Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-rkxrd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-19T10:14:47.829Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

No End

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2013

Jeremy MacClancy
Affiliation:
Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University
Get access

Summary

Our partial survey done we can ask, to what effect? What light can a fieldwork-grounded anthropology shed on contemporary nationalisms?

The first point should have been repeatedly demonstrated to all those who have read the text, rather than skipped straight to this endnote, i.e. that we impoverish our understanding of nationalism if we are not prepared to study its lived reality. If one definition of anthropology is to take people seriously, then it behoves us to listen to what locals are saying and to attend to what they are doing. After all, the much-vaunted strength of social anthropology is to learn, through intensive fieldwork, the ways locals understand and act in the world, to delineate the connections they may make between seemingly unrelated contexts. Perhaps the most revealing example here is the homology made by Pamplonan activists between bull-running and demonstrations, underpinned by the performative understanding of nationalism. Other examples might be the appearance of the Gugu in small Navarran village, the role of gastronomic societies within Basque society, the importance of skull shape in Basque public sculpture of the 1920s, the value of mountaineers to radical political parties, the particular intermeshing of interests between nationalist politicians and genetic anthropologists, and so on. Though, like Deutsch, Kedourie, Gellner and Anderson, have studied respectively and in my own way social dimensions of communication, intellectual genealogies, modes of modernization, and newspapers, I like to think the insights I have produced are a direct consequence of a fieldwork-based approach, broadly conceived.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • No End
  • Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University
  • Book: Expressing Identities in the Basque Arena
  • Online publication: 05 September 2013
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • No End
  • Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University
  • Book: Expressing Identities in the Basque Arena
  • Online publication: 05 September 2013
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • No End
  • Jeremy MacClancy, Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University
  • Book: Expressing Identities in the Basque Arena
  • Online publication: 05 September 2013
Available formats
×