Nationhood, Modernity, and the Everyday

Abstract

This chapter connects the transition to everyday nationhood with a shift in the fundamentals of sociology, especially with the conception of modernity in the writings of Georg Simmel. While public and academic understandings of Emiratiness tend to link collectivity and heritage to the shock from modernity and the contestations of local power, more recent approaches critically examine this link in everyday life. This chapter partly shows how this constellation of assumptions, including the perspective from everyday life, is mirrored in the general debate about nations, nationalism, and classical social theory. And partly, it argues that studies of everyday nationhood can be analyzed through the example of Georg Simmel, in particular his focus upon the social forms of interaction, the exemplary instances of modern life, and the conception of modernity as the subjectivity of dualism