Introduction
Beyond methodological nationalism
By now there is a vast literature demonstrating how collective memory is crucial for identity formation and how, particularly in the modern period, the self-reflexive cultivation of the past has played into the formation of imagined communities (Anderson 1991; Assmann 1995). A large proportion of this scholarship has been governed, however, like so much social science and humanities research, by a methodological nationalism that posits the nation as “the natural social and political form of the modern world” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; see also Beck 2000). In the case of memory studies, this has meant assuming that the nation-state is the natural container, ...
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