Reddit mentions of The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography

I do think you're romanticizing and overestimating the extent to which other countries have a coherent 'natural' ingrained ethnic/national identity by so rashly describing
> Nowhere else in the world is your identity conferred through bureaucracy

I mean, read a book like The Discovery of France that talks about the mapping of France and construction of the French national identity by the government. Up to WWI, the majority of the population wasn't even fluent in French, all the little villages had their own dialects. Spain still has smoldering independence movements and unique languages besides Spanish, from in Catalonia to the Basque region. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson is another great book that talks more broadly about the beginnings of the concept of nationhood, tying it in Europe to the rise of the printing press which enabled a national language for the first time.

And you mention India, which probably wouldn't even be a unified country if it weren't for the conquest under the British empire and subsequent independence. India is culturally and ethnically divided in the extreme, up to and including their caste system.


Not to mention the great success and relative stability of very divided multi-ethnic societies in countries such as Switzerland or Singapore in the first world. Many of these peoples have a longer shared history than the ethnic groups in the United States do, but I don't see why that makes a huge difference in terms of the strength of identity. In either case, the memory of that shared history has to be constructed anew for each generation. Our shared history up to this point is more than enough to serve as a basis to construct national identity on; these days few Italians or Irish descendants of immigrants have any other primary identity than 'American'. Imagining a shared national community such that it is a primary identity isn't easy but the American government has played a large part with mandatory public schools and other measures. Bureaucracy is a large part of forging national identity, no doubt, your mistake is thinking that this is isolated to America.


So your description of America as

> not a serious country

on these grounds says more about your unique antagonism to it than anything else. If America is particularly notable on these grounds it is that as a relatively young nation compared to many of these older countries, our national identity ambiguities and contradictions stand out more. You're doing a negative version of American exceptionalism, which I think is just as incorrect.

Fair enough. I understand that avoiding offensive terms and preferring accuracy makes conversation a lot more straightforward.

I responded partly because I've been reading The Discovery of France. The author talks about Catholicism in the French countryside (circa 1750 - 1850 or so), and how much it differed from (at least) what I would have expected. For example, he suggests that in many parts of France, the average Catholic probably wouldn't have identified either Christ or God as particularly important to their religion, and might instead have highlighted Mary or a favorite local Saint as central. If that were the case, how could one justify the distinction between 'veneration' and 'worship'?

This is very interesting. Usually a large number of children is correlated with socially conservative values, and a smaller number of children is with socially liberal values (such as the education of women). Paris is a different story, but there are little reasons to assume that rural France was particularly socially liberal in values. If anything, it used to be characterized by a conservative resistance to the liberal values of Parisian intellectuals.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Discovery-France-Historical-Geography/dp/0393333647