Ethnosymbolism

Ethnosymbolism is a school of thought in the study of nationalism that stresses the importance of symbols, myths, values and traditions in the formation and persistence of the modern nation state.

It emerges as the critical theory of modernism, which argues the antiquity and la longue durée of nation while modernists believe nation's purely modern appearance.John A. Armstrong, Anthony D. Smith and John Hutchinson are regarded as important theorists of ethnosymbolism.

The term was first used as 'ethno-symbolist approach' in an article by Daniele Conversi, Smith's former student at LSE. However, Conversi was slightly critical, arguing that, 'if we focus exclusively on the power of the past and its symbols, we miss two other key features of nationalism: first, its relationship with political power, and particularly with the state; second, its crucial border-generating function'.

John A. Armstrong's contribution to ethnosymbolism is his myth-symbol complexes in Nations before Nationalism published in 1982, which firstly underlined the significance of la longue durée according to Anthony D. Smith. Armstrong believes that ethnic consciousness has existed for long, whose traces could even be found in ancient civilisations such as Egypt, and nationalism is merely 'the final stage of a larger cycle of ethnic consciousness reaching back to the earliest forms of collective organization'. Therefore, similar to the longue durée of Annales School, formation of ethnic identity should be examined in time dimensions of many centuries.

He emphasised the boundaries for human identity by adopting the social interaction model of Fredrik Barth and argues that 'groups tend to define themselves not by reference to their own characteristics but by exclusion, that is, by comparison to "strangers"'. In other words, the character of a group is never fixed, and in accordance with group member's individual perceptions the boundaries of identities vary. Hence, comparing to the objective group characteristics, the boundary mechanisms of distinguishing a particular group from others should be studied more.

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