ABSTRACT
In both social science and public discourse, our most basic understandings of what count as societies are shaped more than we usually care to admit by the modern era’s distinctive rhetoric of nations and national identity. This “discursive formation” (in Foucault’s sense of the term) is implicated in the usage that constructs societies as bounded, integral, wholes with distinctive identities, cultures, and institutions.1 The tacit assumption of nationalist rhetoric reinforces our acceptance of statecentered conventions of data-gathering that make nation-states the predominant units of comparative research – even when the topics are cultural or social psychological, not political-institutional. Charles Tilly has referred to the “pernicious postulate” that societies are bounded and discrete, but his critique has hardly ended the usage, partly because it is so deeply embedded in the way we speak and think.2 This is not an unmotivated error by social scientists; it is a participation, perhaps unwitting, in the nationalist rhetoric that pervades public life and contemporary culture. This rhetoric presents nations with a decontextualized autonomy that hampers academic understanding and has impacts on practical affairs.
