The Ethnic Origins of Nations

by Anthony D. Smith

This book is an excellent, comprehensive account of the ways in which nations and nationhood have evolved over time. Successful in hardback, it is now available in paperback for a student audience.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Anthropology, Race, Academic

332 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Anthony D. Smith was Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics, and is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies. His best-known contributions to the field are the distinction between 'civic' and 'ethnic' types of nations and nationalism, and the idea that all nations have dominant 'ethnic cores'. While Smith agreed with other authors that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, he insisted that nations have pre-modern origins.

Reviews

[Natkó Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting subject and I greatly appreciate this book. It is a great work. Nevertheless, many times I felt the author was repeating himself over and over and he wrote the same thing again and again in different sentences and in different chapters.

[Fred R · Rating 4 out of 5]

A monumental piece of work, it took me a year or so of browsing it before I understood its worth.

[Noah Lederman Greis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for my thesis, which is also why I read it with unbelievable speed. but this is really good -- and imo misrepresented by the lecturers I've had as some sort of counter argument to Benedict Anderson's nation as an imagined community. Smith disagrees with Anderson's idea that the nation is a modern invention, but they agree and most everything else. Very well written and informative!

[Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book which should amount to a tabletop reference manual for any politician. It contains not only a deep analysis of the birth, life, interaction, change, and disssolution of an ethnie subsequently of a nation, as one of the possible results of such an evolution warning unheeded by any and all colors of the political spectrum.

[Atila Demirkasımoğlu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Çok önemli bir kitap. Milliyetçiliklerarası farkları az dikkate alıyorsa da mutlaka okunmalı

[Mihai Zodian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ethnic Origins of Nations is part of the revival in studies about nationalism. Published in 1986, it is considered an important study that criticized the excessive emphasis put by modernist interpretations upon the events of the last two centuries. Anthony D. Smith attempted a more nuanced understanding of nations, by reevaluating their past as the title suggests. I`m not sure if he achieved that goal, since its ideas can be stretched towards the extremes of modernism and perennialism, but the book is worth a read.

The main thesis is simple to state. Anthony D. Smith argued that the specific features of nations are important, that they are to be found in their identity which depends on the ethnic groups from which they developed. Like Benedicts Anderson, he underlines the value of recurrent questions such as the meaning of life and death in understanding how social groups evolved. I will focus this review on the process and concepts.

Many scholars argue that nations are a modern phenomenon, and that their self-identification didn`t rely too much on history. For Anthony D. Smith, ethnic groups are old and can be found all over the world, today and also in the past (of course, in other studies, all of this is contested). While nations are modern, they are grounded in these ethnic collectivities and they took over and adapted their culture. The main conclusion is that nations are imagined, yet not imaginary communities and the content of these symbolic communities is determined by old time beliefs.

What is an ethnic community? They are culturally defined collectivities, who depend on myths and who differentiate themselves from other individuals or groups. Anthony D. Smith centered his analysis on the concept of myth, which tells the story of their origin and gives them a sense of meaning, one that is given a practical by social activities such as poetry, art and so on. The ethnic group’s survival is greatly enhanced if they rely on religious beliefs, even if they are derived from universal movements.

The work is over-cited by contemporary nationalists, yet Anthony D. Smith is more balanced. Still, it does have to face the objection that there is a disproportion between the high number of ethnic communities and the much lower count of nations, especially those organized as nation-states. So the transition isn`t automatic and requires a special explanation. Another problem is that for a Romanian reader, his thesis is banal, since in Romanian, the term has the same meaning as in French, the one that is used in this book, and the Romanian culture is suffocated by the study of myths and religion, because of Mircea Eliade.

[Vik · Rating 4 out of 5]

It makes clear distinction between ethnicity and nationalism, and the journey of the former to latter. I think it is a useful interjection in the modern perspective to nationalism with ignores or downgrades the importance of past, history and ethnic origins.

[Francie Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read 3-4 chapters for PH Indigenous Ethnic History class. I'll make a comprehensive review right after I finish the class kasi I'm still confused w/ the conflated sense of ethnic communities becoming nations

[Steven]

I think it's something of a mixed bag.

[Igor Zurimendi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoy reading historical comparative sociology, but I ended up thinking that this book could have been a lot shorter.

[Lukas op de Beke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful but repetitive and pompous.

[lovel d.a. hearn]

i'm not an ethnosymbolist.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really innovative