Complicating Banal Nationalism Through Sociological Exploration of Cosmopolitanism: The Trace and Dissemination


Tyler Correia, University Canada West (UCW)

Contemporary sociological research has decisively challenged ideas around ‘societies’ as stable and internally consistent social forms akin to national communities at least since Nina Glick-Schiller and Andreas Wimmer (2003) coined the term methodological nationalism. In tandem, sociologists and social scientists have taken a particular interest in understanding the empirical conditions that ground social life within a global society (Agier 2016; Appadurai 1996; Bayat 2013; Beck 2007, 2008; Castells 2009; Cheah and Robbins 1998; Diouf 2002; Kaldor 2003; Mignolo 2000; Urry 2007; Volkmer 2014). This movement departs from conventional discussion around cosmopolitanism, which often centers normative or philosophical debate, as well as questions around institution-building (especially at the transnational level) (see: Correia, forthcoming). Using theoretical concepts derived from the work of Jacques Derrida and other post-phenomenological thinkers—the trace and dissemination—this paper outlines preliminary findings for an ethnology of banal nationalism (Billig 1995) that also problematizes the construction of national symbols, identities and ideals in terms of their borrowings from other cultures and traditions. Through this analysis, I conclude that often even the most quotidian nationalisms are already complicated by their importation of national symbols, and reliance on a global economy for their circulation. To better situate banal nationalisms within a wider context of global socio-economic and political dynamics, I introduce the concepts of the trace and of dissemination to characterize the sociologist as detective —where the task of the sociologist is to uncover deeper and wider relations and circuits through exploration of manifest social practices. The trace indicates the relationship between a manifest social practice or material symbol with an implied—but as yet concealed—set of social processes that condition its existence in space and time, while also being indecipherable without reference to other social milieux or global networks. The sociologist as detective is responsible for uncovering the traces of a global society lurking within the most unexpected of clues. As a compliment to this, dissemination refers to how an economy of traces circulate within those global networks, binding one society to another through their borrowings. Contrary to sociologies of global cultural diffusion, dissemination implies that there is no stable ‘origin’ from which forms of cultural production emerge before they circulate, but that their circuits are the origins of cultural practices more manifestly. In other words, the traces binding national cultures to global social processes also demonstrate that a cosmopolitan society comprised of the circulation of information, establishment of global publics, and harmonization of normative assumptions, already exists. This further entails that nationalist discourses must be understood in light of their incorporations of other (transnational) nationalist discourses. These methodological insights are grounded in a preliminary ethnological analysis of social identity and nationalist symbols in Mission, British Columbia. This includes the circulation of far-right iconography (displaying a decal of the Canada flag on a lifted truck, where the maple leaf also depicts a mirror image of an assault rifle on one side). I argue that our capacity to decipher these cultural images requires a method that is attentive to the circulation of nationalist imagery from ‘elsewhere’—not only the United States, where assault weapons have a particularly strong cultural symbolism, but around the world. In turn, both the cultural elements of nationalist assumptions—beliefs and values, symbols and cultural artifacts—and the material economies—circulating commodities—implies that even the most assertive ‘national’ societies are meaningfully composed of global traces.

This paper will be presented at the following session: