A Reply to Sam Pryke

Abstract

We are grateful to the Editors of Sociology for the opportunity to respond to Dr Sam Pryke's comments on our paper ‘Constructing National Identity’.

We are, of course, pleased that Dr Pryke has taken an interest in our work and by his acknowledgement that empirical enquiry is welcome in a field marked by, in our judgement, excessive theoretical abstraction. He acknowledges in his first paragraph that ‘there has been a tendency ... to assume that national identity is simply conferred to individuals by the nation-state’, and correctly observes that our article ‘seeks to rectify this emphasis’. However, this appreciation that we are simply trying to advocate a more balanced approach vanishes as the Comment goes on. Dr Pryke's comment is inconsistent and internally contradictory.

We should first take the blame for a misunderstanding. On p. 520 of our article we use the phrase ‘We take as our starting points. . .’. Dr Pryke has interpreted ‘starting points’ as meaning ‘prior to the research’, as being theoretical assumptions. The reality is more complex. Our general reading of the literature and such evidence as exists did lead us to the a priori view that national identity could not simply be ‘read off’ from ‘objective’ factors, or taken as imposed from above. For a comment on the author's argument that it can, see below. However, the detailed set of ‘starting points’ (pp. 520–1) are the starting points for our exposition of the argument in the paper, which is derived from close reading and analysis of our empirical evidence. It would have been better to describe them as ‘summary’ points.