ABSTRACT
Many authors before us have failed to provide concise definitions of the concepts of religion and ‘nationhood’, as well as of the connection between them.1 On the one hand, this could seem startling, as it is those two terms which are seen by many people as crucial factors in determining the central organisational units of political and social life and statehood, as well as for the biggest wars of the last centuries. On the other hand, if religion and nationhood do indeed play crucial roles in shaping collective (as well as individual) identities, then it might not be so surprising at all that they represent a moving target. Boundaries are established in interaction with other agents (in other words, through their engagement with the world), and thus are never fixed but fluent. In what ways can religion and nationhood be seen as such ‘crucial points of reference’
for the establishment of individual and collective identities (commonly described as understandings of who and what we are, as individuals, and as parts of larger social and political entities)? While older (‘essentialist’, as we have learned to call them) approaches to understanding nationhood emphasise shared history, language, and ‘culture’, more recent approaches, informed by anthropology, ethnography, and cultural studies, conceptualise nationhood as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983; see also Smith 2000). The word ‘imagined’ does not indicate that these communities are unreal, but rather that the sense of belonging among its members is not based on actual physical face-to-face encounters and personal bonds but on the understanding that the lives of a particular group of people revolve around a common centre. As an effect, loyalties between members of such ‘imagined communities’ are stronger than those between community insiders and outsiders. This sense of belonging among people who have never met each other in person emerges, according to Benedict Anderson (1983), through mass media enabling people to conceive of, and relate to, the simultaneous existence of fellow human beings living far away (both in place and time). A typical example for this enabling mechanism would be the modern novel (or, nowadays, all mass media, print and electronic).2 Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ can also be used as an explanation for why some people are willing to lose their lives for the land of their
forefathers and -mothers (who are not their immediate biological ancestors) and fellow countrymen and -women (most of whom they have never met). Anderson’s work on ‘imagined communities’, however, predates the age of the
‘hegemony of the gene’ (Finkler 2000). The core question of this chapter will be: have the New Genetics and Genomics influenced the ways in which we think and act religious and ‘national’/’ethnic’ belonging into being?
