Collective memories, identities, lieux de mémoire, oral history
Social and economic history
Modern and contemporary history
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.
