Flagging the nations: Citizens’ active engagements with everyday nationalism in Patagonia, Chile

Abstract

Geographical scholarship examining banal and everyday nationalism has tended to frame national flags as abstract and passive objects that are taken for granted and incorporated into the daily lives of citizens in mindless ways. In contrast, this paper acknowledges flags as lively material objects that can be enrolled by citizens to make political points and generate certain “affective atmospheres.” It argues that the recognition of agency in debates concerning everyday nationalism needs to be pushed further to acknowledge the conscious and active negotiations of national objects like flags, to account for the diverse ways nations can be practised and performed by citizens. To illustrate our arguments we focus on the memories and reflections of citizens involved in protests in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia in 2012. During these incidents, citizens deployed different flags in provocative ways to draw attention to their reclamations and apply pressure on the Chilean state to improve socio‐economic conditions in the region. The legacies of events like the 2012 protests and the associated (re)appropriation of national flags enables an interrogation of citizens’ everyday identifications with nations in this border region of Patagonia. More broadly, we use the example to call for the materialities of flags as active objects to be the subject of further geographical inquiry, as one way to reinvigorate explorations of political agency and everyday nationalism.

Geographies of nationalism

“…In the past few decades, scholars in geography and ancillary fields have traced the wide range of positive emotional experiences enlisted in nationalist practices, covering everything from national holidays and other spectacles, sporting events, monuments, and the most mundane rituals of nationalist participation (e.g., Antonsich and Skey, 2016;Benwell et al, 2019Benwell et al, , 2021Brewster and Brewster, 2010;Dittmer, 2013;Edensor, 2002;Faria, 2014;Ferdoush, 2019;Fuller, 2004;Hagen, 2008;Hung, 2007;Homolar and Löfflmann, 2021;Koch, 2013Koch, , 2015Koch, , 2016Koch, , 2020bKong and Yoeh, 1997;Militz, 2016;Militz and Schurr, 2016;Molnár, 2016;Myadar, 2017;Paasi, 2016;Podeh, 2011Podeh, , 2022Rohava, 2020;Rossol, 2010;Skey, 2011;Stewart, 2021;Tomlinson and Young, 2006;White, 2017;White and Frew, 2019).…”

The Local Dynamics of Nation Building: Identity Politics and Constructions of the Russian Nation in Kazan and Ekaterinburg

“…However, evidence from less ordinary practices beyond everyday life indicates that micro- and mesolevel constructions of the nation do not necessarily support nation building and can in fact undermine it. Benwell, Núñez, and Amigo (2018) show that mobilization around national flags can occur in the name of political claims against the state. Nonstate actors have been found to contest nation-building discourses, linking the nation to stories and symbols unrelated to the state, even in authoritarian regimes (Isaacs 2016).…”

Stitching together the nation's fabric during the Chile uprisings: towards an alter-geopolitics of flags and everyday nationalism

“…In response, Medway et al (2018) set out an agenda for geographers, what they frame as 'vexillgeographies', to more critically explore the spatiality and performativity of flags through an examination of 'their symbolic power and the affective responses they may engender' (Medway et al, 2018: 689). Benwell et al (2019) in the context of protests in Chilean Patagonia in 2012 emphasise 'the materialities of flags as lively, active objects [that can] reinvigorate an examination of intersections between geopolitics, agency and everyday nationalism'. Flags (including those of neighbouring Argentina) were utilised by Chilean citizens in provocative ways to make (geo)political points and apply pressure on the Chilean government, what Eriksen (2007: 9) and scholars of everyday nationalism more broadly might identify as 'flag use from below' (see Baker, 2019;Fox, 2017).…”

“…Generic black flags consisting of blank black material are not an uncommon sight in Chile and have typically been used by citizens to express indignation at perceived government neglect (see Benwell et al, 2019), or political decisions that have detrimental environmental implications for local communities (e.g. the construction of large infrastructure projects like hydroelectric dams in Patagonia).…”