Book Reviews
Many studies of nationalism focus on the production and transmission of the ideology from above. In this excellent collection of essays, however, the various authors seek to take consumption into account in the formation and promotion of nationalism. While acknowledging that the creation and dissemination of nationalist ideology from above is indeed a prime feature of nationalism, especially in its early stages, Yoshino’s introduction suggests that a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon requires due attention to the ways in which various sectors of the population participate in an ongoing process of consumption, and therefore re-production, of certain aspects of culture.
The case studies, which cover Japan, Sri Lanka, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia, explore different cultural phenomenon, but all are oriented to a kind of ‘marketplace’ in which various cultural forms are purveyed and consumed. Yoshino’s essay, ‘Rethinking theories of nationalism: Japan’s nationalism in a marketplace perspective’, does this by reference to a notion of ‘secondary nationalism’ and the role of cultural intermediaries in the promotion of cultural nationalism. Picking up some central themes of his earlier work, Yoshino highlights the role of the nihonjinron (discourses on Japanese social and cultural uniqueness) as an important vehicle for secondary nationalism. These have been produced by various ‘thinking elites’, including businesspeople, journalists, bureaucrats and academics, and consumed by ordinary people concerned in a practical way to understand and deal with certain problems – for example, in cross-cultural business contexts. Two other contributions on Japan; Christine R. Yano’s ‘Distant homelands: nation as place in Japanese popular song’ and Koichi Iwabuchi’s ‘Return to Asia: Japan in Asian audiovisual Markets’ illustrate how notions of place, identity and difference are created and deployed in the construction of Japaneseness in various contexts.
Steven Kemper’s study of ‘The nation consumed: buying and believing in Sri Lanka’ again highlights the fact that virtually all studies of nationalism concentrate on what the centre does to the periphery. He points out that Benedict
Anderson is ‘clearly onto something in emphasising the regularity, synchronicity, and demotic character of newspapers’, but at the same time no attention is given to what role the readers have in the nationalist project. Kemper goes on to show how various national lotteries in Sri Lanka provide a product that is avidly consumed by a large proportion of the population, Sinhala and Tamil alike, a factor which in itself promotes the idea that the nation that gambles together stays together.
The definition and representation of minority (non-Han) identity in China is a subject through which Dru C. Gladney shows how a majority Han identity has been constructed in relational terms as united, monoethnic and, above all, modern. The depiction of minorities as exotic, primitive, uninhibited and ‘natural’ contrasts, sometimes in a romanticised way, with the much more ‘advanced’ (albeit sexually repressed) Han majority – a category that has held together an otherwise disparate population of Manadarin and Cantonese, Shanghaiese and Sichuanese, as a Chinese nation.
Gladney also says that the depiction of China’s minorities accords with a long-standing anthropological tendency to objectify ‘primitives’ and deny them individuality and subjectivity. A similar theme is implicit in Shih-chung Hsieh’s contribution on ‘Representing Aborigines’ in Taiwan. In its promotion of ethnic tourism, anthropological studies have provided much material for constructing and objectifying the ‘authenticity’ of indigenous life as represented through model villages where indigenes are employed to live and work. Laura Kendall’s essay on ‘People under glass’ also explores the objectification and exhibition of ‘culture’ through a study of two museums – the National Folklore Museum in Seoul and the Yunnan Museum of Nationalities in south-west China. Shamsul A. B.’s essay on the role of the social science in Malaysia’s process of nation formation deals explicitly with ‘consuming anthropology’.
Each of these contributions, and indeed the collection as a whole, show how knowledge is both produced and consumed in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes in the construction and maintenance of nationalist projects. Much of this is clearly state sponsored or managed but, as each of the contributors make clear, nationalism must also be understood from the way in which it is produced and consumed ‘on the ground’. Without such a perspective, understandings of nationalism in the contemporary world will be partial at best.
