著者

福岡 千珠

出版者

社会学研究会

雑誌

ソシオロジ (ISSN:05841380)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.50, no.3, pp.57-73,191, 2006

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The objective of this paper is to examine the various ways the Irish language has served as a symbol of a nation, through two different phases of Irish cultural nationalism: nationalism in the nation-building stage where its primary aim is to construct national identity and in the reconstructing stage, where the object is to maintain and to endorse an-established national identity. In order to examine how discourses of cultural nationalism have changed, I think it necessary to analyze these phases of the Irish cultural nationalism. Firstly, I analyze the discourses deployed by the Irish language revival movement which started towards the end of the nineteenth century. Examining how the language was represented in the movements, I reveal that the discourses of cultural nationalism denied the co-evalness of the language, and always represented it with nostalgia. This representation of the native culture is still influenced by the Anglo-Irish colonial discourses of the end of the eighteenth century. Secondly, in opposition, the Free State government came, after independence, to retrieve the co-evalness of the language when it introduced compulsory education and adopted revival policies. This means that the government tried to prove, in the triangular relationship with Northern Ireland and Britain, that it was a legitimate institution of the Irish nation by inheriting the native language. However, this attitude provoked much hatred among Unionists in Northern Ireland, and the heated dispute over the validity of the language even in the South. These changes could not be interpreted as a simple failure of the cultural nationalism.With the change from nation-building to re-construction, cultural nationalism shifted its focus from primordiality of culture to its contemporaneity. It brought into question the historical and political belongingness of the language, and revealed the nations sectarian and ideological division rather than its unity.