ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently, scholars of nationalism primarily used culture to stand for language, ethnicity, and broadly defined traditions. Culture was that stuff out of which nations were built and which nationalists sought to protect and perfect under the aegis of the modern nation-state. Alternatively, culture was regarded as a “thing” requiring invention in order for people to care about and fight for the establishment of nationstates. By embracing the so-called cultural turn, a new generation of scholars changed both the lens and the focus of the field: the object of study shifted from an emphasis on nationalism to one on national identity. From this new vantage point, the nation is not a reified object but a symbol competed over by social actors, nationalism is a field of debates about the symbol of the nation, and national identity is a relational process enacted in social dramas and “events” as well as in everyday practices. This essay analyzes the various ways in which culture has been conceptualized in the
literature on nations and nationalism. It then discusses the import of the “cultural turn” on the field, with a specific focus on recent contributions and new directions. Visualizing that turn, however, presupposes some knowledge of the road and the maps by which we navigated before. To that end, I begin with a brief consideration of the pre-history of “national culture.”
