Introduction: Everyday nationalism's evidence problem

The scholarship on nationalism is changing course. For generations, historians and social scientists have been preoccupied with the origins of nationalism. They have stakes out how modern state-building processes and the growth of industrial capitalism have evolved and interacted to produce standardised forms of national culture. These mostly macro-structural approaches have sought to explain how nations are made; they have had less to say about how people are made national. More recently, top-down perspectives prioritising big structural forces to explain the emergence and maintenance of modern nations have been both challenged and complemented by bottom-up analyses of the quotidian practices, modalities, and habits that reproduce the nation in daily life. This is everyday nationalism. The masses, it turns out, are not (just) receptacles of nationalist messages, but (also) active agents in the consumption, production, appropriation, and manipulation of their own particular versions of the nation. Ordinary people think the nation, talk the nation, enact the nation, perform the nation, consume the nation - and of course reject, resist, ignore, and avoid the nation - all in ways that contribute to the reproduction and legitimation - or dismantling and undermining - of national forms of belonging. For some, everyday nationalism is conjoined with, and indeed trickles down from, structural forms of nationalism from above: it follows the institutional pathways, the cultural logics, and consumer impulses of top-down forms of nationalism. For others, everyday nationalism operates as a domain in its own right, governed by the mundane rhythms and contingencies of everyday life.