May 2021
Yasmine Eve Lucas & Brandon Deadman
Interview with Dr. Geneviève Zubrzycki
Yasmine Eve Lucas: In your work, you’ve developed the concept of the national sensorium. You also describe the creation and cultivation of overlapping, alternate sensoria, arguing that the latter may serve to de- and re-construct national identity. Can you expand on the concept of the sensorium and how multiple sensoria may interact within the life of an individual?
Geneviève Zubrzycki: What I call the national sensorium is the visual depiction and embodiment of historical narratives and national myths in cultural forms, the built environment and the landscape. National narratives are communicated to, and experienced by, individuals through a variety of material practices. To take a few examples from the Polish case, by wearing religio-patriotic jewelry; carrying a cross at a political demonstration; brandishing a flag, draping oneself in a Jesus cape, or moving through a landscape dotted by places of martyrdom, social actors sensorially experience national narratives and myths, rendering the abstract idea of the nation concrete. As they become real and close—embodied—these myths often acquire political traction and can mobilize groups. Here, I build on the work of Emile Durkheim in the Elementary Forms of Religious Life and expand from the frameworks of Benedict Anderson and Michael Billig to illuminate the process through which elite projects ultimately generate sentiments of national belonging below. Within a certain sensorium and aesthetics, elite projects can cue paradigmatic stories and sentiments, or their subversion in iconoclastic acts. I argue that it is the relatively shared set of stories, images and material symbols, and the disagreement as much as the consensus evoked in response to them, that generate “a nation.”
To consider another case, closer to us, during the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, a new generation of secular nationalists revolted against the Catholic French Canadian sensorium, a process I call “aesthetic revolt” and analyzed in my book Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec (2006, French and Polish trans, 2020). In my new work on the Jewish Turn in Poland ,I observe a different strategy from secular nationalists and memory activists: there, there is not wholesale rejection of the Catholic national sensorium but the resurrection, recreation of a Jewish sensorium to complement the Polish one in an effort to expand the symbolic boundaries of the nation, to expand notions of Polishness.
Yasmine: Other work I’ve read on nationalism sees it as a function of economic factors. You link nationalism much more to affective symbols, collective memory, and national mythology. Can you speak to how and why you began to explore nationalism from this angle, and why you think it’s important?
Geneviève: Eric Hobsbawm wrote that nations are “constructed essentially from above, but cannot be understood unless also analysed from below […] in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people.” And yet, a lot of the work on nationalism, as you point out, focuses precisely on top-down processes and on political and economic factors. Obviously these are very important, but they are also more immediately accessible than “how people feel.” Having grown up in Quebec in the 1970s and 80s, and coming of age during the Meech Lake crisis and the Second Referendum, I know how important the affective dimension is. I then went to Poland for the first time in the summer of 1989, landing in Warsaw two days before the first semi-democratic elections that officially marked the beginning of the end of communism in Poland. Emotions were high and the general collective effervescence was palpable in June 1989. The aesthetic of Polish nationalism was also very different from that of secular Quebec. So my research interests were shaped by my experiences, and by a comparative gaze between Quebec and Poland.
To get back to your question about why I focus on the affective and aesthetic dimension of nationalism: because it is precisely through the national sensorium that social actors viscerally experience national narratives and myths, generating sentiments of national belonging and resonant emotional attachments to what is otherwise a distant, imagined community. We know that nations have their soundtracks, sights, tastes, and even smells, but taken cumulatively, these visual and sensual cues reinforce each other through multiple and densely layered synesthetic exchanges, weaving a dense tapestry of “national feelings.” The national sensorium can then link emotions harvested from various contexts and relate them to the national idea. The more developed the sensorium, the more powerful it becomes. The creation and maintenance of a national sensorium is thus a critical skill honed equally by national(ist) actors and by those who seek to alter or subvert a given national identity. Understanding the sensorium of national societies is crucial to the sociology of nationalism.
Brandon Deadman: How do you think the symbol of “the Jew” in Poland has changed since the twentieth century, and how do you see it changing in the future?
Geneviève: The symbol is polysemic. The Jew means something different for different people—for antisemites and philosemites, certainly. And there are also different figures of the Jew—the shtetl Jew, the cosmopolitan intellectual, the “Western,” modern, multi-culti Israeli. What we observe more recently is a rising popularity of “positive” images of the Jew—which does not mean that they are devoid of antisemitic stereotypes, like Jewish figurines or paintings of Jews counting gold coins used as good luck charms— or hip “Jewish” cafes and clubs, Jewish clothing lines, and a variety of cultural institutions devoted to Jewish history and culture. There is a wide range of engagement with things Jewish in Poland, and their meaning and significance cannot all be thrown into a single bag.
Brandon: Do you see conservative Poles and other populists in Europe mobilizing their collective memories of ethno-nationalism today? Do you think alternative sensoria—for instance, Jewish sensoria—will affect these future mobilizations?
Geneviève: There is no question that conservative nationalists and right-wing populists use collective memory, mythology and the national sensorium to mobilize support to their cause. They often are, in fact, expert at this, layering very effectively various symbols and performances to generate emotions in the population and build their constituencies. Proponents of alternative visions of the nation must work just as hard to win the hearts and minds of citizens, but their success depends not only on socio-economic factors but also on what stories, symbols, and practices are available in a given national repertoire for them to articulate a desirable and viable vision of national identity. In Poland, the national sensorium is very dense, but most of its components have been woven into the martyriological tapestry, from the poetry of Mickiewicz to the music of Chopin, both forced into exile; to all the religio-patriotic hymns and rituals, religious symbols like the cross and the crown of thorns, reinterpreted as national symbols, etc. Civic stories and symbols are few, and some of them already incorporated in the Polish Catholic one or were co-opted by the communists. This is one of the reasons why the Jewish past of Poland has become so important in recent years. It had not been tapped yet, and allows to create a rich national mythology built around notions of tolerance, openness, multiculturalism, and of Poland being European avant la lettre.
Yasmine: Have the recent women’s and LGBTQ rights’ protests in Poland made you rethink these dynamics at all, or do you see them as just an escalation of what’s been going on already?
Geneviève: I think it’s an intensification and potentially an acceleration toward the secularization of Poland. While the feminist movement certainly existed before the pro-choice protests of the last couple years, it did not enjoy the same public support and generate massive protests throughout the country. The LGBTQ movement is more recent and not quite as mainstream but has gained significant strength and support in recent years. The feminist movement, the pro-choice protests and the LGBTQ-rights movement have coalesced in their fight against the Catholic church and against the government. What they share with most activists in the Jewish revival is their goal to secularize Polish national identity; to divorce Polishness from Catholicism. They are part of a cluster of progressive movements that articulate a different vision of Poland than the one promoted by the Right and the Catholic Church.
Brandon: Do you view EU-style liberal pluralism as its own “political religion,” with its own “sacred canopy” or symbols that make up a sensorium?
Geneviève: Not really. The EU is an institutional structure, and Europe is a symbol. Both are very important and have a clear impact on national politics and policies, as well as the everyday lives of Europeans. It has a flag and an anthem, but no shared sensorium.
A key common heritage that conservatives and right-wing politicians often build on, is that of Europe’s “Christian heritage.” Both terms are key here: “Christian” and “heritage.” The term Christian is used as the umbrella term for a large family of various denominations; the old feuds and bloody religious wars that have pitted Europeans against Europeans and have torn Europe for centuries are glossed over and “forgotten.” The adjective “Christian” is also—and most importantly—used as a key feature of Europe and European identity, to distinguish and defend it from Islam and Muslim immigrants. It reaffirms the prerogative of the “host” society to define the rules of the game to its “guests.” But the noun “heritage” is as important and should not be overlooked. By juxtaposing “heritage” to “Christian,” it is a history, a memory, an identity that is defended, not a family of religions per se. For Europe primarily imagines itself as secular, where religion belongs to the private sphere and the public (from education to politics to law) is religiously neutral. An important question for us to ponder, however, may not be what kind of collective memories and whether a sensorium can keep European identity unified and in accord with national identities, but whether European memories, a European sensorium, and a European identity are necessary for the European Union to work?
Works Cited
Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Durkheim, Émile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by K. Fields. New York: Free Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1991 Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Verso.
Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2011. “History and the National Sensorium: Making Sense of Polish Mythology.” Qualitative Sociology 34: 21-57.
Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2014. “Nationalism, ‘Philosemitism’ and Symbolic Boundary-Making in Contemporary Poland. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58:1, 66-98.
Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2016. Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec. University of Chicago Press,
Zubrzycki, Geneviève (ed.) 2017. National Matters: Materiality, Culture, and Nationalism. Stanford University Press.