Materializing the nation in Sweden and America*

Abstract

How has the international ideology of nationalism been used for a differentiating culture‐building in shifting national settings'? This article develops a comparative and historical framework to discuss the when, where, how, and why of the national experience, the arenas and situations in which national identity and sharing are materialized, expressed, or contested. The constant remaking of "the national" in Sweden is contrasted with the American experience, with a focus on everyday practice rather than on rhetoric. Notes This paper was written as part of the project "National and Transnational Cultural Processes," based at the Department of European Ethnology, University of Lund, and the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm, and supported by the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. For a more detailed presentation (in Swedish) of the problems discussed here, see Löfgren 1993. Special thanks to Alan Crozier for helping me with the translation.