Abstract

By the early twenty-first century neo-nationalist forces have established themselves in a number of the world’s large regions and subcontinents. From Australia to South Asia, in Eastern and Western Europe, comparable parties and movements have positioned themselves in national parliaments and governments, with some considerable impact on state power. In contrast to right-wing extremist parties in the past, these recent movements mostly operate within legal parliamentary channels, using essentialized notions of local culture to mobilize against real and alleged threats to local identities of status, gender, religion, nationhood and ethnicity.

Prompted by this near-simultaneous rise to political influence of more than a dozen apparently similar parties across Western Europe, this collection offers a range of European case studies with selected global examples, such as the Front National, the late Pim Fortuyn, India and the BJP, and Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party in Australia. It takes up the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by this phenomenon and asks what distinctive contributions anthropology might make to its study.

Marcus Banks is Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and author of Organizing Jainism in India and England (Clarendon Press, 1992); Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (Routledge, 1996) and Visual Methods in Social Research (Sage, 2001), as well as numerous journal articles and book contributions.

“Taken as a whole, there is much to commend and enjoy from this panoply of scholarly perspectives and analyses of fomentation and reformulation of nationalist sentiment…its subject matter, with its significant range for interdisciplinary consideration, fills a notable void in nationalism theory and study.”  ·  JRAI

"The book has its value as a rich description of several cases of 'neo-nationalism' in Western Europe. Its merits lies in drawing the lines to EU issues on the one hand, and to other countries like India and Australia on the other….an innovative work within the discipline of social anthropology, which offers nor works with such an overview."  ·  Anthropos

“…an outstanding insight into the development of nationalism at the dawn of the third millennium. Its richness lies precisely in these social anthropological views that the contributions detail. It opens a fruitful dialogue between anthropologists and political scientists, and I would warmly recommend it to those interested in widening their academic perspectives.”  ·  Social Anthropology

“Just when the interest in political scientists in neo-populist….parties seemed to be waning…along comes a volume of essays that not only proposes a new concept with which to investigate the phenomenon, ‘neo-nationalism’, but delivers something genuinely fresh on the topic. Unusually for a book of collected essays…this volume manages to be consistent both in the detail and admirable concision with which each party’s unique story I summarized…points a truly liberal, transdisciplinary humanties in the right direction to be able to engage intelligently with modern realities.”  ·  Nations and Nationalism

Andre Gingrich is Full Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Recent publications include Anthropology, by Comparison (co-edited with Richard G. Fox, 2002) and One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology: The Halle lectures (co-authored with Frederik Barth, Robert Parkin and Sydel Silverman, University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).