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Flagging the nations: Citizens’ active engagements with everyday nationalism in Patagonia, Chile
Author(s) -
Benwell Matthew C.,
Núñez Andrés,
Amigo Catalina
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
area
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 82
eISSN - 1475-4762
pISSN - 0004-0894
DOI - 10.1111/area.12517
Subject(s) - flags register , nationalism , appropriation , agency (philosophy) , politics , sociology , negotiation , scholarship , interrogation , indigenous , political science , aesthetics , media studies , law , social science , epistemology , art , ecology , philosophy , computer science , biology , operating system
Geographical scholarship examining banal and everyday nationalism has tended to frame national flags as abstract and passive objects that are taken for granted and incorporated into the daily lives of citizens in mindless ways. In contrast, this paper acknowledges flags as lively material objects that can be enrolled by citizens to make political points and generate certain “affective atmospheres.” It argues that the recognition of agency in debates concerning everyday nationalism needs to be pushed further to acknowledge the conscious and active negotiations of national objects like flags, to account for the diverse ways nations can be practised and performed by citizens. To illustrate our arguments we focus on the memories and reflections of citizens involved in protests in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia in 2012. During these incidents, citizens deployed different flags in provocative ways to draw attention to their reclamations and apply pressure on the Chilean state to improve socio‐economic conditions in the region. The legacies of events like the 2012 protests and the associated (re)appropriation of national flags enables an interrogation of citizens’ everyday identifications with nations in this border region of Patagonia. More broadly, we use the example to call for the materialities of flags as active objects to be the subject of further geographical inquiry, as one way to reinvigorate explorations of political agency and everyday nationalism.