Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding
Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding
复制标题
民族主义：寻求理解
DOI：
10.2307/2077661
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发表时间：
1993
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
Walker Connor
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Walker Connor
步行者康纳，也许是民族主义的起源和动态的主要学生，一直强调其政治含义的重要性。在过去30年中发表的这些文章中，他认为西方学者和政策制定者几乎总是低估了民族主义的影响，并误解了其激情和非理性的品质。其中几篇文章已经成为经典：它们共同代表了一种严谨而富有启发性的尝试，旨在为研究一种复杂现象建立一个可靠的方法论基础，这种现象越来越被认为是全球政治不稳定的主要原因。这本书开篇回顾了关于民族主义的广泛学术研究。康纳考察了19世纪和20世纪初英国学者关于多民族国家的可行性和可取性的争论，美国“国家建设”思想学派在二战后时期主导了政治发展的文学，以及最近关于民族主义的文学爆炸。在本书的第二部分，他展示了民族民族主义研究的进展如何受到术语混乱的阻碍，即使在异质性蓬勃发展的地方也倾向于感知同质性，在经济差异中寻求种族冲突的解释的毫无根据的倾向，以及缺乏历史视角。本书最后考虑了理性探究群体认同领域的内在局限性。
Walker Connor, perhaps the leading student of the origins and dynamics of ethnonationalism, has consistently stressed the importance of its political implications. In these essays, which have appeared over the course of the last three decades, he argues that Western scholars and policymakers have almost invariably underrated the influence of ethnonationalism and misinterpreted its passionate and nonrational qualities. Several of the essays have become classics: together they represent a rigorous and stimulating attempt to establish a secure methodological foundation for the study of a complicated phenomenon increasingly, if belatedly, recognized as the major cause of global political instability. The book opens by reviewing a wide range of scholarship on ethnonationalism. Connor examines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate among British scholars on the viability and desirability of the multinational state, the American "nation-building" school of thought that dominated the literture on political development in the post-World War II era, and the recent explosion of literature on ethnonationalism. In the second part of the book, he shows how progress in the study of ethnonationalism has been hampered by terminological confusion, an inclination to perceive homogeneity even where heterogeneity thrives, an unwarranted tendency to seek explanation for ethnic conflict in economic differentials, and lack of historical perspective. The book closes with a consideration of the inherent limitations of rational inquiry into the realm of group-identity.