Re Enchanting Nationalisms

This book provides original insight into the way we now engage and remember national history. Drawing on fieldwork and analysis of international case studies on state commemoration, memorialization, recreational and tourism and times of disaster and crisis, the author demonstrates that not only does the nation frequently retain a strong cultural relevance in our global world but that the emergence of new forms of ritual and remembrance means that in many instances we are seeing the re-enchantment of nationalism. Drawing upon and developing an empirically informed cultural sociology, the author charts the distinctive qualities of these new national rites and how they feed into and advance particular cosmopolitan and orthodox national politics. Because social science has so often wrongly assumed the end of nationalism, the insights of this of the book about the possibilities and limitations of contemporary nationalism demand serious consideration by academics and also by policy makers and the general public.

How do nations come to shape our collective imagination so profoundly? This book argues that the power of national identity and national belonging stems, in part, from the ways in which nationalism is embedded in popular culture. Comprised of chapters covering a wide range of cases from both the Global North and Global South (including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Europe, Israel, Pakistan, and the United States), the text unpacks the connections between nationalism and film, television, music, and other facets of everyday culture. In doing so, it demonstrates that popular culture can help us understand why and how nationhood has become so deeply entrenched in modern society. This book will be of interest to scholars of political science, nationalism, sociology, history, media studies, and cultural studies.

In Re-enchanting Modernity Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity.

This volume focuses on emotions of people in Southeast Europe. Grief and sadness take on different forms of expression. In the era of socialist rule laughter could express political resistance; for labour migrants visiting their country of origin evokes feelings of being at home. Cities attract visitors by appealing to emotions and people try to relive times of national glory by historical re-enactments. Gossip is a means of expressing emotions, smells and rituals become expressions of remembered emotions. Emotions are a factor researchers must always take seriously, both of the people studied and their own.

The authors of this book approach the emergence and endurance of the populist nationalism in post-socialist Eastern Europe, with special emphasis on Hungary. They attempt to understand the reasons behind public discourses that increasingly reframe politics in terms of nationhood and nationalism. Overall, the volume attempts to explain how the new nationalism is rooted in recent political, economic and social processes. The contributors focus on two motifs in public discourse: shift and legacy. Some focus on shifts in public law and shifts in political ethno-nationalism through the lens of constitutional law, while others explain the social and political roots of these shifts. Others discuss the effects of legacy in memory and culture and suggest that both shift and legacy combine to produce the new era of identity politics. Legal experts emphasize that the new Fundamental Law of Hungary is radically different from all previous Hungarian constitutions, and clearly reflects a redefinition of the Hungarian state itself. The authors further examine the role of developments in the fields of sociology and political science that contribute to the kind of politics in which identity is at the fore.

In considering the interplay between contemporary Protestant practice and native cultural traditions among Maya evangelicals, this work documents the processes whereby some Maya have converted to different forms of Christianity and the ways in which the Maya are incorporating Christianity for their own purposes.

Cultural sociology - or the sociology of culture - has grown from a minority interest in the 1970s to become one of the largest and most vibrant areas within sociology globally. In The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Sociology, a global range of experts explore the theory, methodology and innovations that make up this ever-expanding field. The Handbook's 40 original chapters have been organised into five thematic sections: Theoretical Paradigms Major Methodological Perspectives Domains of Inquiry Cultural Sociology in Contexts Cultural Sociology and Other Analytical Approaches Both comprehensive and current, The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Sociology will be an essential reference tool for both advanced students and scholars across sociology, cultural studies and media studies.