Nationalism in the Vernacular illuminates our understanding of the relationship between orality and nationalist politics. In doing so, it provides a new angle to the understanding of nationalism by looking at the popular support and participation of ordinary people in the construction of Mizo nationalism, in short, the vernacularisation of nationalism. The book examines this process of vernacularisation at two levels, the first concerns the process of creating a vernacular language to express nationalist ideas and second, the irrepressibility of the oral against state's violent response to the nationalist movement. Drawing from multiple sources, the book through the rich oral narratives, archival materials, including government and media reports shows how Mizos have remained active agents in asserting and claiming their rights to defining ideas of nationalism in their own terms by making it distinctively Mizo.

This volume brings together eighteen of Will Kymlicka's recent essays on nationalism, multiculturalism and citizenship. These essays expand on the well-known theory of minority rights first developed in his Multicultural Citizenship. In these new essays, Kymlicka applies his theory to several pressing controversies regarding ethnic relations today, responds to some of his critics, and situates the debate over minority rights within the larger context of issues of nationalism, democratic citizenship and globalization. The essays are divided into four sections. The first section summarizes 'the state of the debate' over minority rights, and explains how the debate has evolved over the past 15 years. The second section explores the requirements of ethnocultural justice in a liberal democracy. Kymlicka argues that the protection of individual human rights is insufficient to ensure justice between ethnocultural groups, and that minority rights must supplement human rights. In particular, Kymlicka explores why some form of power-sharing (such as federalism) is often required to ensure justice for national minorities; why indigenous peoples have distinctive rights relating to economic development and environmental protection; and why we need to define fairer terms of integration for immigrants. The third section focuses on nationalism. Kymlicka discusses some of the familiar misinterpretations and preconceptions which liberals have about nationalism, and defends the need to recognize that there are genuinely liberal forms of nationalism. He discusses the familiar (but misleading) contrast between 'cosmopolitanism' and 'nationalism', and discusses why liberals have gradually moved towards a position that combines elements of both. The final section explores how these increasing demands by ethnic and national groups for minority rights affect the practice of democratic citizenship. Kymlicka surveys recent theories of citizenship, and raises questions about how they are challenged by ethnocultural diversity. He emphasizes the importance of education as a site of conflict between demands for accommodating ethnocultural diversity and demands for promoting the common virtues and loyalties required by democratic citizenship. And, finally, he explores the extent to which 'globalization' requires us to think about citizenship in more global terms, or whether citizenship will remain tied to national institutions and political processes. Taken together, these essays make a major contribution to enriching our understanding of the theory and practice of ethnocultural relations in Western democracies.

This book examines the linguistic and discursive elements of social and economic policies and national political leader statements to read new meanings into debates on border protection, national sovereignty, immigration, economic indigenisation, land reform and black economic empowerment. It adds a fresh angle to the debate on nationalisms and transnationalism by pushing forward a more applied agenda to establish a clear and empirically-based illustration of the contradictions in current policy frameworks around the world and the debates they invite. The author’s novel vernacular discourse approach contributes new points of method and interpretation that will advance scholarly conversations on nationalisms, transnationalism and other forms of identity imaginings in a transient world.

Design and the Vernacular explores the intersection between vernacular architecture, local cultures, and modernity and globalization, focussing on the vast and diverse global region of Australasia and Oceania. The relevance and role of vernacular architecture in contemporary urban planning and architectural design are examined in the context of rapid political, economic, technological, social and environmental changes, including globalization, exchanges of people, finance, material culture, and digital technologies. Sixteen chapters by architects designers and theorists, including Indigenous writers, explore key questions about the agency of vernacular architecture in shaping contemporary building and design practice. These questions include: How have Indigenous and First Nations building traditions shaped modern building practices? What can the study of vernacular architecture contribute to debates about sustainable development? And how has vernacular architecture been used to argue for postcolonial modernisation and nation-building and what has been the effect on heritage and conservation? Such questions provide valuable case studies and lessons for architecture in other global regions -- and challenge assumptions about vernacular architecture being anachronistic and static, instead demonstrating how it can shape contemporary architecture, nation building and cultural identities.

For the last two centuries, nationalism has been a central feature of society and politics. Few ideologies can match its power and resonance, and no other political movement and symbolic language has such worldwide appeal and resilience. But nationalism is also a form of public culture and political religion, which draws on much older cultural and symbolic forms. Seeking to do justice to these different facets of nationalism, the second edition of this popular and respected overview has been revised and updated with contemporary developments and the latest scholarly work. It aims to provide a concise and accessible introduction to the core concepts and varieties of nationalist ideology; a clear analysis of the major competing paradigms and theories of nations and nationalism; a critical account of the often opposed histories and periodization of the nation and nationalism; and an assessment of the prospects of nationalism and its continued global power and persistence. Broad and comparative in scope, the book is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on ideas and insights from history, political science, sociology and anthropology. The focus is theoretical, but it also includes a fresh examination of some of the main historical and contemporary empirical contributions to the literature on the subject. It will continue to be an invaluable resource for students of nationalism across the social sciences.

The role of the home, the domestic sphere and the intimate, ethno-cultural identities that are cultivated within it, are critical to understanding the polemical constructions of country and city; tradition and modernity; and regionalism and cosmopolitanism. The home is fundamental to ideas of the homeland that give nationalism its imaginative form and its political trajectory. This book explores positions that are vital to ideas of national belonging through the history of colonial, bourgeois self-fashioning and post colonial identity construction in Sri Lanka. The country remains central to related architectural discourses due to its emergence as a critical site for regional architecture, post-independence. Suggesting patterns of indigenous accommodation and resistance that are expressed through built form, the book argues that the nation grows as an extension of an indigenous private sphere, ostensibly uncontaminated by colonial influences, domesticating institutions and appropriating rural geographies in the pursuit of its hegemonic ideals. This ambitious, comprehensive, wide-ranging book presents an abundance of new and original material and many imaginative insights into the history of architecture and nationalism from the mid nineteenth century to the present day.

Illiteracy problems are worldwide, and growing. Political and economic factors are often in conflict over which language to use for basic education and how it should be taught. There is increasing pressure on the resources available for using literacy in coping with the rapid populationincrease, the spread of disease, and poor development.The editors and contributors to this volume are members of The International Group for the Study of Language Standardization and the Vernacularization of Literacy (IGLSVL), with unrivalled direct personal experience of literacy and language problems in the second half of the twentieth century. Thecontributors take the UNESCO publication, The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education, as their starting point. Published in 1953, this work was optimistic about the future of literacy. The contributors assess the nature and significance of the events that have taken place since then, providing aglobal overview. The discussions are supported by case-studies of campaigns to promote vernacular languages and examples of how people relate to their languages in different cultures. Most importantly, they question traditional notions of, and provide a non-Western perspective on, the uses and valueof literacy.

In this book, based on the 1995 Ohlin Lectures, Deepak Lal provides an accessible, interdisciplinary account of the role of culture in shaping economic performance. Topics addressed include a possible future "clash of civilizations," the role of Asian values in the East Asian economic miracle, the cultural versus economic causes of social decay in the West, and whether modernization leads to Westernization. Lal makes an important distinction between material and cosmological beliefs, showing how both were initially shaped by factor endowments and how they have evolved in response to changing historical pressures in different civilizations. Lal's first major theme is the interaction of factor endowments, culture, and politics in explaining modern intensive growth in the West. The other major theme is the role of individualism--an inadvertent legacy of the medieval Catholic Church--in promoting this growth, and the strange metamorphoses this has caused in both the West's cosmological beliefs and the interaction between "the West and the rest." Lal takes account of the relevant literature in history, anthropology, social psychology, evolutionary biology, neurology, and sociology, and the economic history of the regions and cultures that form Eurasia. An appendix shows how the stories Lal tells can be described by four formal economic models.

Since the structural change in Indian society that began in the 1990s - the result of the liberalisation of the economy, devolution of power, and decentralisation of the government–an unprecedented, democratic transformation has been taking place. This has caused the emergence of unexpected coalitions and alliances across diverse castes, classes, and religious groups according to the issues involved. In this volume, we intend to understand this deepening of democracy by employing a new analytical framework of the 'vernacular public arena' where negotiations, dialogues, debates, and contestations occur among 'vernacular publics'. This reflects the profound changes in Indian democracy as diverse social groups, including dalits, adivasis, and Other Backward Classes; minorities, women; individuals from rural areas, towns, and cities; the poor and the new middle classes–the 'vernacular publics'–participate in new ways in India’s public life. This participation is not confined to electoral politics, but has extended to the public arenas in which these groups have begun to raise their voice publicly and to negotiate and engage in dialogue with each other and the wider world. Contributors demonstrate that the participation of vernacular publics has resulted in the broadening of Indian democracy itself which focuses on the ways of governance, improving people’s lives, life chances, and living environments. An original, comprehensive study that furthers our understanding of the unfolding political dynamism and the complex reshuffling and reassembling taking place in Indian society and politics, this book will be relevant to academics with an interest in South Asian Studies from a variety of disciplines, including Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This is the first book to concentrate not only on the triumph of the vernacular in modern China but also on the critical role of the rise of the vernacular in world literature, invoking parallel cases from countries throughout Europe and Asia.