matter, is embedded in a power/knowledge nexus. 4 It always operates at an institutional level, be it the academy, state institutions, political parties directly associated with national states, or scientific, literary, historical and political associations operating in other state formations. By privileging a conception of the nation as the ordering principle of reality, nationalist discourse forged a new thinkable order of things whereby cultural and social experience, notions of time, space and community assumed a novel significance. Here a specific relation between discourse and reality is operative. Nationalist discourse purports to express a preconstituted national entity which is accorded an objective pre-and extra-discursive status, an entity whose values, qualities and dispositions are deemed recoverable and knowable because real. In fact, rather than expressing an already existing community, nationalist discourse constitutes it by signifying aspects of experience as objective signs of national existence. Thus, the important thing is not raw experience but its particular interpretation, not reality as such but the meaning assigned to it. This could happen when particular, that is selected, questions are asked in relation to a specific vision of the community in mind by specific groups of intellectuals and bureaucrats who present themselves as expressing "national interests". In addressing historical, linguistic and cultural issues necessary to produce truth claims about the national community in view, this discourse shapes the form and direction of cognitive fields such as history, linguistics and ethnography. As such, nationalist discourse not only constructs its own symbolic realm where everything is measured against a nationally meaningful order of things. It also develops the cognitive tools to control and corroborate it. This link between nationalist discourse and knowledge entails neither the view that this discourse simply subjected aspects of knowledge under its ideological hold and therefore those cognitive fields influenced by discourse should not be counted as true, scientific knowledge, nor that discourse by rectifying its errors and classifying its formulations, through its association to these cognitive fields, undid its relations with ideology. In the first place any clear distinction between ideology and knowledge is impossible. It is crucial to understand how nationalist discourse controlled meaning and imposed its own representations of reality through its connection with the aforementioned cognitive fields, despite, or maybe because of, its ideological status. That is why I give particular importance to the operations of selection, omissions and exclusion that underpin the portrayal of the national landscape.Two examples will serve to clarify my point. A crucial element of nationalist discourse is the establishing of national continuity -a precondition of representing the nation as subject of history. The vision of continuity is indispensable to any nationalist discourse. For our pur...
72society as totalities and, finally, with keeping an open mind towards the social sciences which, according to Hobsbawm, were at that same time taking their own historical turn. Social history never represented a unified field since it encompassed differing research agendas and priorities, most particularly Marxism and the Annales school. But there was much common ground. As William Sewell suggests, in contrast to mainstream political history, social history combined the study of people ignored until then by historical scholarship, like the labouring poor and the working classes, with the effort to study and integrate all social experience into a totality or structure.3 New questions and new categories of documents rapidly broadened the fields of social history and spread its influence and attraction. Of course, the arrival of social history to this level of sophistication was not sudden but, to a large extent, the outcome of overlapping influences, both internal and external to the practice of history.Although, as I have suggested, the practice of social history followed different paths, social historians agreed that their work had much to do with the study of structures, most notably economic structures. In the 70s the concept of structure was already available and used in various professional and nonprofessional historical networks. Although with different twists, structural approaches were most common among Marxist and neo-Marxist social scientists, Annalistes historians and anthropologists and linguists of different sorts, particularly in France, Britain and the US. Of course these different networks were not identical and one would have all the good reason to argue that British Marxists and Annalist historians for example should not be lumped together. One could also add that none of these networks were internally unified and coherent. This I concede. It is not my intention to proclaim the unity of these networks nor underestimate their methodological and epistemological differences and their different intellectual traditions. It is hard to miss the point, for example, that most Annalistes historians focused on structures and the longue durée whereas Marxists studied social transitions, most notably the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Nor, on the other hand, do I wish to disregard the reciprocal influences existing among these networks which shaped much common ground. 4 All these apart, it is not unreasonable to suggest that structure as a fundamental category of historical analysis became acceptable to all historians who styled themselves social historians. This choice is understood by the fact that structures could accommodate and relate different elements or series of elements of an economic, demographic, environmental and even cultural nature into a whole. In other words, this new social history was founded on the belief that structure and structuration provided the intellectual and methodological means for adequate answers to complex questions, explaining composite phenomena in the long run...
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