ABSTRACT
The social world is suffused with trailing clouds of etymology that give to social experience a range of meanings both allusive and elusive. Rendering these connections explicit and recovering their historical development entails what John N. Deely has appropriately called the semiotic consciousness, that is, the awareness that all human knowledge is mediated by signs and that consequently description must always at some level be construction. Nationalism treats national identity as a system of absolute values, in which the relativism of ethnic shifters has been transformed into a set of reified eternal verities: the state has always existed. This process of reification follows the fate of the more general class of moral-attribute shifters, but it does so within a specific and identifiable political context. The self-reified state inevitably masks numerous shifting meanings, but the goal of territorial fixity and absolute ethnic identity creates a model that does not easily tolerate open ambiguity.
