearly reinforce social solidarity, they represent a local notion of community in which conflict, both intra-and interethnic, is elemental and constitutive. This image of community does not demand consensus or homogeneity when imagined on a national scale. Such variations in community notions may help explain the diversity of national experiences increasingly documented by ethnographers.     

Nationalism as ideological interpellation: The case of Ulster Loyalism

This article aims to explore nationalism, generally, and Ulster Loyalism, specifically, through the use of discourse theory and the Althusserian concept of ideology as interpellation. It suggests that nationalism is best understood as a particular discursive articulation that constructs subjects as being of a particular nation and thereby having certain characteristics and political needs and interests. This entails a larger definition of nationalism which encompasses some phenomena not generally taken to be nationalistic. The method is illustrated by a study of some aspects of the ideological discourse of Ulster Loyalism showing this, contrary to some accounts, to be a kind of nationalism. In the nationalist articulation of Loyalism, religion, democracy and identity are linked together making a unified ideological discourse based around a sense of specificity and difference to Irish nationalism and Roman Catholicism. Special attention is paid to the role of democracy within Loyalist discourse, in particular, and in nationalist discourse generally. The article suggests that this way of thinking about nationalism can avoid functionalist and teleological analyses, allowing us to focus on the specific ways in which a nationalism operates and to stress the centrality of politics in the process.     

Belling the Chinese Dragon at Sea: Western Theories and Asian Realities

Against the backdrop of projections of either conflict escalation or legal settlement by Western international relations theories, this article provides a more nuanced and subtle balance between Western theories and Asian realities.     

Reducing the gap between leaders and voters? Elite polarization,outbidding competition,and the rise of secessionism in Catalonia

The ethnic outbidding thesis explains party polarization as a consequence of political changes amongst voters. We argued instead that party elites’ extreme position on the national identity cleavage can help polarizing strategies to prevail over moderate strategies in a context of increasing political uncertainty, without previous voters’ polarization. We test successfully this hypothesis in Catalonia by analysing the polarization of political parties and people’s demands for self-government in Catalonia since the early 2000s. We also find that the result of this outbidding pattern of competition was a reduction in the gap between elites’ and voters’ views on national identity. The analysis employs a set of unique data on party elites and activists’ national identity, from several surveys conducted on the delegates at party conferences of the main Catalan parties between 1996 and 2012. Our data provide empirical support for the argument that ethnic polarization is mainly an elite-driven process.     

Ancestral and instrumental in the politics of ethnic and religious conflict

ABSTRACT

Ethnicity, like race, religion, and nationality, is a feature of group identity that is contested. There are literatures devoted to each, and in each there are those who see the origins of identity and affiliation in ancestry and deeply rooted affect and those who see these as socially constructed and instrumentally used by elites. Yet all recognize that the ancestral is socially constructed and that social constructions make use of existing cultural features, and that the vertical cleavages of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality dominate the horizontal ones of class. This generates implications for institutional changes, for the pursuit of extraterritorial interests, for the selection of explanatory narratives for conflict when multiple attributions are possible, for intra-communal conflict, and for policies for ethnic conflict regulation.