February 12, 2002

Dipankar Gupta is professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In this book he analyzes the concept of culture combined with examples from every day life to interpret governance, citizenship, and fraternity. His assertion that political intuitions have deep cultural roots is well-supported by facts as they exist in the modern world. Culture delineates the way people interact with each other in defined spaces. The nation state being one such space. The author through his treatise concludes that only when the nation state is understood as a cultural phenomenon can the passion it arouses be better understood. What better time for this book to be read then now when recent events have brought raw passions to the fore.

This book examines nation states in terms of anthropology, primarily because it is impossible to ignore that sovereign states influence social life. The problem, however, with examining nation states is that one often gets trapped in defining a ‘pure’ nation state. The author says that it would be better instead, to see what a nation state does when it comes into being, and the kind of loyalty it excites. Nation is primarily sentiment on which the structures of the state aspire to organize a collective life. This book is an effort towards an understanding of the sentiments and structures that bind nation states.

The book is divided into two parts, the first is based on the premise that only in a defined space can there be a clear concept of a cultural membership. Part two follows with the conclusion that since nation states are bound by strong sentiments of identity they can be best understood as a cultural phenomena.

The understanding of culture is riven with differences. These have led to the realization that cultures are not monolithic blocks that are oblivious of and neutral to considerations of power and politics. Cultures in fact express power relations, in a veiled manner, and evoke emotions strong enough for people to die and kill for.

Perhaps the most recalcitrant issue in the concept of culture is the reconciliation of tradition and modernity. Culture is primarily practice in the pursuit of a ‘good life’. The good life is not conceived individualistically or solipsistically. When the conception of the good life is assessed through what the author refers to as root metaphors it involves interactions with other people. The notion of purity and pollution, as in the caste system, is a root metaphor, the significance of colour differentiation is a root metaphor in racist societies, and the various injunctions that inform the division into estates are root metaphors in feudal societies.

Nation states influence our self-conscious awareness of who we are as a people with culture(s). It is only by grasping the cultural and sentimental dimensions of individual nation states that we can enter into an informed debate on their respective structures of governance and politics. This book is devoted to these twin aspects of sentiment and structure with respect to the nation state, but mediates them through the optic of culture.

How community sentiments are expressed in modern nation states cannot be fathomed without factoring in the specifics of the nation state in question. Not only will there be a wide divergence between theocratic, fascist and liberal nation states in regard to how community ties and associations are expressed, but within each there are bound to be variations. The modern liberal democratic nation state goes the farthest in trying to accommodate diverse cultural identities within it.

An interesting point is made by the author regarding the great shift in population that took place with partition. The urban migrants faced great trauma and hardship because they had to start life anew, find jobs, retool themselves, make fresh connections and so forth. It is not surprising that for the urban migrants the remembered space of what used to be their home is poignant and loaded with political significance. The rural refugees, on the other hand, were settled in collectivities. Entire villages were relocated and the refugees carried on with the jobs they had pursued in pre-Partition India. The urban refugee continue to recall the brutalities and deprivations that they had been subjected to. The rural refugees have long overcome the angsts of this order. The locale had changed for them but not so much their cultural space.

Analyzing the question of artifacts which most of us think culture is, the author says that these in their nativity often involve culture. Artifacts include not just texts, but also dress, culinary preparations, and even literary styles. In a manner of speaking they can all be seen as texts of different sorts. Food, dress, and other popular markers of culture need not be spatially limited. There are Indian restaurants in London, and there are Pushkin lovers in Kolkata. While culture is deeply committed to space, artifacts are not. They are notoriously promiscuous and can freely roam diverse locales. Global food that vicariously imagines America, wipes out considerations of cultural space. Clothes music and literary appreciation thus have different spaces and in that sense can be ‘neutral’ to root metaphors. The sentiments that gave birth to the nation do not always bring forth a liberal democratic state. The option of a theocratic state or a fascist state is always a live one. This possibility hovers in the background, and cannot, indeed, should not, be casually dismissed. The liberal democratic state does not emerge naturally, as it were, after the nation has come into being. This is quite paradoxical as the liberal democratic structure can alone ensure the sense of common participation that enlivened the cultural space of the nation.

For about seven decades, democracy was ideologically charged not so much with notions of pure liberalism as with differences between capitalism and socialism. But neither socialism, nor pure market-driven capitalism were able to establish fraternity on an enduring and self-generating basis. Maintaining liberal democracy within a nation state is not an easy task. But without it a nation state would renege on those with whom a common cause was made in the making of the nation’s sentiment. There are nation states where this happens but these would not be liberal democratic nation states.

The book under review is a scholarly treatise and may at times bog down the reader with terminology but it is easily overcome as one goes on. It could help provide a basis for understanding what the West today is referring to as ‘our culture’ against ‘their culture’ and the maddening ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. With its unique approach to the study of the nation state and its strong analytical and theoretical bases, this book will be of immense interest to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists as indeed to those who study social systems.

Culture, space and the nation state
y Dipankar Gupta

Sage Publications, M 32 Market, Greater Kailash 1, New Delhi-110 048. 
Email: marketing@indiasage.com
ISBN 0-7619-9499-8
282pp. Indian Rs445

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)