ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises and develops the book’s key concepts. Inclusive particularity – the pursuit of inclusion in the imagined national community from the standpoint of local distinctiveness – is set against the past as a critical mirror, or how ostensibly normative rhetoric and representations can be used to critique the national self and express dissent from national history. Past presencing (Macdonald 2013) is characterised as a process that involves both excavating the past – hollowing it out and subordinating it to the present – and backfilling the past with new contemporary meanings and, consequently, renewed contemporary relevance. It is argued that the methodological arsenal scholars have developed to describe the dynamics of memory and identity ‘between and beyond’ established categories can equally be used to uncover complexity and heterogeneity within these categories. It is suggested, moreover, that anthropologists and historians have a critical contribution to make to the literature by exploring the everyday multidirectionality of both memory and nationhood, and how this multidirectionality might be instrumental in both the maintenance and erosion of national boundaries.
