National ceremonies: the pursuit of authenticity

Abstract

This article asks what, if any, impact national ceremonies have on the formation of national identities. Why are some ceremonies perceived as national and persistent through time, while others fail to achieve that status? It argues that national ceremonies can only be examined as specific types of situations – performances, rather than rituals – characterized by the relationship between performers and their audiences. Following Jeffery Alexander's cultural pragmatics theory, national ceremonies are seen as successful only when a performance is perceived as authentic. A ceremony's authenticity is, at best, a quality of experience among its audience. Only when the audience is transformed into willing participants through a performance's mise-en-scène can a national ceremony be seen as a ritual-like performance. The paper will conclude that the efficacy of these performances is temporary, and that even when a performance succeeds in creating a community of shared experience, that community dissolves with the end of the performance

The politics of recognition: symbols, nation building and rival nationalisms

“…The first official celebrations of this day took place in 1916, but it was not adopted as a national day until 1983 and did not become a public holiday until 2005. In short, neither the Danish nor the Swedish national days have become as popular as the Norwegian equivalent, and their constitutions have not appealed to the imagination of the citizens (Anderson 1991), partly because they are not perceived as authentic (Uzelace 2010). Similarly, their sponsorship and ceremonial design are not comparable to Norway's Constitution Day.…”

What is ‘needed’ to keep remembering? War‐specific communication, parental exemplar behaviour and participation in national commemorations

“…Although certainly not for everyone, as argued by amongst others Fox (), Geisler (), and Uzelac (). An empirical study by Coopmans, Lubbers, and Meuleman () provides further support for this line of argumentation, showing that both ethnic groups and birth cohorts differ in the extent to which commemorative participation is associated with feelings of national belongingness.…”

Demonstrating for a Kosovo Republic in Switzerland: emotions, national identity and performance

“…Thus, in contrast to the recent scholarship, which has sought to understand the success of performances by analysing the reception of the shows by the audience (Alexander ; Mookherjee ; Uzelac ), this paper partially reverses this perspective by demonstrating what the participating audience itself brought to the performance. Moreover, it makes it possible to give a direct voice to those who were primarily involved instead of observing it from the outside and trying to guess how they were affected.…”

“…Although scholars have recently started to question the impact of performances of a national character and have highlighted the importance of emotions in this domain, much research still needs to be carried out in order to understand better the relationship between emotions, national identity and performance. In this article, I seek to explore the conditions leading to a successful performance, a designation that can be broadly applied, according to the literature (see Alexander ; Mookherjee ; Uzelac ), to those performances that manage to create an ‘affective experience’ (Mookherjee : S5). I scrutinise this issue by adopting an oral history approach and with the help of a particular case, that of demonstrations organised by Albanian‐speaking migrants from Yugoslavia in Switzerland in the 1980s.…”