| The object of this study is the production of national identity and national culture within Jordan as both a typical and an atypical postcolonial nation-state. Recent studies of nationalism describe the nation as “invented”1 or “imagined,”2 by intellectuals and/or political elites who are producers of, or produced by, the political discourse of nationalism.3 In this study, I am more interested in whether institutions play a role in the production of colonial and postcolonial national identity and culture. More specifically, I examine whether two key state institutions, law and the military, assist in the production of the nation. Do these institutions contribute to the identification of people as “nationals”? Do they play any role in the production of ideas and practices that come to constitute “national culture”? In posing these and other related questions, what I am proposing is not a general or generalizable theoretical model for the study of nationalism but rather a general and generalizable mode of inquiry. |