‘Primordialism’ in nationalism studies: theory or ideology?

Abstract

For several decades, the field of nationalism studies has seen an extended debate about explanations of nationalism and about the process of nation formation. An impressive set of labels has been coined to describe alternative approaches. One of the theories that has enjoyed unusual longevity is the approach known as primordialism, which stresses the deep historical and cultural roots of nations and nationalism and assumes their quasi‐objective character. This resilience is surprising because of the difficulty of marshalling evidence to support such a theory, and because of the line‐up of critics who dismiss it. This article explores the recent debate about primordialism. It suggests that authentic versions of primordialism are extremely hard to find in the academic literature, and that primordialism may better be viewed as an ingredient in nationalism than as an explanation of nationalism.

A Few Words About Methodology Of Studying Russian Nationalism History

“…Constructivists believe that nationalism is a means of constructing nations for controlling the crowd. Modern researchers are increasingly attributing primordialism to nationalism rather than to a scientific approach to studying it (Coakley, 2017).…”

Nation in Analytical Focus: Some Aspects of Foreign and Russian Studies

“…западной науки о нации и национализме стала критика примордиалистских подходов. Однако исследователи отмечают, что подлинные версии примордиализма чрезвычайно трудно найти в академической литературе (Coakley, 2018). Он предстает в различных вариантах наивного реализма, объективизма, гносеологического оптимизма, социального материализма.…”

The Role of Language and the Significance of Primordialism in Nationalistic Rhetoric

“…Second, I will present the case study I chose to select, that is a concrete example of meta-linguistic analysis of nihonjinron in the context of its ever-lasting literature, by investigating the sort of language deployed by the scholar Watanabe Shōichi in his amateur essay Nihongo no kokoro (The Spirit of Japanese Language), centred on the enhancement of Japanese linguistic uniqueness. Third, I will attempt to draw a number of conclusions: in particular, in line with the proposal by John Coakley (Coakley 2017: 2-3), it will be suggested to remove "primordialism" as a category of analysis and to restrict it to its original, nationalistic significance, namely to interpret it as a specific ingredient or moulding component of the nationalistic discourse, that is the sentiment or be-lief in the perceived genetically-transmitted, natural character of a national community, conceived as a mythic/historical "organic whole" located in a specific and symbolical territory and characterised by continuity, timelessness, perennialness and monolithicityin short, in its primordiality. It will be claimed that primordialism is precisely the core of nationalistic discourse.…”

“…The problem on which Brubaker Colloquium: New Philologies • Volume 4, Issue 3 (2019) Elisa Vitali focuses his attention lies in the uncontrolled conflation of social/practical and sociological/analytical understandings of terms such as 'nation', 'race' and 'identity' which are used analytically a good deal of the time more or less as they are used in practice, in an implicitly or explicitly reifying manner (Brubaker 2004, 32-33). The same goes for 'primordialism': the term has been used to depict at the same time the intellectual position of either those nationalists of the past who claimed the naturalness or primordiality of concepts such those of 'nations', 'national sentiments or attachments', 'national soul', 'shared blood' and alike or those more contemporary scholars such as Edward Shils and Clifford Geertz who, far from insisting that these "primordial attachments" did factually exist, suggested that a perception about the primordiality, about the ontological reality of these assumed "givens" of social existence, by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself, was actually visible among social actors (Geertz 1963;Shils 1957;Grosby 2016;Smith 2003;Özkırımlı 2017;Coakley 2017). This contribution will attempt to tackle both the "national question" and the problem surrounding "primordialism".…”