General Introduction: Writing the Mass into a Mass Phenomenon

Reconstructing the history of nationalist cognition and everyday nationhood from personal accounts

“…Challenging or qualifying the elite‐based top‐down idea of nation‐building, it soon became common to speak of ‘personal nationalism’ (Cohen ), ‘everyday nationalism’ (Fox and Miller‐Idriss ; Goode and Stroup ), ‘bottom‐up approaches’, ‘nationhood from below’ (Beyen and Ginderachter ) and ‘experiences of nation’ (Archilés , ). Eventually, it can arguably be said that the development of this interest in the ‘ordinary’ and ‘popular’ dimensions of nationhood has evolved into a more inclusive ‘exploration of the concrete experience’ (Beyen and Van Ginderachter : 10).…”

“…Nowadays, we have several qualitative methodologies based on what individuals say and how they say it when talking or writing about their lives or about the world they live in (Plummer ; Bertaux ) . Alternatively, indirect inferences may be valid in some contexts (Beyen and Van Ginderachter : 10). Appealing to the unconscious, or dismissing what the subject claims because ‘he/she is lying’ or ‘is meaning something different’, may not be always wrong, but it could lead us to speculation or utterly distorted interpretations.…”

The making of citizenship via tea production: State‐sponsored economic growth, nationalism and state in Turkey

“…Our contention in this paper is that, as opposed to the narratives of the proponents of the centre‐periphery paradigm, the attempt to introduce and promulgate the main pillars of the republic through economic interventionism did not necessarily generate a subservient population that was merely passively exposed to the dictates of the nation‐state and its official nationalist ideology This line of analysis also owes much to theorists of nationalism such as Billig (1995), Beyen and van Ginderachter (2012) and Déloye (2013), who have questioned the validity of approaches that conceive of the formation of national identification solely as ‘the mechanical result of an instrumental and manipulative policy pursued by political elites’ (Déloye, 2013, p. 615). These scholars stress the importance of the role of ordinary people in reappropriating and transforming elite constructions of nationhood (Beyen & Van Ginderachter, 2012, p. 8) and emphasise the pertinence of researching the commonplace everyday activities and experiences through which nationalist sentiments are reproduced in diverse ways (Moreno‐Almendral, 2018). Scholars studying nationalism from this perspective typically turn their attention towards documenting sets of ordinary and repetitive sociocultural practices such as collective participation in ceremonies, parades, sporting events or the consumption of pieces of national (ist) art such as songs and films.…”

How to gauge banal nationalism and national indifference in the past: proletarian tweets in Belgium's belle époque

“…Billig's theory involves the (unspoken) assumption that the absence of an explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the unmindful presence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect the discourses of ‘ordinary people’ – defined as those who ‘are usually not actively or consciously engaged in concerted, organized nation‐building strategies’ (Beyen and Van Ginderachter, : 10). To my mind, this presupposition is problematic and needs to be corroborated by more direct evidence of the ordinary people that are on the receiving end of banal discourses.…”