No End

Summary

Our partial survey done we can ask, to what effect? What light can a fieldwork-grounded anthropology shed on contemporary nationalisms?

The first point should have been repeatedly demonstrated to all those who have read the text, rather than skipped straight to this endnote, i.e. that we impoverish our understanding of nationalism if we are not prepared to study its lived reality. If one definition of anthropology is to take people seriously, then it behoves us to listen to what locals are saying and to attend to what they are doing. After all, the much-vaunted strength of social anthropology is to learn, through intensive fieldwork, the ways locals understand and act in the world, to delineate the connections they may make between seemingly unrelated contexts. Perhaps the most revealing example here is the homology made by Pamplonan activists between bull-running and demonstrations, underpinned by the performative understanding of nationalism. Other examples might be the appearance of the Gugu in small Navarran village, the role of gastronomic societies within Basque society, the importance of skull shape in Basque public sculpture of the 1920s, the value of mountaineers to radical political parties, the particular intermeshing of interests between nationalist politicians and genetic anthropologists, and so on. Though, like Deutsch, Kedourie, Gellner and Anderson, have studied respectively and in my own way social dimensions of communication, intellectual genealogies, modes of modernization, and newspapers, I like to think the insights I have produced are a direct consequence of a fieldwork-based approach, broadly conceived.