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Anthony D. Smith

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Also known as Anthony David Stephen Smith, Anthony Smith

British academic (1939-2016)

Person · Open Library

Born
23 Sep 1939
Died
19 Jul 2016
Works
46

Top works

  • Les Problèmes de la politique des salaires dans le développement économique
  • Starting to teach
  • Nationalism in the twentieth century
  • ANTIQUITY OF NATIONS
  • The nation in history

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

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Quotes

  • For a global culture seems unable to offer the qualities of collective faith, dignity and hope that only a "religion surrogate", with its promise of a territorial culture-community across the generations, can provide.
  • Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Persians, Chinese and Japanese could be cited as examples of ethnic continuity, since, despite massive cultural changes over the centuries, certain key identifying components—name, language, customs, religious community and territorial association—were broadly maintained and reproduced for millennia.
  • All this points to the importance of social memory; as the example of the relationship between modern and ancient Greeks shows, ethnies are constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i.e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population.
  • Perhaps the central question in our understanding of nationalism is the role of the past in the creation of the present. … For nationalists themselves, the role of the past is clear and unproblematic. The nation was always there, indeed it is part of the natural order, even when it was submerged in the hearts of its members.
  • For perennialists, too, the nation is immemorial. National forms may change and particular nations may dissolve, but the identity of a nation is unchanging. Yet the nation is not part of any natural order, so one can choose one's nation, and later generations can build something new on their ancient ethnic foundations. The task of nationalism is to rediscover and appropriate a submerged past in order the better to build on it.
  • For the modernist, in contrast, the past is largely irrelevant. The nation is a modern phenomenon, the product of nationalist ideologies, which themselves are the expression of modern, industrial society. The nationalist is free to use ethnic heritages, but nation-building can proceed without the aid of an ethnic past. Hence, nations are phenomena of a particular stage of history, and embedded in purely modern conditions.

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Wikidata facts

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date of birth
1939-09-23
date of death
2016-07-19
Sources (4)

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