Page 154 - Contribution To Phenomenology

Chapter 6

Cultural Logics and the Search

for National Identities

Algis Mickunas
Ohio University

Abstract: The current appearance of the search for national
identities may be understood in contexts of broader cultural
structures. One such structure is Western Modernity, and provides a
background which plays a multiple role in the search for identity:
in its secular form it provides an opposition to national I ethnic
groups of specific religious type; in its technical form it provides
means for economic transformation or military enhancement; in its
homogenizing universality, it sets a tone for postmodern movements
and anti-modem oppositions; in its individuating form it becomes
an attraction for freedom and liberation. This essay explores the
relationships of Western modernity to various nationalistic and ethnic
movements and, in a final analysis, raises a question concerning the
constitution of nationality

As if it were on cue, recent sociological, cultural, ethnic, psychological,
and even communication theory literatures are focusing on identity.
Various hypotheses are offered to account not only for this focus, but
also to decipher what such identity would be.^ A decade ago some
sociologists contended that the problems of national identities resulted
either from modernization or from some domination of one ethnic group
by another and a partition or an occupation of the lands of one group's
forefathers by another. Thus nationalisms and their identities have only

^ Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Jack Goody, The Logic of
Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
and Mike Featherstone, (editor) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Moder-
nity (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990).

147
M. Daniel and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, 147-170.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.