nations and nationalism ernest gellner summary

He was educated first in a Czech primary school and then in the Prague English Grammar School – but he grew up speaking German as well, for the family had a German governess, linking them to an established high culture. The Jewish community was deeply loyal to the social democratic republic led by Tomas Masaryk. He was born to parents with Jewish backgrounds, but the family was not actively religious. In any case, even those who do not accept his position will, for sure, benefit by having to confront it. The claim here is accordingly that he ought to have such a position because his argumentation is both powerful and correct. Differently put, he was not and is not an accepted insider within anthropology. He is a powerful, indeed almost scandalous figure.

The arguments he made are highly distinctive because they suggest that mainstream anthropological self-understanding is not correct. But Gellner was a polymath, whose training had been in philosophy, and the peculiarity of his contribution to anthropology lies in this fact : he theorized at a deep philosophical level with remarkable acuity what was involved in the practice of the discipline. Radcliffe Brown (1881-1955) that stressed the importance of extended periods of fieldwork. His own anthropological fieldwork on the saintly lineages of the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco – Saints of the Atlas (1969) – firmly places him within the British tradition of social anthropology, that is, the approach created by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) and A.R. Ernest Gellner has a very particular place in the history of anthropology.

Nations and nationalism ernest gellner summary