Methodology and Scope of Everyday Nationalism

The existing scholarship on everyday nationalism sometimes seems to be unified more by method than by substantive focus, given the diversity of cases studied. Most of the literature relies on qualitative methods, primarily featuring ethnographic observation, interviews, focus groups, and social media analysis (Knott Reference Knott2015). While this methodological consensus has strengthened scholars’ depth of understanding of specific cases, qualitative research often limits the appeal and utility of research for producing generalizable findings that are relevant for other fields.Footnote ³ The core means of addressing these limitations is to refocus analysis on social practices, such as the varieties suggested by Fox and Miller-Idriss (Reference Fox and Miller-Idriss2008): talking, choosing, consuming, and performing the nation.Footnote ⁴ While these categories certainly do not exhaust the range of social practices and significant overlap among them may exist (e.g., where “tweeting the nation” might fit into this schema remains unclear), they provide a template for identifying a common range of practices and their diversity within and among cases.

Qualitative research that relies on the observation of social practices must still reckon with the ways that practices are embedded in hierarchies of knowledge and authority (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2007). For scholars conducting qualitative research on everyday ethnicity or nationhood, these hierarchies inhere in the relationship between researcher and respondent and are typically encountered in terms of navigating one’s positionality as insider, outsider, or both.Footnote ⁵ In turn, respondents provide insight into the broader associations and power relationships that they associate with ethnic or national identification and potentially with the identities and organizations that intersect them like race (Smith Reference Smith2015), religion (Stroup Reference Stroup2017), or domestic political regimes (Yusupova Reference Yusupova2019).

In the first contribution to the special issue, Stroup (Reference Stroup2020) notes that religion is an important area for investigating everyday ethnicity that remains relatively untapped. Yet in attempting to expand the study of everyday ethnicity to examine the intersection of Hui and Muslim identities, he encountered an unexpected problem in the form of “epistemic deference,” or a situation in which respondents “feel that as non-academics or non-elites they lack the qualifications to provide any kind of useful information to the researcher.” He ascribes this reaction to the hierarchies of power and spiritual authority that structure communities of faith, which in turn make daily practices seem profane, uninteresting, or otherwise unworthy of academic research. Of course, hierarchies of power are pervasive in ethnic as well as religious communities (and typically they overlap), and Stroup’s observations highlight the influence of power relations not only between respondents and their communities but also between respondents and researchers. Asking respondents about “religion” or “ethnicity” invariably invokes those power relations, leading either to epistemic deference (with regard to religion) or sometimes to assertions of what the researcher ought to be studying (with regard to ethnicity). Stroup thus recommends that researchers of everyday ethnicity and religion focus on respondents’ lived experience, such as “how practices have changed over the course of their lifetimes, or how their habits in present differ from their youth.” In other words, the key is to remain focused on everyday practices as constituting (and contesting) ethnic boundaries rather than the specific content that fills them.

Vucetic and Hopf (Reference Vucetic and Hopf2020) seek to expand the scope of everyday nationalism by building bridges with constructivist approaches to national identity in the field of International Relations. Their “Making Identity Count” (MIC) project is motivated by a similar ambition of taking qualitative understandings of national identities and making them broadly comparable without sacrificing their interpretive epistemology. In contrast to the focus of everyday nationalism on practice theory (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Nice1990; Reckwitz Reference Reckwitz2002), MIC adopts a Gramscian approach in arguing that “hegemony is more secure and stable the more deeply the discourse of national identity being propagated by the elite resonates with the masses.” In methodological terms, everyday nationalism typically starts with the ethnographic observation of microlevel social practices, while Vucetic and Hopf focus on a broad range of textual sources, reasoning that national identities are a kind of matrix (following Edensor [Reference Edensor2002]) that imprints and configures social practices, textual sources, and material and cultural structures. A crucial advantage of this approach is that it provides a means to access historical manifestations of everyday nationalism in ways that are not available to contemporary ethnographers, for “if at least some habits of nationhood are discursive, then it stands to reason that one could recover them through some form of discourse analysis of a sample of texts that widely circulate in modern states.” MIC thus provides a means to map “the most salient identity categories available to elites and/or masses, their prevailing valences, and … the conditions under which some national identity claims are likely to resonate with citizens while others do not.”

The MIC approach has much to contribute to everyday nationalism, particularly in its adoption of an inductive approach to coding and analyzing textual sources. It thus represents an important step toward rendering studies of everyday nationalism generalizable and comparable, and resonates with efforts like Bonikowski's (Reference Bonikowski, Skey and Antonsich2017) to develop quantitative ways to examine cultural repertoires. At the same time, the MIC approach further complicates the distinction between “banal” and “everyday” nationalism—a reckoning that may also be due in International Relations (Frost and Lechner Reference Frost and Lechner2016), where the study of everyday practices in relation to diplomacy (Pouliot Reference Pouliot2016), political economy (Hobson and Seabrooke Reference Hobson and Seabrooke2007; Adler-Nissen Reference Adler-Nissen2016), and conflict management (Autesserre Reference Autesserre2014) are increasingly prevalent.

Diversity and Generalizability of Everyday Nationalism

One strength of everyday nationalism as an approach is that it complicates the notion that nations are relatively homogeneous and uniformly meaningful social categories. Knott (Reference Knott2015, 8) points out that everyday nationalism emerged in part as a reaction to the “overly deductive agenda” of Billig’s banal nationalism, instead emphasizing human agency in relation to the structuring effects of national categories. Hence, scholars working within this approach “highlighted how far nationalism may not be a constantly salient aspect of everyday, but rather this salience is contingent and, in itself, messy” (8). Hearn and Antonsich (Reference Hearn and Antonsich2018, 601) similarly criticize banal nationalism for focusing on the reproduction of singular nations while neglecting the multiple and contested forms of national belonging that are claimed on behalf of the nation. In their estimation, this limits scholars’ understanding of nationalism as an “extremely dynamic and ambiguous process made of multiple, conflicting ordinary voices,” which in turn leads to static conceptions of the nation “as something out of history, something which does not adjust to the changing of people and times” (601).

Polese, Seliverstova, Kerikmae, and Cheskin (Reference Polese, Seliverstova, Kerikmae and Cheskin2020) focus on “the everyday” as an approach for exploring “the way national identity is lived, and produced day by day, by ordinary citizens.” Their analysis aims at the disjuncture between state-constructed national narratives and quotidian experiences, and thus shares the ambitions of Vucetic and Hopf to gauge the congruence between official discourse and everyday practices of nationhood. Their approach builds upon existing studies of everyday nationalism in post-communist contexts (Morris et al. Reference Morris, Polese, Seliverstova and Pawlusz2018; Polese et al. Reference Polese, Morris, Pawlusz and Seliverstova2018), adopting an ethnographic focus on food branding and consumption among Estonians and Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority population. As a means for researching national attachments, nation branding (Anholt Reference Anholt2007) and food consumption—including “gastronationalism” (DeSoucey Reference DeSoucey2010; Ichijo Reference Ichijo2020)—emerged separately over the last 10–15 years. However, their interaction with studies of “the everyday” has a long history, particularly with sociological examinations of the self under capitalism (de Certeau Reference de Certeau1984; Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre1991; Highmore Reference Highmore2001).

Polese et al. find that Estonians and Russians make different kinds of national associations with food consumption: “While Estonians refer to the traditions by a population (a nation in a Walker Connor fashion), Russians refer to the local (land, territorial) traditions as preeminent in a sort of civic or economic nationalism.” Crucially, though these different kinds of associations represent competitive discourses, they are not mutually exclusive. As a result, nation branding efforts may not produce the intended kinds of national attachments sought by authorities, but nonetheless they may succeed in cultivating “different ways to experience national belonging” in parallel with others.

Their research is emblematic of the work on everyday nationalism in several respects. First, it demonstrates a deep commitment to contextualized observation and uncovering the significance of ordinary social practices, often in ways that are unintended by (and sometimes challenge) elite nation-builders. Second, it favors a deep understanding of a single case as a means toward producing candidate generalizations about the production and salience of national attachments in everyday life. However, like much of the everyday nationalism literature, it simultaneously insists upon the potential generalizability of the findings while resisting an agenda for systematically extending its generalizations to other cases. Moreover, the authors’ interest in demonstrating the rift between official narratives and everyday consumption perhaps misses an opportunity to consider how everyday forms of exclusion manifest in relation to consumption (e.g., in the presentation of restaurant menus or lavatory instructions exclusively in Estonian and English). Finally, it demonstrates the increasingly common practice of treating everyday nationalism and banal nationalism as interchangeable in the sense that both focus on ordinary existence.

Like Stroup, Schmoller (Reference Schmoller2020) seeks to expand the reach of everyday nationalism to consider religious identification. However, rather than evade the problem of “epistemic deference,” Schmoller engages directly with religious practices that are considered to form part of “traditional Islam” in Russia (as opposed to what might be considered “global Islam”). His analytical strategy is to examine commonalities among a diverse range of religious practices that are “so strongly blended with everyday forms of religious life and culture that they are rarely critically reflected.” Relying on several years of participant observation and ethnography, Schmoller unravels the ways that the practices that constitute “traditional Islam” permit engagement not only with specific territory but also with nonhumans (those who have passed away). A focus on religious practice thus brings a crucial perspective that everyday nationalism often lacks in connecting with a (dis)embodied past kinship.

Somewhat analogous to the way that Polese et al. identify competing national discourses in food consumption that signal different yet parallel paths to nationhood, Schmoller discovers “a vision of life in a shared space” in which “Muslims are engaged in an ongoing exchange with a multitude of human and non-human beings inhabiting their surroundings.” His work also (pointedly) resists extension beyond his chosen case. However, his analysis could be criticized for focusing perhaps too insistently on the national or religious unities that are fostered, while sidestepping their relationship to the many quotidian practices of exclusion and othering. In Schmoller’s analysis, this combination of unifying and exclusionary practices potentially emerges in the contrast between “global” and “traditional” Islam in Russia—particularly given the latter’s clear association with specific territory and even an alternative destination for religious pilgrimage. In these two articles by Polese et al. and Schmoller, then, we see both the strengths of everyday nationalism as a approach in their uncovering of the diversity of everyday practices and their contributions to ethnic, religious, or national identification, but also their difficulty in reconciling an inward focus on diverse practices with broader claims to generalizability beyond a single case.

Problematizing and Integrating Banal and Everyday nationalisms

One area in which everyday nationalism has made genuine inroads in recent years is in relation to political legitimation. Well before Gellner (Reference Gellner1983) defined nationalism as a doctrine of political legitimacy, Renan (Reference Renan, Hutchinson and Smith1994 [1882]) famously likened the nation to an everyday plebiscite. Much of the early work on everyday nationalism questioned the value of nation building and elite-oriented approaches to nationalism, focusing particularly on the failure of nationalizing projects to mobilize or even appeal to citizens and youth (Brubaker et al. Reference Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox and Grancea2006; Fox Reference Fox2004). More recently, scholars have begun examining the efforts of democratizing and autocratizing regimes to use banal nationalism as a source of legitimation (Goode Reference Goode2020; Stewart Reference Stewart2020), for which everyday nationalism as an approach is ideally suited to examine the success or failure of such attempts.

Dukalskis and Lee (Reference Dukalskis and Lee2020) examine the relationship between authoritarian rule and everyday nationalism in North Korea. While they treat banal and everyday nationalism as conceptually distinct, they note the problem that, “in highly repressive contexts where the state mandates its version of banal nationalism, such as in North Korea, it is difficult to disentangle it from everyday nationalism with reliable precision.” Indeed, they note that the state actively tries “to infuse its version of nationalism in everyday practices” in a variety of ways. Everyday interactions in party-state venues can diffuse more broadly in society. In turn, this diffusion of official nationalism into daily life can facilitate the state’s mobilization of the public against real or perceived foreign threats and creation of a “rally around the flag” effect.

Through interviews with North Korean emigres, Dukalskis and Lee find that a crucial element in the state’s success has been the elimination of public space for social interaction, for which “the prospect of violence coercion helped the state maintain control, and rumor and control parables amplified the state’s power in everyday interactions.” These control factors continued to exert an influence even with the emergence of black markets in the 1990s as a social sphere with limited autonomy and potential for acknowledging the state’s failure, in part because the state’s agents were both visibly present and actively interested in profiting from them. In this important sense, Dukalskis and Lee note that it is difficult to claim that the state has succeeded in producing nationalist legitimacy, as North Korean people “are not passive actors fully indoctrinated by ideology and cowed by the state apparatus.” However, their analysis indicates that the perceived lack of an autonomous social space for interactions limits the potential for drawing attention to the gap between official and everyday nationalism. Their findings thus resonate with Goode’s (Reference Goode2020) observation that “monopolization” succeeds as a state strategy for cultivating banal nationalism to the extent that elites accept the repetition of state-supplied symbols and narratives as a routine cost of doing business, and citizens cease to care about the routine imposition of national symbols and repertoires in their everyday interactions.

While it is almost axiomatic for scholars working on everyday nationalism to note that the state’s nationalist narratives cannot be convincingly created from scratch, most studies continue to focus on assessing the congruence between official nationalism and everyday nationalist practices rather than considering the reverse process: How do everyday nationalist practices influence official nationalism? McGlynn’s (Reference McGlynn2020) research on the Russian government’s appropriation of everyday patriotism represents a valuable first step in this direction. Her contribution examines the Russian government’s strategy of historical framing of the Ukraine crisis and conflict in Syria and its co-optation of everyday patriotism in the media to sustain the regime’s claims of a groundswell of patriotism.

In the cases McGlynn analyzes, most of the media’s examples of patriotic activities “were mundane and accessible to ordinary people, from eating domestic produce to holidaying at home,” which in turn were signposted as patriotic activities. These co-opted patriotic practices soon became commercial branding opportunities (“like attending exhibitions, wearing vatniki [padded jackets], and consuming salads”) that, in turn, confirmed the Kremlin’s legitimating narratives about the Soviet Union, the 1990s, or the Great Patriotic War. Hence, the strategy achieved “a sense of resonance between the top-down production of banal nationalism and (allegedly) authentic practices of everyday nationalism.” Following the writing of McGlynn’s article, it is worth noting that the Kremlin successfully expanded this strategy of co-opting everyday patriotic practices—frequently apolitical in nature and oriented around history and tradition—to mobilize support for constitutional amendments that would make it possible for Putin to remain in power until 2036.

Conclusion: What’s Ahead for Everyday Nationalism?

As is evident in the contributions to this issue, most discussions of everyday nationalism tend to focus on the “national” part of the concept, though it may be time to focus more squarely on that is meant by the “everyday.” When discussing methodology, scholars substitute a variety of synonyms for “everyday” (such as “ordinary,” “quotidian,” or “informal”) rather than specifying what the term means or implies for analysis. Likewise, when discussed in conceptual terms, the primary use of the term “everyday” has been to distinguish the approach from “banal” nationalism. Yet even this distinction is not carefully made or even understood, such that the difference between banal nationalism and everyday nationalism may appear to be more a matter of emphasis than substance. The resulting temptation is to elide the difference and refer to any nationalism that does not originate with states or elites as “banal” or “everyday.” More fundamentally, this interchangeable usage reflects what Fox and Ginderachter describe as a “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t sort of everyday nationhood, where the nation enjoys variable salience across time and space, relevant in some situations, but irrelevant in others” (Reference Fox and Van Ginderachter2018, 547). Hence, everyday nationalism and banal nationalism appear as if they were two sides of the same coin: the nationalism we observe by way of social practices is recognized as everyday nationalism, while the pervasively unnoticed (and unobserved) nationalism that persists in the background is treated as banal nationalism.

While it is certainly the case that both approaches are closely linked at their cores, our ability to theorize the relationship between everyday nationalism and other “non-banal” forms of nationalism is limited by focusing on the differences between them at the expense of specifying their domains. Synthesizing the different meanings of the “everyday” (beyond meaning “not banal”) as generally used in the literature on everyday nationalism, one can identify three core dimensions: (1) the nature of the agents (in terms of their social status as non-elites); (2) the contexts within which they exercise agency (routine, informal interaction); and (3) the scale of observed or measured social interaction (social practices versus social structures). More broadly, this ensemble of dimensions helps to define everyday nationalism while differentiating it from banal nationalism insofar as both share a focus on non-elite actors and routine (informal) contexts, while their differences in observation and explanation arise from the focus on social structure (banal nationalism)Footnote ⁶ as opposed to social practices (everyday nationalism).

Aside from facilitating an understanding of the relationship between conceptual approaches, examining banal and everyday nationalism in terms of agents, contexts, and scale makes envisioning their relationship to other varieties of nationalism possible (see table 1). For example, Vucetic and Hopf examine a combination of official and banal nationalisms to produce a composite of national identities and their changes over time. Polese et al. pointedly examine the divergence of everyday nationalism in Estonia—observed by way of varied consumption practices—from official nationalism, even as they contribute to a broader (informal) nation-building project. Dukalskis and Lee probe the intersection of banal and everyday nationalism, viewing the former as a day-to-day source of regime legitimation in North Korea while everyday nationalism emerges where social practices challenge or confirm regime-aligned social structures. By contrast, McGlynn examines how official nationalism in Russia legitimates foreign policy actions in Ukraine and Syria by way of historical framings, which are then fused with depictions of citizens’ ordinary social practices as exemplars of loyal, patriotic action. Once co-opted, these social practices in turn become ways of signaling loyalty to the regime and a routine cost of doing business. They are then replicated in public discourse, classrooms, and the market, and thus serve to reproduce regime-aligned social structures.

Table 1.

Everyday, Banal, Contentions, and Official Nationalisms

Looking beyond this special issue, one of the most pressing challenges for everyday nationalism is to develop a clearer understanding of its relationship to contentious or eventful forms of nationalism. As one might expect from their shared focus on routine, informal contexts, banal and everyday nationalism are preoccupied with “quiet” or “settled” contexts (Bonikowski Reference Bonikowski2016) as opposed to “eventful” times that often feature waves of protest or social mobilization. Indeed, the contributions to this special issue are mainly concerned with the lack of contestation, protest, or mobilization. Scholars working in the banal nationalism tradition have long argued that there is a close relationship between banal and contentious nationalisms, and everyday social practices constitute a crucial middle ground where contestation can emerge (Jones and Merriman Reference Jones and Merriman2009; Hearn and Antonsich Reference Hearn and Antonsich2018). Yet establishing its relationship to nationalist mobilization remains a significant challenge for scholars working on everyday nationalism, and currently there is almost no overlap between the literatures on contentious nationalism and everyday nationalism.

Another challenge for everyday nationalism is to turn outward to engage with global phenomena rather than remaining focused on the diversity of practices within individual cases (Malešević Reference Malešević2019). Recent work by Michael Skey aims to update banal nationalism and everyday nationalism by pointedly engaging with globalization, migration, and other related phenomena that do not easily fit within their conceptual frameworks (Skey Reference Skey2009; Skey and Antonsich Reference Skey and Antonsich2017; Skey Reference Skey2018). The current (as of this writing) global health crisis potentially provides additional clues to resolving this issue by drawing attention to the seemingly sudden emergence of nationalism in response to pandemic (Antonsich Reference Antonsich2020; Bieber Reference Bieber2020). The lessons learned from examining everyday nationalism during the pandemic may prove even more valuable for understanding nationalist responses to the growing climate crisis (Conversi Reference Conversi2020).

Crucial to this process are the ways that the disruption of routines caused by pandemic creates demands for their restoration—that is, when the context changes from routine or settled times to eventful or “unsettled” times. For example, Goode, Stroup, and Gaufman (Reference Goode, Stroup and Gaufman2020) examine social practices like wearing face masks or panic buying as responses to ontological uncertainty induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyday nationalism may thus emerge in eventful contexts when “the perceived relationship between structure and routine in the process of meaning making is inverted,” and manifest in attempts to reestablish routine life: “Rather than interpreting the meaning of social practices in relation to social structure, social practices seek to affix national meanings to social structures that are in flux.” In unsettled times, the assertion of normality becomes a radical form of everyday nationalism.

Finally, the contributions to this special issue suggest that attending to the ways that everyday nationalism intersects with contentious politics and global political phenomena will also push scholars to pay greater attention to quotidian social exclusions, the diffusion of social practices, and the cross-fertilization of research in international relations and everyday nationalism. While each of the contributions adopts an inductive approach to observing and coding everyday nationalism, they proceed from a common theoretical core and a common understanding of what counts as practice. When everyday nationalism scholars make the transition from case-based observation to observing how categories of social practice are distributed across borders, they will discover that they have much to offer to emerging studies of social practices in comparative politics and international relations.