Towards a Cultural Sociology of Re-Enchantment

Abstract

This opening chapter explores the role of ritual in rejuvenating national attachment in an increasingly plural and global world. While the chapter draws on cultural sociology to provide a critique of postmodern assumptions about the death of the nation, it agrees that the second half of the twentieth century has seen a general demise in the West of the symbolic power of national historical narratives. The thesis forwarded in the chapter, however, differs from postmodernist scholarship in challenging the assumption that this cultural malaise will inevitably continue. It does this by introducing the idea of national re-enchantment and by outlining how this is facilitated by various new forms of national ritual that are broadly consistent with the highly aestheticized capitalism. Such cases highlight a type of globalization that is not antithetical to the nation but which encourage a counter-shift in national identities.