Expressing Identities in the Basque Arena - 9780852559895

Everyday nationalism is a neglected subject in the literature on nationalism in Europe. Jeremy MacClancy redresses the balance in this unusual and sharp book on the human and cultural aspects of Basque identities in the modern world.

Jeremy MacClancy argues that the ethnographic understanding of nationalisms - rather than the orthodox studies of ideology, political parties, social classes and centre-periphery clashes - offers a more nuanced comprehension of the lived reality of people in areas where nationalism is a significant force. This is very much nationalism from the bottom up.

The style is fresh and colloquial, dealing with several of the kinds of issues that usually appear in popular magazines - cuisine, football, art and graffiti - but the treatment is serious and illustrative of underlying currents in social life.

Certain themes within Basque nationalism resurface repeatedly throughout the book: the importance of landscape (in the appreciation of local cuisine, prehistoric monuments, graffiti and art); the masculine bias which underlies so much of Basque nationalist representation (the lauding of male appetites and male football-players, and the absence of female artists from the local canon); the tendency for anthropologists and their work to be deployed for nationalist ends in the representation of the Basque people, through their genes, their art and their museums.

Ethnographic studies such as this one can illuminate both the strengths and the blind spots of the grand theories of nationalism produced from within allied disciplines. We cannot speak of `the nationalism' of a people, Jeremy MacClancy argues, but of multiple nationalisms, at times complementary, at other times competing, given voice within any one nationalist arena. The Basque arena is a mixed space of multiple voices, each clamouring at different degrees of intensity, with differing rates of success at wooing listeners, and gaining adherents, at least for a while.