Public Lecture: "Everyday Nation Building: Creativity, Culture and Political Community in Senegal and Indonesia"
Apr. 8, 2010, 3:00-5:00 pm
Everyday Nation Building is grounded on the idea that 19th century, Wilson-era, and postwar tools are not going to cut it as we try to make sense of new problems of culture, political inclusion and conflict. The end of big structural explanations demands a significant shift in how we look at the politics of state and nation, indeed politics in general. Recognizing that identities are fragmentary and highly flexible, we have much to learn from recent work on practice, performance and ordinary life to understand the nation and politics not as a kind of rat maze through which people run in predictable, patterned ways, but as an outgrowth of the everyday creativity and sense-making inherent in human existence.:namespace prefix = o />
This talk explores how nations are built and inclusion emerges in everyday practices and beliefs, in the humdrum of how ordinary people think of themselves and treat those who are not like them. It showcases two examples of how this works. In most of Senegal, West Africa, and in a city-state in Central Java, Indonesia, people don’t simply imagine the nation, or fit into it as designed from above. They live it as part of the mundane regularities of ordinary existence. Look carefully in places like Senegal and Central Java at jokes, teasing, common fears, shared stories, who people date, who they call neighbor, what they eat, what they treasure, and you can begin to understand how Muslim and Christian, Wolof and Diola, Orang Jawa and totok Chinese become the same kind of people, part of one community of belonging.