In his classic study on the rise of Arab nationalism, George Antonius writes: ‘Without school or book, the making of a nation is in modern times inconceivable’ (1946: 40). Of course, modern nations are not built in schools and books alone; but one need not discount nationalism's socioeconomic determinants, nor its historical specificity, to accept the premise of Antonius's argument: that is, the effect of culture and cultural institutions on the political formation of the nation-state. Though the nature of that effect is itself overdetermined, its location can in part be inferred from what Antonius then goes on to write concerning certain educational reforms initiated in Syria in 1834: ‘[They] paved the way, by laying the foundations of a new cultural system, for the rehabilitation of the Arabic language as a vehicle of thought’ (ibid). In other words, one might say, a modern nation is inconceivable apart from a language in which it can be conceived and communicated as such. By articulating this linguistic link between nation and thought, Antonius thus points to the site of culture, or a cultural system, as the specifically ideological field in which nationalism is sown and from which national identities are reaped.

I draw attention here, through the above metaphor, to the organic character of this relationship between culture and nationalism not because, as Ernest Gellner argues, there is anything natural about it, but because it is almost invariably from the field of culture that proponents of nationalism first posit an idea of the nation as an organic entity, one which pre-exists its geopolitical formation.