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Informal Nationalism after Communism: The Everyday Construction of Post-Socialist 

Identities. Abel Polese, Oleksandra Seliverstova, Emilia Pawłusz, and Jeremy Morris (eds.) 

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. 232 pp. Notes. Bibliography. £75.00/$99.00, hard 

bound. 

Polina Manolova, Centre for Anthropological and Ethnosociological Studies, University of 

Plovdiv 

Philipp Lottholz, Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 138 “Dynamics of Security” & 

Institute of Sociology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen  

Traditionally considered the realm of anthropological inquiry and ethnographic methodology, 

informality and ‘the everyday’ can be said to have recently experienced a boom in studies of 

nationalism and nation-building, which has, however, not necessarily led to the development 

of more insightful accounts of this realm of life. The collection Informal Nationalism after 

Communism: The Everyday Construction of Post-Socialist Identities, edited by Abel Polese 

and colleagues, has set out to advance the study of informal practices of everyday national 

identity building, enactment and renegotiation in a diverse set of post-socialist countries. 

Recognizing the importance of challenging the prevalence of state-centered approaches to the 

study of identities and nationalism in former socialist/Soviet societies, the editors instead 

advocate prioritizing the role of individuals in the (re-) production, interpretation and 

contestation of markers of national belonging. The book deserves recognition for the wide 

range of empirical contexts, methodological approaches and disciplinary orientations brought 

together. However, in light of its insufficient ethnographic depth and embedding within 

important debates on recent developments in the region, as well as its narrow and uncritical 

conceptualisation of ‘everyday’ nationalism, it ends up serving as another example of how 

elusive attempts to analyse everyday post-socialism empirically can be. 



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Thе main premise of this edited collection is that tacit, unnoticed and routinized performances 

of nationhood are not less significant for the process of nation-state building than governmental 

policies and official discourses. It is precisely the lack of certain activities, the non-reaction to 

certain upheavals, and the silent moments marking daily existence that can become the 

‘loudest’ instruments for contestation of official ideologies of nationalism (4). The editors 

make the pertinent argument that qualitative methodologies are best suited for unearthing and 

scrutinizing the 'invisible' dimensions of identity construction and its affective, material and 

ideological expressions (10). The eight empirical chapters are organized into three thematic 

sections which aim to examine: 1) the role of educational institutions as platforms for the 

‘renegotiation and contestations’ of statehood and identity categories; 2) the effects of 

portrayals of the nation in media production; and 3) the enactment and shaping of national 

identity in ‘everyday’ cultural practices. With its coverage of a variety of contexts ranging from 

the Western Balkans and Moldova to Russia and Mongolia and with the wide range of materials 

and sources analysed, the collection presents interesting ideas and possibilities for forging 

ahead with the study of post-socialist everyday nationalism. 

At the same time, the research presented barely reaches the empirical depth and perspective 

that would allow for the uncovering of the ‘everyday’ and ‘invisible’ processes and practices 

– a task that the editors set for themselves in the Introduction (11-12). The larger part of the 

chapters examines textual and visual material like school textbooks (Chapter 3), corporate 

advertisements and branding (Chapter 4), restaurant menus (Chapter 6) or general public and 

social media discourses (Chapter 5) and thus prioritizes (semi-) formal and institutional 

expressions of nationalism over the everyday ones. For example, in Chapter 3, Tamara Trošt 

investigates expressions of nationalism in Serbian and Croatian textbooks in geography, nature 

and sports. Beyond the unsurprising conclusion that the centralised national curriculum 

transmits established national symbols and ideologies, her claim that school textbooks can also 



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be considered ‘sites for contestation’ is not further explored or substantiated by considering, 

for instance, the reception and negotiation of the materials by teachers and pupils.  

Half of the collection’s chapters approach the topic with a mix of interviews and at least some 

kind of participatory observation. However, especially in the case of Rayna Gavrilova’s 

(Chapter 6) and Timofey Agarin and Līga Rudzīte’s (Chapters 8) the high degree of 

synthetization and interpretation of data takes over more in-depth descriptions of contextual 

and procedural details and leaves room for alternative interpretations of the observed realities. 

Agarin and Rudzīte, for instance, cite interviews ‘conducted with an international development 

organisation’ (170) on merely one occasion while not providing further details on how their 

three months of fieldwork in several places feed into their generally compelling narrative.   

Despite their stated intention to reveal particularities of regional dynamics of informal 

nationhood ‘idiosyncratic to the post-socialist region’ (184), the case studies presented are 

insufficiently, or at least not systematically enough, contextualized within trajectories of post-

socialist neoliberal transformation and the political economies of nationalist consumerism that 

have emerged from them (especially Chapters 3, 6 and 7).  

A more thorough contextualization could also have appreciated the rise of nationalist rhetoric, 

social movements and political parties, as well as increasingly authoritarian tendencies across 

the post-socialist region and globally. The racist and exclusionary language and sentiments that 

have become part of the everyday in post-socialist countries can hardly be dismissed as deviant 

or pathological expressions of nationalism but merit scrutiny as part of a more widely-defined 

inquiry into banal nationalisms. Elizaveta Gaufman’s analysis in Chapter 5 points in this 

direction, as it reveals how homophobic, heteronormative and exclusionary discourses are part 

of Russian social media users’ attempts to define their national belonging, identification and 

subjectivity. 



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With its analytical restriction to a narrow, if not sanitized version of ‘banal’ nationalism, the 

collection creates the impression that national identities can somehow be extricated from the 

more regressive and violent dynamics and practices of nation-building. Banal forms of 

nationalism are thus portrayed as voluntaristic and possibly emancipatory forms of self-

determination or even expressions of agency (9; Chapters 1, 2, 5), which have the potential to 

contest top-down nation-building projects. However, as Michael Billig (Banal Nationalism. 

Sage, 1995), whose work builds a cornerstone of the volume’s approach, has admonished, 

banal forms of nationalism should not be mistaken as benign ones, let alone, as Hannah Arendt 

noted (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963), as 

harmless ones. 

Instead, banal nationalism has to be scrutinized for its complicity and inextricable symbiosis 

with the more violent and exclusionary practices of nation-building. The problematic nature of 

this analytical choice is hinted at in Gaufman’s and Agarin and Rudzīte’s chapters (5 and 8) 

and becomes most obvious in Dilyara Suleymanova’s contribution (Chapter 1), which 

investigates the strategies of minority ethnic pupils in the Republic of Tatarstan to renegotiate, 

and at times to outrightly deny, their ethnic belonging in favour of a self-identification as part 

of the Russian ethnicity conceived of in a wide sense. Yet the author fails to appreciate the 

coercion and symbolic violence lingering behind such reconfiguring of one’s identity.  

In summary, while it points to valuable entry points and important aspects of the study of informal 

and everyday identity and nation-building processes, this collection ultimately falls short of its own 

ambition to provide a substantive – presumably ethnographically informed – analysis of the latter.