ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, there has been renewed interest in the study of everyday nationhood. This theoretical chapter emphasises the benefit of interrogating the interpenetration of the local and the national, rather than focusing on how one might transcend the other. The chapter proposes parallels between the historian Alon Confino’s discussion of the Heimat idea in German nation building and the Greek concept of patr í da (‘homeland’), both of which can interchangeably refer to an abstract national homeland and a familiar local one. It is argued that as every Greek is able to envisage the national patr í da through the lens of their own local patr í da, they are able to feel belonging to an abstract national collectivity grounded in belonging to a tangible local community. My discussion not only repudiates an analytical opposition between the locality and the nation, but also demonstrates how the two might be mutually reinforcing, such that national identity is made tangible through local particularity, whilst local particularity takes on broader significance through national abstraction.
