The First Question of the Week

Bienvenue!

After a - I think - rather neat class on romantic nationalism and the occasional downsides thereof evolved into a discussion of group identity as caricature ("The Caper", "The Maritimer," "The Upper Canadian"), one point that might have gone unexpressed, or unstressed, was how political boundaries often do not reflect the natural geographic boundaries to environments, which therefore at least calls into question some of Herder's conclusions - if not his premises - of national character. First, the confusion - or the propensity for confusion - of the nation with the state (Milan Kundera has a great article in this week's New Yorker about this point, although he also seems to be arguing for the opposite) and how nation-state identity can tend to obfuscate personal, local, or regional identity. The state is a construct that occasionally is contiguous with nation, but not exclusively. To suggest that Canadian identity does not exist is grossly unfair, but typically - with food, with song, with habitat- certain local or regional traditions have been extrapolated as representative of the whole.

But enough about that.

The Question for next week (e-mailed to me by Monday) is: Do you consider yourself a member of an ethnic group? Why or why not?

By the way, the course syllabus is now up as a link (look to the right): any other handouts I, um, hand out will be available there as well (this does not include chapter or article photocopies: those are outside my office door).