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Nira Yuves-Davis Theorizing Nation
Nira Yuves-Davis Theorizing Nation
Nira Yuves-Davis Theorizing Nation
Theorising
Gender and
Nation
Main Ideas
Gender relations:
Impact on national creatons (projects)
Positions and positioning of women in national projects
How national projects are gendered both by the notions of man and
womanhood
Epistemological framework:
Knowledge drawn from one standpoint cannot be ‘finished’ i.e. finally
defined
Though it does not mean invalidity or irrelevance to any particular
context
Theorizations - nation and
nationalism
Dissmissed the importance of gender relations (even women)
Primordialists – a school of nationalists
Nations – natural, universal extention of kinship relations
Materialists
Stress state bureaucracy, institutional apparatuses and the maintenance
of national-ethnic ideologies and boundraries
Others claim
Intellectuals are important in creating nationalist ideologies
• esp. in opressed nations, e.g. bards, philosophers –either allowed or
banned show golden age of anation from the mythical perspective.
Imagined
comunities
Imagined communitties
Nation can only be imagined when
Universal language script (medeival Latin)
New history and cosmology patterns
Old organiational patterns vanished gradually
• Monarchy – divine rulers
• Hierarchy
That happened in Western Europe and elswhere due to:
Economic change
Social and scientific discoveries
Devolopement of new, rapid comunication
A search of the link between power, fraternity and time (history)
Imagined communitties
Devolopement of print as commodity
A range of new ideas could be transmitted or smuggled if neccessary
Manuscripts replaced by reproductable knowlege
Early print capitalism emerged – branches of printing bussinesses and
publishing houses – national boundraries ignored
An early market search – literate Europe
First – Latin readers – the others will quickly follow
Cheap editions in vernaculars - mass readership developement
Latin Transformation
Latin removed from the educational and eccleciastical contexts
Latin – entered as a language of print – unification needed
Impact of Reformation and the popularisation of ‘non-Latin’
languages (Luther – writing in German, popular by his name,
first ever bests-selling author)
Protestantism as an advocaate of print-capitalism
Index Librarium Prohibitium – Vatican on the other pole
(decrease of power)
New masses of readers – non-Latin speakers enter
New languages
Europe was not as universalistic in political systems as in
linguistic domain
New vernaculars for administration – Anglo-Saxon in England for
courts
After the Norman conquest French mixing with Anglo-Saxon resulted
in new English (Early English)
Choice of new language as dominant is pragmatic, unselfconcious, and
a gradual process – contributed to the decline of imagined European,
Christendom- dominated communitty.
Languages fatality
Can be positive- generates language diversity
Unifies many ‘little nations’
Unique fields of exchange
printproducing language varieties and opening the geographical
boundraries
Interplay between fatality, technology and capitalism
Print- capitalism decided wchich langages were to extinct or
deteriorate (closer to print vernacular = succesfull)
Imagined communitties
conclusion
Modern nation was preconditioned by;
Convergence of capitalism and print technology
Fatal created diversity of human languages
Imagined community concept appeared