Beyond politics. National indifference as everyday ethnicity

This chapter critiques the literature on national indifference and the alternatives proposed in recent scholarship. Egry puts forward the concept of everyday ethnicity to highlight the situational character of identification. His investigation of everyday encounters and interactions in interwar Romania shows not only that people were at times indifferent to nationalist claims but also that the very same people were often well aware of their own ethnicity in similar situations. Everyday ethnicity is therefore not some stable category that is automatically activated in a given context or by contact with nationalist activists. Rather, it is the participants of the encounters and interactions themselves who finally make ethnicity count or not in any given situation. In the end, Egry proposes to subsume national indifference as a subcategory under the general heading of everyday ethnicity.