C~APTER6 THE WESTION OF CUL-TURAL I D E m 291
Inthis section, then, I have tried to map the conceptual shiftsby which,
according to some theorists, the Enlightenment 'subject', with a fixed
and stable identity, was de-cenbed into the open, contradictory,
unhished, hapented identities of the post-modern subject.I have
bated this throughfive peat de-centrings. Let me remind you again that
a great many social scientists and intellectuals do not accept the
conceptual or intellectual implications (as outlined above] of these
deveIopments in modern thought. However, few would now deny their
deeply unsettling effectson late-modern ideas and, particularly, on how
the subject and the issue of identity have come to be conceptualized.
COMMUNITIES'
Having traced the conceptual shifts by which the late-modern or post-
modern conceptions of the subject and identity have emerged, I sMl
now turnto the question of how this 'fragmented subject' is placed in
terns of its cultural identities. The particular cuPmal identity I am
concerned with is that of national identity (though other aspects are
implicated in the story).What is happening to cultural identity in Iate-
modernity? Specifically,how are national cultur+-i'_dnti~es-bein~~
affected,,-hay.or displacedL-=.-,- by.-Athe,;pro&s~w.-- Gm&ztitiad,,
Inthe modern world, the national cultures into which we are born are
one of the principal sources of cultural identitp. In d e W g ourselves
we sometimessay we are English or Welsh or Indian or Jamaican. Of
course, this is to speakmetaphorically. These identities are not literally
imprinted in our genes. However, we do think of them as if they are part
of our essential natures. The conservative philosopher, Rogm S m t o a
argues that:
The condition of man (sic]requires that the individual,while he
exists and acts as an autonomous being, does so only because he
can first identify h i n i S s z m n g greater -as a member of a
society, group, class, state or nation, of same arrangementto which
he may not attach a name,but which he recognizes instinctively as
home.
(Scruton,1986,p.156)
Ernest Gelher, &oma more liberal position, also believes that without a
sense ofnational identification the modern subject would experience a
deep sense dsubjective loss:
The idea of a man (sic)without a nation seems to impose a [great]
strain on the modern imagination. Amanmust,havh?*,art-ati~nality~.-.--4- ' ,.--,.--
as.,+?~=.c~+lX~be m u ~ ~ ,rri.*..-?"s+wk-.-,h a ~ e - ~ . n ~ ~ e ~ a n d ~ t w p a ~ I l T f i Z-.++'.I. ++ d4,,.v n- seems oT%ous,
though, alas, it is not true. But that it should have come to seem so
292 MODERNITYAND TTS FUTURES
very obviously true is indeed an aspect, perhaps the very core, of
the problem of nationalism. Having a nation is not an inherent
attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.
[Gellner, 1983, p.63
The argument we will be considering here is that, in fact, national
identities are not things we are born with, but are form~dand
transformed within and in relation to representation. We only h o w
what it is to be TngIishh'because of the way 'Englishness' has come to
be represented, as a set of meanings, by English national culture. It
follows that a nation is not only a politicd entity but something which
produces meanings -a system of culturalrepresentation.People are
not only legal citizens of a nation; they participate in the idea of the
nation as represented in its national culture. A nation is a symbolic
community and it is this which accounts for its 'power to generate a
sense of identity and allegiance' (Schwarz,1986, p.106].
National cultures are a distinctly modern form. The allegiance and
identification which, in a pre-modern age or in more traditiend
societies, were given to tribe, people, religion and region, came
gradually in Western societies to be bansfenced to the national culture.
Regiond and ethnic differenceswere gradually subsumed beneath what
Gellner calls the 'poIiticd roof'of the nation-state, which thus became a
powerful source of meanings for modern cuItural identities,
The formation of a natianal culture helped to create standards of
universal literacy, generalized a single vernacular language as the
dominant medium of communication throughout the nation, created a
homogeneous culture and maintained national cultural institutions,
such as a national education system [see Geo&ey Whitty" discussion of
this in Book 3 (Bocockand Thompson, 19921,Chapter 61. Inthese and
other ways, national culture became a key feature of industrialization
and an engine of modernity. Nevertheless, there are other aspects to a
national culture which pull it in a different direction, bringing to the
fore what Bomi Bhabha calk 'the particular ambivaIence that haunts the
idea of the nation' (Bhabha, 1990, p.31. Some of these ambiguities are
explored in Section 4. First, Sedan 3.1 willqconsiderhow a national
culture functions as a system of representation, and Section 3.2 whether
national identities are really as unified and homogeneous as they
represent themselves to be. It is only when these two questions have
been answered, that wwe can properly consider the claim that national
identities were once centred, coherent, and whole, but are now being
dislocated by the processes of globalization,
3.1 NARRATINGTHE NATION:AN IMAGINED
COMMUNITY
National cultures are composed not only of cultural institutions, but of
symbols and representations. A national culture is a discourse -a way
of constructing meanings which iduences and organizes both our
CHAPTER6 THE QUESTIONOF CULTURALIDEKTITY 293
actiarrs and our conception of ourselves (seePenguin Dictionary of
Sociology:DISCOURSE; also Book 1 (Hall and Gieben, 19921,Chapter 6).
National cultures construct identitiesby producing meanings about %the
nation' with which we can identify; these are contained in the stories
which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its
past, and images which are consmcted of it. As Benedict Anderson
(19831has argued,national identity is an 'imagined community' (see the
discussion of this idea by Kenneth Thompson in Book 3 mocock and
Thompson,1992),Chapter 71.
Anderson argues that the differences between nations lie in the diflerent
ways in which they are imagined. Or,as that great British patriot Enoch
Powell put it, 'the life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely
in the imagination' (Powell, 1969, p.2451.But how is the modern nation
imagined? What representationd strategies are deployed to construct
our commonsense views of national belonging or identity?What are the
representations of, say, 'England'which win the identifications and
d e h e the identitiesof 'EngIish' people? 'Nations', Rami Bhabha has
remarked, 'Iike narratives,lose their origins in the myths of time and
only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye' (Bhabha, 1990,p.11.
How is the narrative of the national culture told?
Of the many aspects which a comprehensiveanswer to that question
wauld include, I have selectedfive main elements.
1 First, there is thenarrative of the nation, as it is told and retold in
national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture. These
provide a set.of stories, images,landscapes, scenarios, historical events,
national symbols and rituals which stand for, or ~pmsent,the shared
experiences, sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which give meaning
to the nation. Asmembers of such an 'imagined co~zunuaity',we see
ourselves in our mind's eye sharing in this narrative. I=lends
significanceand importanceto our humdnun existence, connecting our
evexyday lives with a national destiny that preexisted us and will
outlive us.From England's green and pleasant land, its gentle,rolling
countryside, rase-trelIised cottages and country house gardens -
Shakespeare's 'sceptered isle' -to public ceremonials like the Troaping
of the Colour and Poppy Day, the discourse of 'Englishness' represents
what 'England' is, gives meaning to the identity of 'being English' and
h e s 'England' as a focus of idenmcation in English (arid Anglophile]
hearts. As Bill Schwarz observes:
These make up the threads that bind us invisibIy to the past. Just
as English nationalism is denied, so is the fact of its turbulent and
contested history. What we get instead ...is an emphasis en
tradition and heritage, above all on continuity so that our present
political culture is seen as the flowering of a long organic
evolution,
(Schwarz,1986,p.1551
294 MOOERNrPTAND ITS FCTTURES
Jubilee year, 1977
2 SecondIy, there is the emphasis on origins, continuil;v,tmdition and
timelessness. National identity is represented as primordial -'there, in
the very nature of things', sometimes slumbering,but ever ready to be
'awoken' from its 'long, persistent and mysterious somnolence' to
resume its unbroken existence (Gellner, 1983,p.48).The essentials of
the national characterremain unchanged through dl the vicissitudes of
history. It is there from birth, unified and continuous, 'changeless'
throughout all the changes, eternal. Mis Thatcher remarked at the time
of the Falldands War that there were some people 'who thought we
could no longer do the great things which we once did ...that Britain
was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of
the world. ...Well they were wrong ...Britain has not changed' [quoted
in Barnett, 1982,p,63].
3 A third discursive strategy is what Hobsbawm and Ranger cdl the
invention of tradition: Traditions which appear or claim to be old are
often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented. ..."Invented
hadition" [means]a set of practices, ...of a ritual or symbolic nature
which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviours by
repetition which automatically implies continuity with a suitable
historical past'. For example, 'Nothing appears more ancient, and linked
to an immemorial past, thanthe pageanby which S U ~ ~ O W ~ SBritish
monarchy and its public ceremonial manifestations. Yet ...in its
modern form it is the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries' Wobsbawm and Ranger, 1983, p.1).
4 A fourth example of the narrative of national culture is that ofa
found~tiunolmyth:a story which locates the origin of the nation, the
people and their national character so early that they are lost in the
CHAFER 8 W E QUESTIONOF CULWRAL IDEMnY 295
mists of, not 'real', but 'mythic' time -like basing the dehition of the
English as 'free-born' on the Anglo-Saxonparliament. Invented
traditions make the confusions and disasters of history intelligible,
converting disarray into 'community' (r;.g.the Blitz or evacuation during
World War II] and disasters into Wiumphs (e.g. Dunkirk). Myths of origin
aIso help disedkmchised peoples to 'conceive and express their
resenment and its contents in intelligible terms' (Hobsbawm and
Ranger, 1983, p.1). They provide a narrative in terms of which an
alternative history or counter-narrative, which predates the ruptures of
colonization, can be constructed (e.g. Rastafarianism for the
dispossessed poor of Kingston, Jamaica;see Hall, 1985). Newnations
are then founded on these myths. (I say 'myths' because, as was the case
with many African nations which emerged after decolonization, what
preceded colonization was not 'one nation, one people', but many
different bibal cultures and societies.)
5 National identityis also ohen symbolicallygrounded on the idea of a
pure, originalpeople or 'folk'.But, inthe realities of national
development, it is rarely this primordial folk who persist or exercise
power. As GeIlner wryly observes, 'When [theR d t d a n s l donned folk
costume and trekked over the hills, composing poems in the forest
clearings, they did not also dream of one day becoming powerful
bureaucrats, ambassadors and ministers' (1983,p.61).
The discourse of national culture is thus not as modern as it appears to
be. It constructs identitieswhich are ambiguously placed between past
and future. It straddles the temptationto return to former glories and the
chive to go forwards ever deeper into modernity. Sometimesnational
cultures are tempted to turn the clock back,to retreat defensively to that
'lost time' when the nation was 'great', and to restore past identities,
This is the regressive, the anachronistic, element in the national cultural
story. But often t h i s very return to the past conceals a struggleto
mobilize 'the people' to purifg.their ranks, to expel the 'others' who
threaten their identity, and to gird their loins for a new march forwards.
During the 1980s,the rhetoric of Thatcherism sometimes inhabited both
these aspects of what Tom Nairn cdls the 'Tanus-face'of nationalism
(Nairn, 1977): looking back to past imperial glories and 'Victorian
values' while shultaneously undertaking a kind of modernization in
preparation for a new stage af global capitalist competition. Something
of the same kind may be going on now in Eastern Europe. Areas
breaking away horn the old Soviet Union reaffirm their essential ethnic
identities and claim nationhood, buthessed by [sometimesextremely
dubious] 'stories' of m w c origins,religious orthodoxy, and racial
purity. Yet they may be also using thenation as the form in which to
compete with other ethnic 'nations', and so to gain en- to the rich
'club' of the West. As lmanuel Wallerstein has acutely observed, 'the
ngtionalisms of the modern world are the ambiguous expression [of a
desire]for ...assimilation into the universal .,.and simultaneously for
...adhering to the particular, the reinvention of differences. Indeed it is
a universalism through particularismand particularism through
universalism' (Wallerstein,1984,pp.166-71.
296 MODERNITY AND ITS FUTURES
3.2 DECONSTRUCTINGTHE 'NATIONAL CULTURE':
IDENTITYAND DIFFERENCE
Section 3.2 considered how a national culture functions as a source of
cultural meanings, a focus of identifkation, and e system of
representation. Thissection now turnsto the question of whether
national cultures and the national identities they construct are actually
unified.Inhis famous essay on the topic, Ernest Renan said that three
things constitute the spiritual principle of the unity of a nation: ' ...the
possession in common of a rich legacy of memories, ...the desire to live
together, [and]the will to perpetuate the heritage that one has received
in an undivided form' menan, 1990,p.19).You should bear in mind
these three resonant concepts of what constitutes a national culture as
an 'imagined community': memories from the past; the desim to live
together; the perpetuation of the heritage.
Timothy Brennan reminds us that the word nation refers 'both to the
modern nation-state and to something more ancient and nebdous -the
natio -a local community, domicile, family, condition of belonging1
(Brennan,1990, p.453.Nationd identities represented precisely the
resuIt of bringing these two halves of the national equation together -
offering both membership of the political nation-state and identification
with the national culture: "tomake culture and polity congruent' and to
endow 'reasodably homogeneous cultures, each with its own political
roof' (Gellner,1983, p.43).Gellnef clearly establishesthis impulse to
unify in national cultures;
...culture is now the necessaxy shared medium, the Iife-bIood,or
perhaps rather the minimal shared atmosphere, within which
done the members of the society can breathe and survive and
produce. For a given society it must be one in which they can all
breathe and speak and produce; so it must be the same culture.
[Gellner,1983, pp.37-43)
To put it crudely, however different its members may be in terms af
class, gender or race, a national culture seeks to unify them into one
cultural identity, to represent them all as belonging to the same great
nationalfamily. But is national identity a unifying identity of this kind,
which cancels or subsumes cultural difference?
Such an idea is open to doubt, for severalreasons. A national cuIture
has never been simply a point of allegiance,bonding and symbolic
idenmcation. It is also a sbmcture of dturaI powsr. Consider the
following points:
1 Most modern nations consist of disparate cultures which were ody
d e d by a lengthy process of violent conquest-that is, by the
forcible suppression of cultural difference. 'The British people' are the
product ofa series of such conquests -Celtic, Roman,Saxon,Viking
and Noman. Throughout Europe the story is repeated ad nauseam.
Each conquest subjugated conquered peoples and their cultures,
CHAPTER 6 THE QUESTIONOF CULWRAL IDENTITY 297
customs, languages and traditions and tried to impose a more uni5ed
cultural hegemony. As Ernest Renan has remarked, these vioIent
beginnings which stand at the origins of modern nations have Erst to be
'forgotten' before allegiance to a mere unified, homogeneous nationd
identity could begin to be forged. Thus 'Brilish' culture still does not
consist of an equal partnership between the component cultures of the
UK,but of the effective hegemony of 'English', a southern-based culture
which represents itself as the essential British culture, over Scottish,
Welsh, and Irishand, indeed, other regional cultures. Matthew Arnold,
who tried to Bxthe essential character of the English people from their
literature, claimed when considering the Celts that such 'provincial
nationalisms had to be swd!owed up at the level of the political and
licensed as cultural conf~ibutcsrsto English culture"odd, 1986, p.12).
2 Secondly, nations are dways composed of differentsocial cIasses,
and gender and ethnic groups. Modern British nationalism was the
product of a very concerted effort, in the late Victorian and high
imperial period, to mify the classes amass social divisions by providing
them with an alternative point of identification--common membership
of 'the family of thenation'. The same point can be made about gender.
National identities are strongly gendered. The meanings and values of
'Englishness' have powerful mastdine associations. 'Womenplay a
secondary role as guardians of hearth,kith and kin,and as 'mothers' of
the nation's 'sons'.
3 Thirdly, modern Western nations were also the centres af empires or
of neo-imperial spheres of influence, exercising cultural hegemony over
the cultures of the colonized. Some historians now argue that it was in
this process of comparison between the 'virtues' of 'Englishness' and the
negative features of other cultmes that many of the distinctive
characteristics of English identities were &st dehned (see C. Hall,
1992).
Instead of thinking of national cultures as d e d , we should thinkof
them as constituting a discursive device which represents difference as
unity or identity. They are crass-cut by deep internal divisians and
differences, and 'unified' only through the exercise of different forms of
cultural power. Yet -as in the fantasies of the 'whole' self of which
Lacmian psychoanalysis speaks -national identities continue to be
represented as unified.
One way of unifylug them has been to represent them as the expression
of the underlying culture of bone people'. Ethnicity is the term we give
to cultural features -language, religion, custom, traditions,feeling for
"place'-which are shared by a people. It is therefore tempting to fzyte
use ethfiicity in this 'foundational' way. But this belief turns out, in the
modern wodd, to be a myth. Western Europe has no nations which are
composed of only one people, one culture or ethnicity. Modern nations
are all cultlrroJ hybn'ds.
It is even more difficult to try to unify national identity around race.
First, because -contrary to widespread belief -race is not a biological
298 MODERNIXYAND ITS FUlURES
or genetic category with any scienSc validity.There are different
genetic strains and 'pools', but they are as widely dispersed within what
are called 'races' as they are between one 'race'and another. Genetic
difference-the last refuge of racist ideologies -cannot be used to
distinguish one people horn another.Race is a discursive not a
bieIogicaI category. That is to say, it is the organizing category of those
ways of speaking, systems of representation, and social practices
[discourses) which utilize a loose, often unspecified set of differencesin
physical characteristics -skin colour, hair texture, physical and bodily
features etc. -as symbolic markers in order to differentiate one group
socially from another.
Of course the unscienflc character of the term 'race' does not
undermine 'how racial logics and racial fiames of reference are
articulated and deployed, and with what consequences' fDonaId and
Rattansi, 1992, p.11. Inrecent years,biological notions of races as a
distinct species (notions which underpinned extreme forms of
nationalist ideology and discourse in earlier periods: Victorian eugenics,
European race theories, fascism)have been replaced by cultumi
dehitions of race, which allow race to play a significant role in
discourses about the nation and national identity. Paul Gilroy has
commented on the links between 'culturd racism' and 'the idea of race
and the ideas of nation, nationality, and nationd belonging':
We increasingly face a racism which avoids being recognized as
such because it is able to line up 'race' with nationhood,
patriotism and nationalism. A racism which has taken a necessary
distance fiom crude ideas af biological inferiority and superiority
now seeks to present an imaginary definition of the nation as a
u s e d cultural community. It constructs and defends an image of
national culture -homogeneous in its whiteness yet precarious
and perpetuallyvulnerable to attack from enemies within and
without. ...Thisis a racism that answers the social and political
turbulence of crisis and crisis management by the recovery of
national greahess in the imagination. Its dream-like construction
of our sceptered isle as an ethnicdly purified one provides special
comfort against the ravages of [national] decIine.
[Gilroy,1992, p.87)
But even when 'race' is used in this broader discursive way, modern
nations stubbornly refuse to be resolved into it. As Renan observed, 'the
leading nations of Europe are nations of essentidly mixed blood':
'France is [atonce]Celtic, Iberic and Germanic. Germany is Germanic,
Celtic and Slav,Italy is the country where ...Gauls, Eh-uscans,Pelagians
and Greeks, not to mention many other elements, infersect in an
indecipherable mixture. The British Ides, considered as a whole,
present a mixture of Celtic and Germanic blood, the proportions of
which are singularly d i f i d t te define' menan, 1990,pp.14-15). And
these 'are relatively simple ' m i m e s ' as compared with those to be
found in Cenbal and Eastern Europe.
CHAPTER 6 THE QVESTtONOF CULTURAL IOENTIYY 299
This brief examination undermines the idea of the nation as a unified
cultural identity*National identities do not subsume all other forms of
difference into themselves and are not free of the play of power, internal
divisions and contradictions,cross-cuttingallegiances and difference.
So when we come to consider whether national identities are being
dislocated, we must bear in mind the way national cultures help to
'stitchup' differencesinto one identity.
The previous sectionqualaed the idea that national identities have
ever been as unified or homogeneous as they are represented to be,
NevertheIess, in modern history, national cultures have dominated
'modernity' and national identities have tended to win out over other,
more particularistic sources of cultural idenacation.
What, then, is so powerfully dislocating national cultural identities
now, at the end of the twentieth century? The answer is, a complex of
processes and forces of change,which for convenience can be summed
up under the term 'globalization'. This concept was extensively
discussed by Anthony McGrew in Chapter 2 of thisvolume. As he
argued, 'globalization' refers to those processes, operating on a global
scale, which cut across national boundaries, integrating and connecting
communities and organizations in new spacetime combinations,
making the world inreality and in experience more interconnected.
Globalization implies a movement away fiom the classical sociological
idea of a 'society' as a well-bounded system, and its replacement by a
perspective which concentrates on 'hew social life is ordered across
time and space' (Giddens,1990, p.64).These new temporal and spatial
features, resulting in the compression of distances and time-scales, are
among the most significant aspects of globalization affecting cuIturaI
identities, and they are discussed in greater detail below.
Remember that globalization is not a recent phenomenon: 'Modernity is
inherently globalizing' (Giddens, 1990,p.631.As David Held argued
Dook 1(Hall and Gieben, 19921,Chapter 2), nation-states were never as
autonomous or as sovereign as they claimed to be. And, as Wdlerstein
reminds us, capitalism 'was from the beginning an a& of the world
economy and not of nation states. Capitalhas never allowed its
aspirations to be determined by national boundaries' [Wallerstein,1979,
p.19).So both tha trend towards national autonomy and the trend
towards globalization are deeply rooted in modernity (seeWallerstein,
1991,p.98).
You should bear in mind these two cantradictory tendencies within
globalization. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that, since the 1970s,
b o d the scope and pace of global integration have greatly increased,
accelerating the flows and Iinkages betweennations. In this and the
300 MODERNW AND TTSFUTURES
-
Capitalism-'an affair of the world economy'
next section, I' shall attempt to track the consequences of these aspects
of glabdization on cultural identities, examining three possible
consequences:
1 National identities m being eroded as a result of the growth of
cultural homogenization and 'the global post-modernsa
2 National and other "tocal%rparticularistic identities are being
strengthened by the resistanceto globalization.
3 NationaI identities are declining but new identities of hybridity are
taking their place.
4.1 T!ME-SPACE COMPRESSIONAND IDENTITY
What impact has the latest phase of globalization had on national
identities? You will remember from Chapter 2 that one of its main
featuresis 'time-space compression' -the speeding up of global
processes, so that the world feels smaller and distances shorter, so that
events in one place impact immediately on people and places a very
long distance away. David Harvey argues that:
As space appears to shrinkto a 'global' village of
telecomunications and a 'spaceship earth' of economic and
ecological inter-dependencies -ta use just two famiIiar and
everyday images -and as time horizons shorten to the point
where the present is a11there is,so w e have to learn to cope with
an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal
worlds.
(Harvey,1989,p.240)
CHAPTER 6 ME QUESTIONOF CULTURAL t D E M W 301
What is important for our argument about the impact of globalization on
identity is that time and space are dso the basic coordinates of all
systems of rep~sentafion.Every medium of representation -writing,
drawing, painting, photography,figuringthrough art or the
tslecommunications systems -must translate its subject into spatial
and temporal dimensions. Thus, narrative translates events into a
beginning-rniddle-end time sequence; and visual systems of
representation banslate three-dimensional objects into two dimensions.
Different cultural epochs have differentways of combining these time-
space coordinates. Harvey contrasts the rational ordering of space and
time of the Enlightenment (with its regular sense of arder, symmetry
and balance] with the broken and fragmented time-space coordinates of
the Modernist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. We can see new spacetime relationships being d e h e d in
developments as different as Einstein's theory of relativity,the cubist
paintings of Picasso and Braque, the works of the Surrealists and
Dadaists,the experiments with time and narrative in the novels of
Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and the use of montage techniques in
the early cinema of Vertov and Eisensteh.
Section 3 argued that identity is deeply impIicated in representation.
Thus,the shaping and reshaping of time-space relationships within
different systems of representation have profound effects on how
identities are located and represented. The male subject, represented in
eighteenth-century paintings surveyinghis property, in the form of the
well-regulated and controlled classical spatial forms of the Georgian
crescent (Bath) or English country residence [BlenheimPalace), or
seeing himself located in the spacious, controlled foms of Nature of a
Capability Brown formal garden or pmkland, has a very different sense
of culturaI identity from the subject who sees 'himselfJherself' mirrored
in the fragmented, fractured 'faces' which look out from the broken
planes and surfaces of one of Picasso's cubist canvases.All identi~tiesare
located in symbolic space and time. They have what Edward Said calls
theh 'imaginary geographies' (Said,1990):their characteristic
'landscapes', their sense of 'place', 'home', or heirnot, as well as their
placings in time -in invented baditions which bind past and present,
in myths of origin which project thepresent back into the past, and in
the narratives of the nation which connect the individual to larger,mare
significant national historic events.
Another way of thinking about this is interms of what Giddens [1990)
calls the separation of space fiom place. "lace' is spec&, concrete,
knawn,familiar,bounded: the site of specific social practices which
have shaped and formed us, and with which our identities are closely
bound up.
Inpremodern societies,space and place largely coincided, since the
spatial dimensionsof social life are,for most of the population ...
dominated by "presence' -by localised activity. .,.Modernity
increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations
between 'absent' others, locationally distant from any given