Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity Book

Anthony Smith is one of the best (as in provocative, challenging and influential) theorists of nations and nationalism around, and his mid 1980s Ethnic Origins of Nations has framed the work of a generation of scholars. This book shows how his approaches have changed, as he looks to the ways discourses of nation and nationalism have worked to make the people and their nation sacred - I may disagree with some of the detail, but the model is powerful. It has four parts (paraphrased from p 255): a myth of ethnic election by a diety, a long-standing attachment to specific places seen as both sacred and belonging to the community; a desire to recover golden age(s); and a belief that both mass and individual sacrifice has regenerative power. None of these, Smith admits, is new to or invented by nationalism, but all are used (usually collectively) to justify nations and nationalism.

The book is powerful, coherent and the case well-made, and works as a critical extension and revision of more commonly invoked arguments such as Anderson's Imagined Communities model (which in itself is often used very badly anyway). Its major shortcoming is hinted at by Smith's own admission of a limitation - its focus on experiences shaped by and within Judeo-Christian histories. Models and ideals of the sacred developed outside the frame provided by the three great west Asian monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) very often rely on a more complex set of relations, activities of the deity/deities, and interactions with place, space, and the natural world. This is not to deny the useful of the approach outlined by Smith, merely to point to its major shortcoming: it is not universal and needs local and specific testing, application, and development. This limitation aside, it remains a major contribution to studies of nationalism and nations that seems to have passed much of the field by: puzzling that.