2015 - Cultural nationalism

20

Transcript of 2015 - Cultural nationalism

Contents

Flocel Sabaté Perverse Identities. Identities in conflict ................................................... 9

María Teresa Quintillà Differences between Male & Female Speech: a classical topic.............. 19

Jesús Corsà Identity in conflict in a Medieval border: the case of an offer/agreement by the count Ermengol VI of Urgell ...... 47

Pilar Jiménez Identités en conflit. Disputes entre catholiques et « bons hommes » à la veille de la Croisade contre les Albigeois, 1206-1207 ...................... 59

Luciano Gallinari Ethnic identity in medieval Sardinia: rethinking and reflecting on 14th and 15th century examples ................... 81

Esther Martí The Battle of Sanluri in the process of recreating Sardinian identity ... 119

Rafael M. Mérida Magia, hechicería y sexualidad en la narrativa caballeresca temprana: tres identidades perversas y domesticadas........................... 147

Marta Miquel-Baldellou Tracing Miss Havisham in the Mirror, or Aging through the Other ...... 171

Jacques Migozzi « Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère ! » : le roman populaire du XIXe siècle et de la Belle Époque entre manichéisme et mauvaise foi ....................................................... 187

6 Contents

Matthieu Letourneux Vous dites Fantômas ? Dynamique sérielle et identités perverses ......... 201

Emma Domínguez-Rué Helpless and Invisible: Female Identity, Invalidism and the Cult of True Womanhood in Ellen Glasgow’s The Miller of Old Church ..... 215

Régis Meyran Du mythe à l’idéologie politique : l’utilisation des légendes populaires par le Régime de Vichy ............... 231

Daniel Carmona, Raúl Travé Agrarian Colonization and Francoist neo-traditionalism ...................... 249

José Antonio Langarita Perversion, Urbanity and Homosexuals. Multidimensionality in the Sex Life of the City.................................... 259

Šárka Novotná Cléopâtre de la Main parmi les ruines de l’identité du papier mâché : les identités perverses dans Hosanna de Michel Tremblay ....................273

Estrella Díaz Aventura y perversión en El último goliardo ......................................... 291

Luis Espinosa Evil in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: Havelock Vetinari......................... 301

Benoît Santini Identités perverses et malfaisantes versus identités rebelles dans la poésie chilienne de la dictature et de la Transition .................... 323

Kálai Sándor Les structures de la perversion (L’analyse de quelques romans de Thierry Jonquet) .............................. 353

Mariona Lladonosa The use of immigration in the debate on identity in Catalonia during the course of resumption of democracy ...................................... 369

Contents 7

Laura Menna Hashtag Identity: Semiotics of The Spanish 15M Protest ..................... 399

Mariona Visa Front Pages of the Spanish and Catalan Press on the Demonstration of September 11th, 2012: Illustrating a National Identity or a Nationalist Farce? .......................... 413

Pablo Giori Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved in the nation-building process? .............................................................. 431

María Ángeles Calero El morfema género en el pensamiento de la Real Academia Española: ¿Cuestión que va más allá de la teoría gramatical? ............................... 447

Mónica Labonia La royauté joola-ajamaat : constructions sémantiques et représentations autour du genre ......................................................... 475

Montse Solsona Immigration subsaharienne et altérité : une approche sociobiographique à la perception de la différence ............................... 497

Chabier Gimeno Cultural Bricolage on Minors who Migrate on Their Own................... 527

Teresa Torres Reconstruction of the identity in destination ........................................ 561

Fidel Molina, Dolors Mayoral, Paquita Sanvicén Leadership and Complex Identities in Associations of African Immigrants ............................................................................................. 579

Joseba Achotegui Mi Nombre es Nadie. El Síndrome de Ulises. Emigrar en el Siglo XXI. Salud Mental y Migración ............................ 591

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved in the nation-building process?1

Pablo Giori Universitat de Girona

“I would emphasizethe elements of artifact, invention and social engineering

involved in nation-building2”

1. Nation-building: a project and an experience

We usually read articles and books about nationalism as a political project produced and developed by governmental institutions. This is what we call the top-down perspective which only explains what institutions want peo-ple to do. This hegemonic standpoint, based on the disciplinary methods of history and sociology, has been questioned in recent years from the con-tributions of anthropology and psychology. These new proposals also try to understand nation-building processes from the bottom-up standpoint, what people really do beyond institutions and their desires. This perspec-tive considers the experience and everyday life of citizens as something important to understand nation-building processes.3 We believe that both proposals are not opposed but complementary; they have to be part of

1 This research was supported by the University Teacher’s Training Program (FPU) of the Ministry of Economy, Culture and Sports (MECD) from the Government of Spain. The researcher participates in the project: HAR2012-35322.

2 Eric Hobsbawm, Naciones y Nacionalismo desde 1780 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1998), p. 17.

3 Eric Hobsbawm, Naciones y Nacionalismo…; For the Catalan case, see, amongst others: Xosé Manuel Núñez, Los Nacionalismos en la España contemporánea: siglos XIX y XX (Barcelona: Hipótesis, 1999); Molina Aparicio, “La nación desde abajo. Nacionalización, individuo e identidad nacional”, Ayer, 90 (2013), pp. 13-16.

422 Pablo Giori

the same research because they allow us to understand the process as a whole, nationalism as a project and as an experience. This proposal helps us recognize the limits of the institutions attempts to change everyday life, national feelings or popular traditions. We can also put into perspective how spontaneous is the emergence of national belonging from civil soci-ety and how planned it is from some institutions at a national or subnation-al level. To do that, we have to consider the political and cultural aspects of nation-building processes4.

Since the 19th century, nationalism has been one of the most important powers in creating a framework for interpreting the world, the nation-state, and also in transforming the reality in which we live. In the case of Spain and Catalonia throughout the 20th century, nationalism has been one of the projects that had a stronger impact on their historical development and territorial organization. In this paper we will expose this theoretical proposal on the base of the study of the Catalan and Spanish case to better understand how national belonging can be modified in a context of nation-alistic conflict.

2. Political and cultural nationalism

In this proposal, we focus on the cultural aspects without setting aside the political ones because we are convinced that if we study nation-building processes as historical facts we also have to see how they change culture, experience and the way people do things. We cannot just study the texts created by politicians to scatter their beliefs or how the institutions attempt to make this speech a reality; we have to study if this does in fact become real in the life of common people, if this institutional proposal changes their life in some way. If people successfully resist the intrusion of the institutions into their everyday lives, then top-down nationalism has not been effective; when this government or institutional project ends, people start doing all over again what they were used to doing at home when they

4 Josep Termes, Les arrels populars del catalanisme (Barcelona: Empúries, 1999), p.58.

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved 423

where kids5. Because of that, we say that the army cannot modify an idea; cultural change has to transform ideas by promising something new and valuable. For this reason we say that we have to study the cultural condi-tions of political change and, in this specific case, how the creation of an indubitable national conscience can enable the political independence of Catalonia.

It is at this point that we have to speak about Antonio Gramsci’s con-cept of cultural hegemony, because the concept of hegemony and the strat-egies it creates lie in its ability to elaborately explain relations not from a perspective of domination but from one of conviction. Thus, cultural hegemony doesn’t work openly but covertly; as with cultural machinery, like Bourdieu (2005) used to say, hegemony is “within us”, inside us, part of who we are and what we do. This conceptualization helps us understand how cultural practices are coherent with experiential, contextual, political and material aspects of our environment as well as with experiences of our daily life. This coherence is taken for granted but it does not really exist; we need to believe in and live according to this coherence in order to not perceive its incoherence6.

To study cultural and political nationalisms we have to first under-stand that they differ in the manner and rhythm of their work: one is slower yet constant and deep, while the other is accelerated, abrupt and superfi-cial. Although they have different strategies, durations and objectives, they can work together and this is the most effective way of working, creating synergies and feedbacks. We can also say that cultural nationalism can work easily with emotional aspects and organized civil societies, whereas political nationalism has to do it with rational arguments and institutions. This shows us the limitations of a political nationalization model that does not take cultural aspects into account. This was the main limitation of the Francoist project: an excessive institutionalization and a blind trust in the State’s ability to change reality that generated a relative modification of the daily life of individuals despite the 40 years of dictatorship. The resis-tance processes of nationalization were operating in the material, cultural and experiential aspects of those individuals and groups who suffered the stigma of having lost the war (the republicans, the Catalans, the Basques,

5 Pablo Giori, Hacer castells, construir nación. Castells, modelo festivo y catalanismo (Girona: Universitat de Girona, 2012), p. 107.

6 Pablo Giori, Hacer castells, construir nación…, p. 162.

424 Pablo Giori

etc.). Although they were in a strong context of an opposite re-national-ization, it could not reach them effectively because resistance tends to be conservative and, also, they wanted to recover the lost world that gave meaning to their lives7.

When we live in a context of confronted nation-building processes, as with Spain and Catalonia in the 20th century, we have to understand that socialization is also a form of nationalization. When there are two national cultures, the culture in which you are nationalized is the one that marks you as belonging to one nation or another. The assumption of one national culture determines how we think, what we do and what we experience; it creates our horizon of perspective and expectation, gives us a nation-al history, a national territory and a national group to belong to. It also configures the places, times and ways of doing things in which we feel comfortable in our everyday reality. When we talk about socialization we are not just talking about the primary one that comes from our family and our own context, but also about the socialization practices that we carry out during the course of our lives and that create and sustain the groups and the background of our way of feeling, thinking and acting. We change our minds – the way we experience our reality, do things and modify the world – so slowly that we do not notice; because of that, socialization is also fundamental for understanding the nation-building processes and the necessary construction of a daily coherence.

3. The national feeling of belonging: a naturalized cultural aspect

From this standpoint, we believe that emotional, cultural, experiential and material aspects can be slowly created or changed over the basis of some-thing real to which the changes can anchor. We are born unto an interpret-ed world, we are born into a national culture, we are socialized in national contexts, but the idea of what our nation is can vary historically, so much

7 Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: política, historia e identidad nacional en España 1875-1975 (Barcelona: Pomares-Corredor, 2000), p. 261.

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved 425

that we can be renationalized into another national culture (as the cases of national struggle, immigration or the creation of new states can illustrate). We assume that belonging is something that we embody as part of our so-cialization but that can be challenged and modified. Why does it look like something natural, specific and unquestionable? Because it is a naturalized cultural aspect, something cultural, historical and relative but that national-ism makes us perceive as natural. Although it’s true that the State provides us with a framework to make sense of the world we live in, it is also true that for a large percentage of the world, the State only became real as a result of the World Wars, and a large part of this population has changed its state or nation throughout the 20th century due to wars, immigration or the creation of new states. That means that we can change our national feeling of belonging, radically or little by little, but we can modify it. We have to recognize that it is part of what we are and to change it we have to deeply transform what we are.

Belonging to a nation does not concern only our feelings, but also what we believe, what we think and how we do things. To be a national subject has to do with identity and cultural practices that we carry out in group and as individuals; it has to do with our personal and institutional routines, but also with the times, places and forms in which we do and perceive things. There is certainly a need to belong, but not necessarily to belong to a nation; there is more probably a need to belong to a family, a group, a region, etcetera.8 In the case that currently concerns us, the Catalan case, it is really important to see how Catalanism has changed the ideas of belonging and identity throughout the last century: from belong-ing to a region and a nation – the double belonging both to the Spanish state and the Catalan nation as something complementary until the transi-tion to democracy – to the newest proposal of Catalanism that sustains that the nation and the state has to be the same, a Catalan state for a Catalan nation; the Spanish and the Catalan are no longer complementary but op-posite, and ones denies the other9. From Francoism until our current times, Catalanism has passed from a regionalist standpoint to a separatist one, basically based on the solidification of the idea of a Catalan nation and the positive value of what is Catalan. But to do that Catalonia had to change in

8 For the Quebec case in the seventies, see the documentary of: Pierre Perrault, Un pays sans bon sens! <http://www.onf.ca/film/un_pays_sans_bon_sens>.

9 Andrew Dowling, La reconstrucció nacional de Catalunya: 1939-2012 (Barcelona: Pasado & Presente, 2013), p. 23.

426 Pablo Giori

30 years the idea of Catalonia and the idea of national belonging to Spain that a large part of the population had; it had to create a new culture and feelings and then it had to make it real, shared, hegemonic10.

4. How to study cultural nationalism?

To answer this question, we have to admit that there is something else to study that is not being studied, that there is something else to see. The first thing to do is admit that our definition of culture has hitherto been restrictive, not inclusive; we need an anthropological conception and an interpretative theoretical perspective, not a positivist one. With these basic ideas, we can see that institutional research on nation-building (school, army, institutions and mass media) is limited but complementary with what Hobsbawm proposed as a bottom-up perspective: to think what nor-mal people think, do and feel. If we continue this proposal we have to accept the need to study not just the role of symbols and rituals, but also the cultural practices involved in nation-building processes11.

When we talk about culture from an anthropological standpoint we talk about the everyday life of common people; we talk about the material (economic, material and social practices), experiential (the feelings and daily life) and cultural (the practices, ideas and standpoint that they have of their own world and of others) aspects of their life12. To study cultural nationalism we do not have to study the products (the newspapers, cinema, pamphlets and discourses) but the cultural processes of socialization in general, the construction process of what they perceive as their own world. Because of that, we specifically focus our studies within a wide range of cultural practices that are related to the expansion and reproduction of some kind of nationalism. For example, in Catalonia13 we work with

10 Andrew Dowling, La reconstrucció nacional de Catalunya…, p. 187.11 Alejandro Quiroga, Ferrán Archilés, “Presentación”, Ayer, 90 (2013), p. 10. 12 Pablo Giori, Hacer castells, construir nación…, p. 58. 13 For a general perspective on Catalan cultural activities see: Avelli Artís-Gener, Bienve

Moya, Festes populars a Catalunya (Barcelona: Hmb, 1980); Joan Soler, Cultura popular i tradicional (Barcelona: Pòrtic, 2001).

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved 427

the relation of sardanes (a traditional dance) with ethnical Catalanism14; castells (human towers) with modern civic Catalanism15; and bullfighting with Spanish nationalism16 (Shubert 2002) to see how political national-ism is related with cultural practices and their socialization. Of course, there is a reciprocal relationship between political nationalism and cultural practices but it is not a direct one; it occurs through the national celebra-tion model chosen to be developed, i.e., a means of cultural organization that is consistent with national interests while developing the necessary conditions for the possibility of nationalism (Giori 2012: 200). Ultimately, we can say that nationalisms’ disputes in the cultural field are disputes over the implementation of a national celebration model. Cultural practic-es selected within each of these models end up being cooperative, part of the same force, they all celebrate the nation (albeit not in the same way).

We think, and this article is an attempt to answer this matter, that through the development of certain cultural practices, nationalism has brought new individuals closer to their ideas, emotions and experiences. An emotional anchor could be used as a vehicle for the consolidation and reproduction of ideas. As has been mentioned, there is a close coherence relation, unreal yet perceived as real, between the three basic aspects of our reality, accord-ing to our theoretic proposal: the material (social practice, context and rela-tionships, production methods, actions), the cultural (ideas, common sense, values, standpoints, thoughts) and the experiential (subjectivity, habitus, emotions, feelings). Furthermore, we feel obliged to contradict those aca-demics who believe in the predominance of rational thinking, for the body can learn through any of these three aspects. These elements are not discon-nected: they are interrelated and in constant dialogue, creating contradic-tions and coherences17. When we become thrilled about something in which we don’t rationally believe we have the ability within us to modify our opin-ion: practical knowledge is reinforced or discouraged by rational knowledge.

14 Josep Mas, La Sardana, dansa nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona: Editorial 62, 1993).15 Pere Català, Món casteller (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1981).16 Adrian Shubert, A las cinco de la tarde: una historia social del toreo (Madrid:

Turner, 2002).17 Pablo Giori, “El prejuicio y los medios masivos en el aboradje de la juventud”,

Derivas contempráneas. Practicas y usos de la cultura de masas, María Laura de Arriba, ed. (Tucumán: Sectretaría de Ciencia y Técnica Universidad Nacional de Tucuman, 2011), p. 545.

428 Pablo Giori

5. Which is the role of cultural practices in the nation-building process?

We cannot continue believing that nationalism is only practiced by institu-tions or states; it is widely produced and reproduced, deliberately or uninten-tionally, by our current society, and therefore we should say that our society is a national one. Culture and society are organized with a national perspec-tive and with the nation as a limit (a matter that sociology and anthropology should recognize and denounce yet they do not do). Nationalism is not only reproduced as an idea, that is, one person telling another the benefits of be-lieving in the nation, but first and foremost as a culture and as an experience, for instance in the form of a cultural practice that we carry out with other peo-ple. When we talk about processes of cultural nationalization we are referring to a series of cultural processes that make political change possible and that, depending on the moment in history, are more or less decisive in a society’s future. It has therefore become clear that in some way building human towers, dancing sardanes or going to a bullfight are ways of making a nation, without explicitly entering partisan discussions, whether nationalist or pro-indepen-dence; it is about generating the cultural conditions for political change.

If we work with the institutionalist proposal we will not go forward with the idea of internalization, i.e., the power of institutions to make someone believe something. This powerful idea, implicit in a great part of the tradi-tional bibliography, downplays the role of the subjects, that of coproducing or resisting the changes in their everyday lives; a subject that lives and con-tributes to make the nation every day, by will or necessity and not by impo-sition. This proposal in Spain is at the base of the prevailing theory of weak nationalization18, according to which, if the Spanish State had been stronger during its formation it would not currently have the problem of containing several nations within the state; in this theory, strong means effective and effective means an assimilation of the other nations into the Castilian one. In contrast with this perspective, we believe that the role of the State in na-tion-building processes is much smaller than what this theory believes and that the role of civil society is crucial. This is an area that is often neglected and that we consider essential to support or contradict the task of the state.

18 Alejandro Quiroga, Ferrán Archilés, “Presentación”, Ayer, 90 (2013), p 5.

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved 429

If we see this from the Catalan experience it is made clearer: Catalanism, excepting certain specific historical periods, has been powered by a network of cultural, political and economic organizations of civil so-ciety, sometimes distant from the regional or national institution in power19. We are convinced that civil society is the one that has the real power to make the national discourse local and tangible and to bestow it with sense; the centralized State cannot act alone in the marathonic task of national-izing millions of citizens in such a vast territory20. The state requires other small and malleable institutions that help in the creation, or in the nega-tion, of the everyday reality of the nation. To do that, these organizations work with national culture, experience and belonging: they adapt it, hide it and put it everywhere, making it normal, redundant and hegemonic, until eventually it becomes necessary to the citizen’s feeling of belonging.

We could say that the State imposes a national curriculum, but that it (the State) is ultimately the teacher (through the citizen’s daily lives and their social reality) who suggests it as something natural or imposed, who gives it the tone of something valuable. This, clearly exemplified by schools, happens every day in every social contact, with all the people, groups and institutions that we meet daily and that can help to support or to deny the national discourse, for instance, in benefit of a subnational conception. To avoid fissures and to believe in the nation as unquestionable, it has to be in everything that we are, in our daily life, in the media, in the churches, in the soccer fields, in schools, as well as in theaters, queues in the supermarket and at ATMs. Here the concept of coherence is essential: to make the nation something powerful and natural, it has to be coherent with a large part of the discourses, practices, values and organizations that sustain and reproduce it in an important part of the world in which we live. If this coherence does not exist, the subject immediately doubts rationally or feels unease, something is not right, there is something that is not natural and that can be questioned and changed. The main task of nationalism is to become quotidian, and that means to be coherent with the world of the people it wants to nationalize; if not, it will never be effective. It also has to become real in the thoughts, feelings and actions of the people. If there is not coherence, we can doubt, and if we doubt, we can transform it: when we feel that discrimination is

19 Josep Termes, Les arrels populars del catalanisme (Barcelona: Empúries, 1999), p. 234.20 Daniele Conversi, “Nación, estado y cultura: por una historia política y social de la

homogeneización cultural”, Historia Contemporánea, 45 (2012), p. 437.

430 Pablo Giori

bad, although we still believe that we are superior, the first seed of change has been planted, the fracture in the coherence has begun.21

6. Catalanism and a quest for the nation

The role of cultural practices and civil society is central, as we have seen, in the creation of a cultural machine able to develop, reproduce and change the feelings, thoughts and ways of doing things of the common people. This machine can be an accomplice or a foe of the nationalization project of the State; as we stated above, a top-down machine necessarily needs a bottom-up to be effective. In the Catalan case, although it may only be par-tially generalized, the relation between cultural and political nationalism can be plainly traced throughout the 19th and 20th century.

Disputes between Spanish and Catalan nationalism have always exist-ed in this period, sometimes more clearly, others more covertly22. With the Renaixença (a Catalan cultural revival in the mid-19th century), Catalanism presented a new energy: the energy of developed social strengths, spearhead-ed by industrialization, and of a new rising bourgeois culture23. The cultural nationalism set up by Catalanism during this period generates in the begin-ning of the 20th century a political project: the Mancomunitat de Catalunya (1914). This political and cultural project was really interested in literacy and in the creation of a modern education system, but was cut by Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, which again imposed a Spanish nationalism with a centralized state. The Second Spanish Republic was an attempt to work with the plurinational reality of Spain and to accept that every nation of the feder-ation could develop as it wanted. The internal and external problems, the rise

21 We believe that this can be a good hypothesis to work in an alternative way the prob-lem of nationalization. We have to consider the important role of civil society in the reproduction or challenge of the national discourse of the State, based on every territory and historical period. If we do that, we will find unexpected things.

22 Borja de Riquer, Jordi Maluquer, La Catalunya autonòmica: 1975-2003 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2004).

23 Joan-Lluis Marfany, La cultura del catalanisme. El nacionalisme català en els seus inicis (Barcelona: Editorial Empúries, 1996), p. 220.

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved 431

of Communism and nationalism, produced the Civil War, which ended with all the alternative proposals: Franco’s dictatorship was there to impose its own Spain, “unified, great and free24”. In the sixties, in a context of cultural and material genocide carried out by the state, an opposition and resistance movement started to act, and because they could not act politically, they acted culturally: they started to reconstruct Catalonia, “fer país”. With the arrival of the transition to democracy, these cultural projects fed the political processes and in Catalonia a nationalist party won the elections in 1980.

In this brief itinerary we see the relationship between the cultural and the political projects of nationalism, sometimes carried out by the political institutions and sometimes by civil society. The idea of nationalism also changed due to Francoism; the national idea of the Second Republic was ethnic and regionalist, not separatist, it wanted to change and to modernize Spain. With Francoism, Catalanism became a civic movement in defense of the Catalan language and culture; this new civic nationalism used a democratic discourse as a means of legitimization25. In the fifties, with renovated nationalism, its civil nature became unquestionable, notably af-ter the following decade’s important migratory processes. At the end of Francoism, after 40 years of dictatorial attrition and a decline of the 20th century, the possibility of outlawing or defeating the adversary by armed force became increasingly unthinkable; it was the time of culture26.

The strategies used by Catalanists during the last period of Francoism and the ensuing democracy were similar to those used by the Renaixença: culture and hegemony. In the 19th century, they operated by spreading the Catalan language and literature, searching for their traditional roots and developing a new sense of pride towards all things considered Catalan. This project spanned over 50 years in a context of social and econom-ic growth for Catalonia due to the Industrial Revolution27. Many scholars suggest that, in fact, these activities were aimed at the bourgeoisie and it

24 Ismael Saz Campos, España contra España: los nacionalismos franquistas (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003), p. 16.

25 Michael Keating, Nations against the state: the new politics of nationalism Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1996), p.691.

26 Montserrat Guibernau, Catalan nationalism: Francoism, transition and democracy (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 6.

27 Albert Balcells, Història del nacionalisme català: dels orígens al nostre temps (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1992).

432 Pablo Giori

is because of this that the Renaixença focused above all on language and symbols. Based on these premises, what has mostly been studied has been the movement’s literary and intellectual side, but we can now assure that it was composed of much more than just intellectuals28.

While the Renaixença was interested in culture as content, ideas, text and rationalism, the new anti-Francoist Catalanism attempts to venture into more experiential and emotional aspects. That means not just to create a national poetry but also a national feeling of belonging, clearly distinct from the Spanish one. The battle of ideas was read again in an emotional key: the culture of democratic Catalanism won’t be a literary culture but a culture of passion, one that is lived and felt. For that reason, we are certain that we have to study civil society, cultural practices and culture as something quo-tidian to better understand how these cultural machines generate the ideas and experiences of a nation. We suggest that there is a close relation between cultural practices (mainly sardanes, human towers and bullfighting) and na-tionalistic processes. This relation can explain how Catalonia passed from a stage of cultural resistance during Franco’s dictatorship to one of national re-construction in Spanish democracy… and to one of state-building in 2010.29

Conclusions

After 150 years of nation-building processes carried out by Catalanism, in cultural and political projects, we can now see that a new moment is com-ing: the consolidated Catalan nation asks for the creation of an independent state. There is no logical relation between nation and state, Switzerland is the classic example. But in this case, the creation of an indubitable feeling of belonging to a nation, the creation of an intellectual community and of a new dignity has created the conditions of possibility for this new proposal.

28 Joan-Lluis Marfany, La cultura del catalanisme. El nacionalisme català en els seus inicis (Barcelona: Editorial Empúries, 1996), p. 379.

29 We believe that Francoism cannot be fully understood without taking into account the history of bullfighting, the anti-Francoist Catalanism without sardanes and the democratic Catalonia without castells. See: Pablo Giori, Hacer castells, construir nación…, pp. 18-32; Pablo Giori, “Castells, sardanes i toros. Les disputes culturals dels nacionalismes durant el franquisme”, Segle XX (forthcoming).

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved 433

This is the relation between culture and politics: one depends on and makes possible the other, even though they are not cause and consequence. The new solidified national Catalan culture, the problems arising from the eco-nomic and political crisis represented by the political parties in Spain and the idea that Catalans could manage these problems better, are some of the reasons mentioned. The work carried out by civil society, parallel to politi-cal proposals, was fundamental for achieving the current situation.

During Francoism, the Catalan nation did not exist; it was just a regional difference, an exception in the unified Spain of Franco. With the Transition and the arrival of democracy, the idea of Catalonia, now one of the seventeen Autonomous Communities of Spain, has been changing until it became what is generally believed today, that Catalonia is a nation. This long process – it took more than 40 years of nation-building processes – makes the people that live in this territory today strongly believe that the Catalan nation is a reality. In the last few years, Catalonia has been demanding to participate in the mechanisms of decision-making in Spain, but the centralized state and the bipolar party system does not allow it to make its proposals a reality. When Catalonia has the dignity of a nation and it feels that nothing can be done to change Spain, it considers that its belonging to this state has finished. This is the moment of a new Catalanist project: the Catalan nation needs to create its own state to survive and to develop (as Catalanists say). To do that, it needs to transform the Spanish national feeling of belonging of the people living in Catalonia and that can be done only through cultural processes.

We don’t want to be,A Spanish region.

We don’t want to be,An occupied country.

We want, we want, we want,We want independence.

We want, we want, we want,Catalans countries.

(A song heard in the demonstration on September 11, 2013, National Day of Catalonia).30

30 No volem ser, / Una regió d’Espanya. / No volem ser, / Un país ocupat. / Volem volem volem, / Volem independència. / Volem volem volem / Països Catalans.

434 Pablo Giori

Annexe

Bibliography

Joan Amades, Costumari Català: el curs de l’any (Barcelona: Salvat, 1982).

Benedict Anderson, Comunitats imaginades: reflexions sobre l’origen i la propagació del nacionalisme (Catarroja: Afers, 2005).

Pere Anguera, La nacionalització de la sardana (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 2010).

Ferrán Archilés, Ismael Saz, La nación de los españoles: discursos y prác-ticas del nacionalismo español en la época contemporánea (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2012).

Ferrán Archilés, Marta García Carrión, “En la sombra del estado. Esfera pública nacional y homogeneización cultural en la España de la restau-ración”, Revista Historia Contemporánea, 45 (2012), pp. 483-518.

Avelli Artís-Gener, Bienve Moya, Festes populars a Catalunya (Barcelona: Hmb, 1980).

Albert Balcells, Història del nacionalisme català: dels orígens al nostre temps (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1992).

Josep Benet, L’intent franquista de genocidi cultural contra Catalunya (Barcelona: Abadía de Montserrat, 1995).

Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: política, historia e identidad nacional en España 1875-1975 (Barcelona: Pomares-Corredor, 2000).

Michael Billig, Nacionalisme banal (València: Universitat de València, 2006).

Pere Català i Roca, Món casteller (Barcelona: Rafael Dalmau, 1981).Paola Lo Cascio, Nacionalisme i  autogovern:  Catalunya, 1980-2003

(Catarroja: Afers, 2008).Daniele Conversi, “Nación, estado y cultura: por una historia política y

social de la homogeneización cultural”, Historia Contemporánea, 45 (2012), pp. 437-481.

Andrew Dowling, La reconstrucció nacional de Catalunya: 1939-2012 (Barcelona: Pasado & Presente, 2013).

Ernest Gellner, Nacionalisme (València: Afers, 1998).Pablo Giori, Hacer castells, construir nación. Castells, modelo festivo y

catalanismo (Girona: Universitat de Girona, 2012).

Cultural nationalism: How are cultural practices involved 435

Pablo Giori, “Castells, sardanes i toros. Les disputes culturals dels nacio-nalismes durant el franquisme », Segle XX, 7 (forthcoming).

Montserrat Guibernau, Catalan nationalism: Francoism, transition and democracy (London: Routledge, 2004).

Montserrat Guibernau, “National identity, devolution and secession in Canada, Britain and Spain”, Nations and Nationalism, 12 (2006), pp 51–76.

Eric Hobsbawm, Naciones y Nacionalismo desde 1780 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1998).

Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, La invención de la tradición (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002).

Michael Keating, Nations against the state: the new politics of national-ism Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1996).

Xosé Manuel Núñez Seixas, Los Nacionalismos en la España contem-poránea: siglos XIX y XX (Barcelona: Hipótesis, 1999).

Joan-Lluis Marfany, La cultura del catalanisme. El nacionalisme català en els seus inicis (Barcelona: Editorial Empúries, 1996).

Josep Mas i Solench, La Sardana, dansa nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona: Editorial 62, 1993).

Alejandro Quiroga Fernández de Soto, Haciendo españoles: la naciona-lización de las masas en la dictadura de Primo de Rivera (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2008).

Alejandro Quiroga Fernández de Soto, Ferrán Archilés, “Presentación”, Ayer, 90 (2013), pp. 1-16.

Borja de Riquer, Jordi Maluquer, La Catalunya autonòmica: 1975-2003 (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2004).

Ismael Saz Campos, España contra España: los nacionalismos franquis-tas (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003).

Adrian Shubert, A las cinco de la tarde: una historia social del toreo (Madrid: Turner, 2002).

Joan Soler i Amigó, Cultura popular i tradicional (Barcelona: Pòrtic, 2001).

Josep Termes, Les arrels populars del catalanisme (Barcelona: Empúries, 1999).

Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Création des identités nationales: Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle, (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).

436 Pablo Giori

Javier Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, 1939-2004 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005).

William Washabaugh, Flamenco: pasión, política y cultura popular (Barcelona: Paidós, 2005).