Customer Reviews

The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (1996 Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen's University of Belfa)

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This book has already been criticized as a blatant promotion of the "primordialist" view of nations and nationalism, i.e. the claim that nations have existed as one of the prime forms of human (self-) identification and organization since time immemorial. Such criticisms are, I think, not entirely on the mark. What Hastings does in this book more than anything else is challenge the incredibly structural/functionalist view that nations and nationalism are simply a by-product of industrialization and the increasingly complex division of labor in human societies-a model constructed and most extensively explained by Ernest Gellner. While useful and interesting, Gellner's model often has to bend and fold historical facts to make them "fit." In fact, Hastings takes Gellner's rigid model and applies it to early medieval England, where shows that according to Gellner's criteria, one can even speak of a nascent English nation in the era of the Venerable Bede and King Alfred. The most important point Hastings makes is to fault the strictly modern view of national development as overly simplistic. Nation formation and national identity are actually long-term historical processes which, although closely tied to industrialization and modernization, were and are not strictly bound to the latter nor always dependent on them. Although I don't necessarily agree with all of Hastings' conclusions, nor even his analytical methods, I think this is a very interesting and useful contribution to the scholarly literature on nationalism.

Recently, I have been reading about group behavior, why we form groups, and, in general, nationalism/religion, etc. This is a short, well written, and informative treatment of the subject.