ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts presents in the subsequent chapters. This part explores the links between nationalism and various kinds of ritual or ceremonial performance. It aims to provide a stage on which nationalism can be both celebrated and contested, reconstituted or replaced by regional identities both intra-national and trans-national. The part deals with the ways in which these royalists negotiate their socially inferior positioning; they switch between the competing discourses of democratic egalitarianism on the one hand and hereditary privilege on the other so as to construct a positive view of the monarchy and the nation and themselves. The sociocultural character of the Isle of Man, Lewis argues, is influenced largely by the island’s anomalous position: geographically central among ‘The British Isles’ while politically and economically peripheral to mainland life.
