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This book shows how an encounter with everyday nationhood in the northern United Arab Emirates can make us revisit the classics of sociology as continuous analytical world-views. Through the textual universe of Georg Simmel, and in particular his analysis of modern life as the feeling of dualism, the project reflects about how seemingly crucial challenges to the national - the forces of globalization and the wish to be unique - are drawn together with the formation of nationhood in everyday life. It does so not least by attending to the instances of everyday nationhood - like fashion and car-driving - that are at the same time central ways of embodying the modern. This volume appeals to students of nationalism, classical sociology, and the modern Arab Gulf.
List of contents
1. Chapter 1: Everyday Modernity: An Introduction.- 2. Chapter 2: Nationhood, Modernity, and the Everyday.- 3. Chapter 3: On The Road: National Form and the Globalizing Everyday.- 4. Chapter 4: Strangers in the Nation: Nearness, Distance, and the Everyday.- 5. Chapter 5: The National and the Fashionable: Everyday Nationhood as Dress.- 6. Chapter 6: Epilogue.
About the author
Martin Ledstrup is Researcher in the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark.
Summary
This book shows how an encounter with everyday nationhood in the northern United Arab Emirates can make us revisit the classics of sociology as continuous analytical world-views. Through the textual universe of Georg Simmel, and in particular his analysis of modern life as the feeling of dualism, the project reflects about how seemingly crucial challenges to the national – the forces of globalization and the wish to be unique – are drawn together with the formation of nationhood in everyday life. It does so not least by attending to the instances of everyday nationhood – like fashion and car-driving – that are at the same time central ways of embodying the modern. This volume appeals to students of nationalism, classical sociology, and the modern Arab Gulf.
