New approaches to nationalism have focused on the role of human agency within nation‐building structures (nationhood from below, everyday nationalism, experiences of nation, personal nationalism, etc.). However, the development of specific methodologies is still scarce. This paper proposes the use of personal accounts (mostly journals and autobiographies, but not only) as sources for qualitative historical research in nations and nationalism. Departing from the concepts of ‘identity’, ‘experience’ and ‘memory’, it is argued that, although very problematic, these sources are a valid path to the study of nations as they are: social phenomena of discursive nature and political frame, whose real agents are individuals. When these agents narrate their lives employing the nation as a meaningful category, they are not producing mere second‐hand reflections of superior and prior realms, but are performing microhistorical acts of nation‐making that are significant for understanding any case of nation‐building. The paper includes an empirical example using British personal accounts from the Age of Revolutions (c.1780–1840).
Cómo citar/CitationMoreno Almendral, R. (2016). Corrientes teóricas para el estudio de las naciones y el nacionalismo: críticas y alternativas al paradigma modernista.Revista
ResumenEste artículo es un ensayo teórico-historiográfico sobre las corrientes críticas y alternativas al modernismo en los estudios sobre nación y nacionalismo. Se traza una visión general del modernismo clásico y sus variantes como punto de partida. A continuación, se desarrollan las principales corrientes alternativas a partir de sus diferentes autores y aportaciones. Se incluyen tanto autores clásicos como recientes. En primer lugar, se hace una distinción entre primordialismo y perennialismo y se desarrollan sus argumentos sobre la antigüedad del fenómeno nacional. En segundo lugar se abordan las aportaciones del etnosimbolismo y sus propuestas intermedias entre las corrientes anteriores y el modernismo. En tercer lugar, el artículo termina con las nuevas corrientes desarrolladas en los últimos años, que intentan superar los debates sobre la modernidad o no de las naciones y proponen nuevas vías y temas de investigación.
1Beneficiario de la ayuda FPU 13/00339 del Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte.
This article revisits the debate on the modernity of nations considering recent critical approaches to national phenomena. It proposes an alternative model that addresses the existence of empirical evidence about nations before the 19th century without erasing key changes in the history of nationhood, such as the rise of the principle of national sovereignty. The model draws on existing literature and a corpus of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese ego-documents from the Age of Revolutions. The study of patterns of usage of national languages in these life narratives supports the abandonment of the premodern/modern antinomy and the implementation of a more complex account. The proposal distinguishes republican, genetic, nonpoliticized ethnotypical, politicized ethnotypical, liberal, romantic, biological, cultural, and democratic forms of nationhood. It then develops the genetic and the ethnotypical forms using source materials and readdresses the issue of “modernity” in the light of this evidence.
The deconstruction of the ‘War of Independence’ (1808–1814) as a Spanish nationalist myth was a necessary step in advancing our knowledge of the history of the Age of Revolutions in Spain and of Spanish nation-building itself. However, it set aside those who had in fact experienced those events through a genuine Spanish nationalized lens. Using a corpus of autobiographical sources written between the 1780s and the 1830s, this paper argues that political concepts of Spanish nationhood were already available before the liberal revolution unleashed by the French invasion, that anti-liberals used the language of nationhood in their ego-documents too, and that ideas of independence and constitution pervaded social cleavages and ideological divides. Arguably, then, the War of Independence had both mythical and real dimensions in terms of the history of national identities. Therefore, the great issue in nineteenth-century Spanish nation-building would have not been a congenital ‘lack’ or ‘weakness’ of nationhood but an intense cultural war for its definition along political lines.
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