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National Culture and Its Discontents: The Politics of Heritage and Language in Taiwan, 1949–2003

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2005

Horng-luen Wang
Horng-luen Wang
Affiliation:
Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica
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Extract

In his groundbreaking Nationalism Reframed, Rogers Brubaker challenges conventional understandings of nations and nationalism by advancing a distinctive, if not innovative, approach to the subject. Drawing on recent theoretical developments that problematize the realist ontology implicitly assumed in previous literatures, Brubaker calls for an institutionalist approach to the study of nations and nationalism. As he points out, nation and nationhood can be better understood not as substance but as institutionalized form, not as collectivity but as practical category, and not as entity but as contingent event (1996:18). He then employs this approach to analyze the breakdown of the Soviet Union. According to Brubaker, nationhood and nationality were institutionalized in the Soviet Union in two different modes: political-territorial and the ethno-personal. While the incongruence between these two modes led to tensions and contradictions within Soviet society, the dual legacy of such an institutionalization, manifesting itself as unintended consequences, eventually shaped the disintegration of the Soviet Union and continues to structure nationalist politics in the successor states today.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 786 - 815
Copyright
© 2004 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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