This paper examines the interrelations of whiteness, gender, class and nationalism as represented in popular media discourses surrounding the coverage of the assault on Olympic ice skater Nancy Kerrigan and the investigation of her rival, Tonya Harding. As with other recent works that have refocused the issue of "race" on whiteness, this essay seeks to unveil the exclusionary social processes in which boundaries are set and marked within the "difference" of whiteness. The concepts of habitus and historicity are used to understand how Tonya Harding became marked as "white trash," and the implications of her "flawed" qualifications are explored. Furthermore, this paper identifies ongoing ideological struggles over moral regulation and reproduction of the nation and its subjects.

A major factor cited in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is the emergence of nationalist ideologies and identities among the empire’s ethno-religious minority groups. Such arguments, however, often fail to recognize roles played by the Ottoman state itself in promoting – albeit unwittingly – politicizations of such constructs. By examining Ottoman educational policies during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), it becomes evident that policies intended to contain, manipulate, or otherwise affect the conduct of ethno-religious minorities’ identities and/or politics actually promoted their particularization. Individualizations of ethno-religious identities in a pluralistic society like the Ottoman Empire thus exacerbated problems of resistance, fragmentation, and secession. This research thus examines Ottoman politics of education vis-à-vis the ethnic and religious minorities of the empire during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While numerous studies have examined ways in which education fostered political cohesion when administered directly or through other governmental institutions, few have examined those examples when such policies failed – or even fostered fragmentation. In considering alternate cases, one quickly ascertains that while these cases may have been traumatic and far from uniform through time and over place, their eventual successes resided in the fact that they did foster loyalties on the basis of the universal ideal of a nation-state. By contrast, educational policies in societies lacking the nation-state as the ultimate ideal – and the nation as ultimate sovereign, might be said to have failed eventually. In ethnically, religiously, and linguistically pluralistic societies like the Ottoman Empire, evolved notions of citizenship were the best that could be aspired to without obvious alienations of particular groups. In such cases, increased involvements by the state – even when designed to enhance the loyalties of its citizens, could be seen as having catastrophic outcomes for multi-ethnic/-religious empires in the modern era of the nation-state. In short, this work maintains this observation as its primary thesis and seeks to foster an inquiry into its conduct and consequences with respect to the ethnic and religious minorities of the Ottoman Empire. This research draws upon unique primary materials written in Ottoman Turkish that were acquired from archives in Turkey. In sum, histories of Ottoman educational politics illuminate many of the failings of citizenship-fostering and/or nation-building educational agendas that would subsequently be enacted worldwide in pluralistic societies. Indeed, such examples were even apparent later as the Turkish Republic attempted to deal with its minorities. At a time when certain ideologies, religions, and nationalisms of the Middle East are characterized as malevolent, this collective experience from Ottoman educational history yields a powerful and cautionary lesson as to the potential ramifications of state policies geared towards controlling, co-opting, marginalizing, or otherwise manipulating political, religious, and/or other identity-based constructs.

In Egypt, during the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were rapidly replaced with new alternative concepts of community, which for the first time, had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. The existing historiography however, places Egyptian nationalism exclusively within the realm of elite politics. Thus, this dissertation seeks to investigate the agency of ordinary Egyptians in constructing and negotiating national identity. The principal reason why the Egyptian urban masses are not well represented in the literature is the almost complete neglect of colloquial Egyptian sources. Indeed, I would contend that writing a history of modern Egypt without taking into account colloquial Egyptian sources is, by default, a top-down history and will at best provide only a partial understanding of Egyptian society.This study has several simultaneous objectives. The first is to highlight and feature the role and importance of previously neglected colloquial Egyptian sources--be they oral or textual--in examining modern Egyptian history. This, I argue, is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of "ordinary" Egyptians. The second objective is to document the influence of a developing colloquial Egyptian mass culture as a vehicle and forum through which, among other things, "hidden transcripts" of resistance and critiques of colonial and elite authority took place. And lastly, through the lens of colloquial mass culture, this study traces the development of collective Egyptian identity, and the strengthening of Egyptian national communality from the 1870s to the 1919 Revolution.

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Between 1914 and 1919, Germans and Austrians experienced previously unimaginable sociopolitical transformations: four years of war, military defeat, the collapse of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies, the creation of democratic republics, and the redrawing of the map of Central Europe. Through an analysis of new state symbols and the staging of political and cultural celebrations, this dissertation explores the multiple and conflicting ways in which Germans and Austrians sought to reconceptualize the relationships between nation, state and politics in the wake of the First World War. Whereas the political right argued that democracy was a foreign imposition, supporters of democracy in both countries went to great lengths to refute these claims. In particular, German and Austrian republicans endeavored to link their fledgling democracies to the established tradition of großdeutsch nationalism – the idea that a German nation-state should include Austria – in an attempt to legitimize their embattled republics. By using nineteenth-century großdeutsch symbols and showing continued support for an Anschluss (political union) even after the Entente forbade it, republicans hoped to create a transborder German national community that would be compatible with a democratic body politic. As a project that investigates the entangled and comparative histories of Germany and Austria, this dissertation makes three contributions to the study of German nationalism and modern Central European history. First, in revealing the pervasiveness of großdeutsch ideas and symbols at this time, I point to the necessity of looking at both Germany and Austria when considering topics such as the redefinition of national identity and the creation of democracy in post-World War I Central Europe. Second, it highlights the need to move beyond the binary categorizations of civic and ethnic nationalisms, which place German nationalism in the latter category. As the republicans’ use of großdeutsch nationalism demonstrates, the creation of a transborder German community was not simply the work of the extreme political right. Third, it contributes to recent scholarship which seeks to move past the entrenched question of why interwar German and Austrian democracies failed. Instead of simply viewing the two republics as failures, it investigates the ways in which citizens engaged with the new form of government, as well as the prospects for the success of democracy in the wake of military defeat. In drawing attention to the differences between the German and Austrian experiments with democracy, this dissertation points to the relative strengths of the Weimar Republic when compared to the First Austrian Republic.

The dissertation examines the relationship between democracy and nationalism from a normative standpoint. A point of departure is the assumption that any democracy requires a referent community, or demos. Nationalism has, in practice, frequently provided democracies with this sense of community during the last two centuries. The author argues, firstly, that this connection has led to an entanglement of the concepts of democracy and nationalism, so that democrats tend to rely, often unknowingly, on the thought structures of nationalism as they seek to make explicit the identity of their respective communities. The mechanism by which this connection is upheld is demonstrated through two contextualized studies of discourse on common society-wide identity in, respectively, the contemporary United States of America and the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany. Secondly, it is argued (also on the basis of these contextualized studies) that the nationalist features which tend to ‘leak’ into the overarching, society-wide identities that are constructed in these debates contain an inherently exclusionary potential; however, this leakage is often glossed over by superficial anti-nationalism and phrases such as ‘civic nationalism’, which is contrasted with ‘ethnic nationalism’. Rather than hidden behind such rhetoric, the author argues, the nationalist thought structures that democrats tend to rely on should be brought into the light of day, so that the potentially destructive features of nationalism can be handled in the best way possible. Thirdly, it is claimed that deliberative models (such as that of Jürgen Habermas) are better suited than liberal nationalist models (such as that of David Miller) for this task.

This study explores borderlands as a function of the imposition of the post-colonial state upon primary structures of identity, polity and social organisation which may be sub-state, national or trans-state in nature. This imposition, particularly in the postcolonial experience of Asia, manifests itself in incongruence between identities of nation and state, between authority and legitimacy, and between beliefs and systems, each of which is most acutely demonstrated in the dynamic borderlands where the competition for influence between non-state and state centres of political gravity is played out. The instability in borderlands is a product of the re-territorialisation of pre-state primary structures, and the state's efforts in accommodating, assimilating or suppressing these structures through a combination of militarisation, providing opportunities for greater political enfranchisement, and the structure of trans-borderland economic flows. The Pashtun tribes of the Afghan borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan are exhibiting a resurgence of autonomy from the state, as part of the re-territorialisation of the primary substructure of Pakhtunkhwa that underlies southern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. This phenomenon is localised, tribally driven, and replicated across the entirety of Pakhtunkhwa. It is a product of the pashtunwali mandated autonomy of zai from which every kor, killi and khel derives its security, and through the protection of which each is able to raise its nang, and is able to realise its position within the larger clan or tribe. Other examples of competition between postcolonial states and primary structures are the Kurdish experience in south-eastern Turkey and the experience of the Arab state. While manifesting significant peculiarities, all three cases - the Kurds, the Arabs and the Pashtuns - demonstrate that the current configuration of the postcolonial state system in Asia is a fragile construction, imposed upon enduring, pre-state primary structures which are resurgent through competition with the state.

Recent studies of the development of Indian politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have contested the notion of a giant clash between imperialism and nationalism in the sub-continent. Increasingly, these studies have focused on the regional variations of the Indian national movement, and high-lighted the contradictions within it. Not only has the earlier vision of the unity of the movement tended to break down as a result. The very continuity and indeed existence of the movement has apparently been brought into question. Yet the strength of something perceived as a nationalist movement by large numbers of contemporary observers, official and non-official, has been undoubted. To meet this difficulty, historians have sought to re-introduce by new methods some element of continuity and permanence into their concept of the Indian nationalist movement. An important suggestion has been that the links between different levels of politics, different regions and different interests were provided by the formal political structure imposed on the country by the British. Constitutional development, then, accounts for an on-going national movement, and changes in the constitutional set-up explain changes in the intensity, scale and form of the nationalist struggle. One problem with these studies has been the almost invariable concentration on 'elites' and the leadership. Differences among nationalist leaders have been taken as indicative of the contradictions within the nationalist movement. Links between leaders have appeared as nationalist links. 'Followers', it has generally been assumed, acted simply in accordance with the wishes of their leaders. The present thesis concentrates much more on the relationship between leaders and followers in the national movement. It investigates the means of communication between them, the barriers and the contradictions, and tries to assess the way in which leaders and followers influenced one another and 'followers' occasionally became leaders in their own right. An attempt is also made to explain the continuity of the national movement, in terms not only of the changing constitutional structure, but also of the permanent organisational base of the movement and the independent power that nationalist propaganda, symbols and slogans - broadly speaking, the nationalist 'ideology' - came to have. Finally, the thesis examines how the method and manner of nationalist propaganda, as well as the institutions and style of British rule, tended to divide sections of the Indian 'nation' from one another, and how the Congress leadership responded when these divisions assumed dangerous proportions. The striking fact is that as the Congress-led movement for freedom advanced to a position of enormous strength, its weaknesses also became more obvious. The Introduction sets out this problem in the case of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, (U.P.), an area noted for its prominence in the national movement after the First World War. It shows how by the early 1930's the Congress was recognised as the strongest and most organised party in the province, and one that constituted a real threat to the position of the Government. Yet this party had the active support neither of the Muslim community in general nor of the mass of the poor in town and country. The chapters that follow seek to explain the genesis of this apparently paradoxical position. Chapter 2 examines the organisational base of the Congress movement in the 192O's and early 193O's. It is suggested that in the years immediately after World War I a sound base was secured, through the presence of a hard core of permanent workers in the organisation, financial support from business, industrial and other sympathetic groups, and the work of 'national' educational and other institutions which provided new recruits for nationalist activity. The weakness of the organisation is seen in its failure to make any direct provision for the poorer sections of Indian society. Some attempt was made to remedy this situation in the last years of the period under study, but it is argued that these were piecemeal and limited efforts which did not go very far. Chapter 3 elaborates the very broad, nationalist appeal made by the Congress, the agencies it used and the effects of its endeavours. It is shown that personal contact, acts of 'revolutionary terrorism' and the press, all performed valuable propaganda for the nationalist cause. Racial and religious elements in the Congress' propaganda had widespread influence. There was room also for appeals on specific economic issues within the general, nationalist approach of the Congress. Where the Congress approach confronted major problems was at points where parts of its appeal brought different sections of the society into clash with one another. The remaining chapters examine the limitations that this, and the Congress' refusal to face the problem squarely, imposed on the movement as a whole. Chapter 4 makes a case-study of pppular agitation during the civil disobedience campaign in two very different U.P. districts, one in Agra and the other in Oudh. This indicates how the Congress encouraged popular agitation and yet tried to keep it under strict control. The chapter argues that the Congress attempt to maintain the broadest possible front in its anti-imperialist struggle misfired at this point. Large numbers of peasants, extremely distressed on account of the conditions created by the Depression and agitated at the relentless efforts of the Government and the landlords to extract their dues, strained at the leash that Congress leaders had tied on them regarding the manner of their protest. Friction between the two was especially marked when the Congress withdrew the 'no-tax'/'no-rent' campaign after the Gandhi-Irwin agreement of March 1931. Ultimately, the chapter suggests, the obvious distress of large sections of the peasantry and the independent actions of angry tenants led the Congress to adopt a more militant position, but before then the hesitations of the leadership had caused a substantial loss of support for civil disobedience. Chapter 5 turns to the problem of the alienation of the Muslims from the national movement, a fact that was clear at least in the U.P. by the time of the civil disobedience movement, fhe importance of the style of British rule, and of the nature of electoral arrangements, is noted. But the chapter is concerned more with the manner in which sectional appeals, adopted for short-term electoral or agitational purposes, contributed to the growth of communal antagonism. The importance of communal tension on the ground in the development of a separate Muslim politics is emphasized. By the end of the 192O's, it is suggested, general communal suspicion had made it difficult for Hindu and Muslim leaders to work together, and subsequent attempts by Congress (Hindu) leaders to appeal to the Muslim 'masses' over the heads of Muslim leaders only tended to close Muslim ranks further. A central theme of the thesis is that the general nationalist appeal of the Congress proved a source both of strength and of weakness for the movement. Aggressive anti- British propaganda gave rise to the widespread view of the Raj as enemy and oppressor. Racial clashes between Government forces and nationalist deroonstrators proved particularly important in arousing anti-British feeling among very diverse groups and people. In addition, the Congress after 192O acquired the image of the 'poor man's party'. It is seen, however, that nationalist symbols and slogans, which were widely accepted, had vary different meanings for different people. The extension of a 'national', or at least an anti-British consciousness to social groups which had been unaffected earlier led to Increasing conflicts of interest within the nationalist camp.

It is commonly maintained that prior to World War I all was well between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. According to this view, the Jews were too few and the Arabs too inarticulate for discord to have manifested itself. Amongst the Arabs there was, at most, only rudimentary opposition to Jewish settlement in the country, and the general harmony was not broken until the British promised national sovereignty to both the Arabs and the Jews in the course of the Great War. This study seeks to do three things. It attempts to trace the development of the Ottoman Government's position regarding Jewish immigration into Palestine between 1882 and 1914, to describe how this policy was translated into practice by the authorities in Palestine, and to discover how the Arabs reacted to this influx of Jews in the light of Ottoman official policy and practice. This study, which is based mainly on diplomatic and Jewish records, reaches the conclusion that the popular notion of Arab- Jewish harmony in Palestine prior to 1914 has little grounding in fact.

Anthropological approaches to contexts of violence and conflict often focus on the exceptional and extraordinary moment of violence or its memory, leaving little room for the ordinary ways in and through which much conflict is lived. How might conflict and violence permeate ordinary practice, daily events and experience? What about the mundane and anticipatory moments through which violence may be predicted, anticipated and waited upon? This thesis explores ordinary security perspectives and practices among Jewish-Israelis in Tel Aviv. It is based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork among security guards, civil guards and city residents between 2005 and 2007 as they do and discuss bitachon (security). Participant observation with street-level security staff, with civil guard patrols and within the critical activities and conversations at a local neighbourhood kiosk café all explore practices, perspectives and experiences of security. This thesis argues that security practices that are often invoked as a precaution against danger and a provider of protection may paradoxically produce a sense of even more danger, uncertainty and insecurity. Security is not only about spectacular conflicts or strategic concepts but is also engaged with and experienced through mundane and ordinary social life. As well as claiming to protect the nation-state or managing strategic threats, security is also a kind of practice and emotion; an atmosphere, activity, and a feeling. Security is not only about extraordinary events and explosive situations, but also about a particular kind of waiting; an uncertain and boring anticipation of potential violence to come. It may be less about performance, legibility, or defence against dangerous others, than the identification of intimate and illegible populations, the playing out of racialized notions of danger and the ethno-nationalist uncertainties of the nation-state. In this context, collective anxieties and insecurities may be brought about not by the scale or magnitude of security threats, but by the perceived incapacity and protective impotence of the state. This thesis contributes to the anthropology of conflict and violence, the anthropology of Israel/Palestine and urban anthropology more generally. It points towards ways in which anthropology may meaningfully contribute to and enter dialogue with security studies, and argues in favour of an ordinary approach to the analysis of conflict and security.