Using examples of your choice critically examine how ideas about the Essay

Using examples of your choice critically examine how ideas about the nation or national identity have become an important part of contemporary culture and socie - Essay Example Britons constructed their identity in opposition to an â€Å"other†: Catholic France. Gender roles were central to this moderate Protestant national identity. By looking at eighteenth-century British writers such as Sir Walter Scott and by analyzing William Hogarths prints, it was clear how British identity was constructed as strong and â€Å"masculine† while â€Å"others† especially the French, were described as weak and â€Å"feminine† (Taylor, 2000: 63). National Identity as a Part of Contemporary Culture and Society: The diversity, the multitudinous cultural effects and the flexible symbols of the national produce an enormous cultural resource that is a seething mass of cultural elements. Culture, according to this conception, is constantly in the process of developing, of emerging out of the dynamism of popular culture and everyday life whereby people make and remake connections between the local and the national, between the national and the global, between the everyday and the extraordinary. However well established and institutionalised nations may become, they remain elusive, perpetually open to context, to elaboration and to imaginative reconstruction (Edensor, 2002: vi). There are several routes towards expressing identity that exist within this matrix, some branches of which wither, are renewed, and multiple connections which exist between cultural spheres according to Edensor (2002: 1) emerge. Despite the globalisation of economies, cultures and social processes, the scalar model of identity is believed to be primarily anchored in national space. Partly, then, the space in which culture and everyday life operates is indisputably the nation which is a social and cultural construct. Edensor: (2002: 3) states that the position of the state towards already existing cultures is complex, for certain cultures may be eradicated (especially in the case of ethnic or