The Personal Contexts of National Sentiments

Abstract

There is an important strand of scholarship which argues that we need to explain ‘ethnicity’ within the social and personal contexts in which ethnic identities and sentiments are created and enacted. But there has been little attempt to consider whether, and if so how, attitudes to the nation may be informed by experiences and events at the personal level. Adopting a case-study approach, this paper focuses upon the lives of four ‘white English’ individuals. Treating each respondent's account of his or her social milieu as the analytical starting point, the paper investigates how wider self-understandings and personal experiences inform a particular orientation towards nation, place and the country. In further exploration of this, it argues that the salience of ‘resentful nationalism’ is intensified when articulated through a sense of personal or social decline and failure. This is then demonstrated through reference to those with both ‘resentful’ and ‘indifferent’ orientations.

Keywords:

• Class
• Indifference
• Nationalism
• Resentment
• Social Milieu

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Nationalism and National Identities: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Conference held at CRONEM, University of Surrey, 12–14 June 2007. The authors would also like to thank Ranji Devadason and Jon Fox for their constructive comments.

Notes

1. Such extended case studies of individual lives have a growing appeal within ethnic and migration studies. For examples of their utility, see Brubaker et al. (2006), Portes and Rumbaut (2001, 2006).

2. In so doing, we also draw methodological support from the turn towards life-history and biographical methods across a number of sociological areas (see Beynon and Austrin 1994; Brannen et al. 2004; Hollway and Jefferson 2000).

3. Held jointly by the University of Bristol and University College London; for more information on the Leverhulme research see http://www.bristol.ac.uk/sociology/leverhulme/.

4. For validation of this, see Fenton and Mann (2006) and Mann (2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robin Mann

Robin Mann is Research Officer in the Oxford Institute of Ageing at the University of Oxford

Steve Fenton

Steve Fenton is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol