Abstract
Materialities of everyday nationalism is more frequently explored today in nationalism studies. Similar attention, however, is missing if we consider young children’s institutional lives. This chapter uses an object centric approach to everyday nationalism to explore how objects gain national significance and weave nationalism into young children’s everyday institutional lives and contribute to their identity formation as national subjects. By analysing two scenarios as cases to learn from, I identify three processes: production, occupation and performance through which objects tie the nation into everyday practices. While everyday nationalism often operates beneath the surface, paying attention to objects and mundane practices in preschools help us understand where and when everyday nationalism is present in children’s preschool lives, when it matters, and how it works. To conclude, I call attention to the need to take objects more seriously in the study of banal nationalism and childhood.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
It is also possible that she does not understand the BBQ as an exclusively male domain. She might also like to enact the masculine discourse.
References
Anderson, K. (2003). White natures: Sydney’s royal agricultural show in post-humanist perspective. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28(4), 422–441.
Antonsich, M. (2015). The ‘everyday’ of banal nationalism—Ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian. Political Geography, 54, 32–42.
Appadurai, A. (Hrsg.). (1986). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Balthasar, A. (2017). Made in Britain: Brexit, teacups, and the materiality of the nation. American Ethnologist, 44(2), 220–224.
Beneï, V. (2008). Schooling passions: Nation, history, and language in contemporary Western India. Sanford: Stanford University Press.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
Bradford, C. (1995). Exporting Australia: National identity and australian picture books. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 20(3), 111–115.
Brubaker, R., Feischmidt, M., Fox, J., & Gracea, L. (2006). Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dyrenfurth, N. (2007). John Howard’s Hegemony of values: The politics of ‘mateship’ in the howard decade. Australian Journal of Political Science, 42(2), 211–230.
Edensor, T. H. (2002). National identity, popular culture and everyday life. Oxford: Berg.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.
Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Hrsg.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (S. 208–227). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fox, J. E. (2017). The edges of the nation: A research agenda for uncovering the taken-for-granted foundations of everyday nationhood. Nations and nationalism, 23(1), 26–47.
Franklin, A. (2006). Animal nation: The true story of animals and Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hage, G. (1998). White nation: Fantasies of supremacy in a multicultural society. Sydney: Pluto Press.
Haldrup, M. (2017). Souvenirs: Magical objects in everyday life. Emotion, Space and Society, 22, 52–60.
Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2006). What else? Some more ways of thinking and doing ‘Children’s Geographies’. Children’s Geographies, 4(1), 69–95.
Kapferer, B. (1988). Legends of people, myths of state: Violence, intolerance, and political culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kopytoff, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things: Commodization as a Process. In A. Appadurai (S. 64–91) The social life of things. Commodities in a social perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kowalski, A. (2017). That banal objects of nationalism: ‘Old stones’ as heritage in the early days of the French public television. In G. Zubrzycki (Hrsg.), National matters : Materiality, culture, and nationalism (S. 124–146). Stanford, SA: Stanford University Press.
Lappalainen, S. (2006). Liberal multiculturalism and national pedagogy in a Finnish preschool context: Inclusion or nation-making? Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 14(1), 99–112.
Löfgren, O. (1993). Materializing the nation in Sweden and America. Ethnos, 58(3–4), 161–196.
MacNaughton, G. (2001). Back to the future—Young children constructing and reconstructing ‘White’ Australia. Early childhood education for a democratic society. From Conference Proceedings. Wellington: NZCER Distribution Services (S. 37–52).
Merriman, P., & Jones, R. (2017). Nations, materialities and affects. Progress in Human Geography, 41(5), 600–617.
Millei, Z. (2018). The pedagogy of nation: A concept and method to research nationalism in young children’s institutional lives. Childhood, 26(1), 83–97.
Millei, Z., & Imre, R. (Hrsg.). (2015). Childhood and nation: Interdisciplinary engagements. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Millei, Z., Korkiamäki, R., & Kaukko, M. (2019). ‘Arctic childhoods’ and mobilized differences—The mattering of skis and skates. In P. Rautio & E. Stenval (Hrsg.), Social, material and political constructs of arctic childhoods: An everyday life perspective (S. 49–64). Singapore: Springer.
Newton, J. (2007). Dunnies and Australian culture: Looking backward and forward to explicate community memory. Journal of Australian Studies, 31(91), 81–91.
Noble, G. (2002). Comfortable and relaxed: Furnishing the home and nation. Continuum, 16(1), 53–66.
Pease, B. (2001). Moving beyond mateship: Reconstructing Australian men’s practices. In B. Pease & K. Pringle (Hrsg.), A man’s world?: Changing Men’s practices in a globalized world (S. 191–204). London: Zed Books.
Pettman, J. J. (1995). Race, ethnicity and gender in Australia. In D. Stasiulis & N. Yuval-Davis (Eds.), Unsettling settler societies: Articulations of gender, race, ethnicity and class (S. 65–94). London: Sage.
Redmond, A. (2007). Surfies versus westies: Kinship, mateship and sexuality in the cronulla riot. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 18(3), 336–350.
Scourfield, J., Dick, B., Drakeford, M., & Davies, A. (2006). Children, place and identity: Nation and locality in middle childhood. London: Routledge.
Skey, M. (2011). National belonging and everyday life: The significance of nationhood in an uncertain world. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Silverman, R. (2015). Material biographies. History in Africa, 42, 375–395.
Sørensen, E. (2013). Human presence: Towards a posthumanist approach to experience. Subjectivity, 6(1), 112–129.
Stratton, J., & Ang, I. (1994). Multicultural imagined communities: Cultural difference and national identity in Australia and the USA. Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture, 8(2) https://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/readingroom/8.2/Stratton.html
Taylor, A. (2014). Settler children, kangaroos and the cultural politics of australian national belonging. Global Studies of Childhood, 4(3), 169–182.
Turner, G. (1994). Making it national- nationalism and Australian popular culture. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin.
Wetherell, M., & Edley, N. (2014). A discursive psychological framework for analyzing men and masculinities. Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 15(4), 355–364.
Woronov, T. (2007). Performing the nation: China’s children as little red pioneers. Anthropological Quarterly, 80(3), 647–672.
Zubrzycki, G. (2017). National matters: Materiality, culture, and nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Millei, Z. (2020). Object Centric Study of Everyday Nationalism in an Australian preschool. In: Bollig, S., Alberth, L., Schindler, L. (eds) Materialitäten der Kindheit. Kinder, Kindheiten und Kindheitsforschung, vol 22. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25532-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25532-9_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-25531-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-25532-9
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)