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Obituary for Dr. John R. Lyman, NAVA's second president.

Following a similar study in the United States, 210 Canadian school children were asked their flag preferences. Both the Union Jack and the Red Ensign were rated high, with a slight preference for the Union Jack. Appreciation of the U. S. flag, although initially high in the lower grades, dropped off somewhat at the high school level. Results with the U. N. and Russian flags were very similar to those for American children: the U. N. showing steady growth in preference; the Soviet, persistent rejection.

This article argues that public schools play a key role in producing and transmitting American civil religion. Data from classroom observations, college-age informants, and the author's experiences reveal that civil religion in schools is manifested in daily rituals such as the pledge of allegiance; in holiday observances, with activities such as music and art; and in the social studies curriculum. Analysis of these data permits one to describe the beliefs, symbols, and rituals of American civil religion. The data further show that the practice of civil religion in schools plays a dual role: while it socializes American youth to a common set of understandings, it also sets off subgroups of Americans whose backgrounds or beliefs prevent them from participating fully in civil religious ceremonies.

When one examines current national anthems and flags, one finds a great deal of variety. What explains this variation? Possible factors include a nation's world-system position and its degree of modernization. Specifically, I analyze the ways in which world-system position and modernization affect the design or configuration—the syntactic structure—of the symbols national leaders adopt to convey their nation's identity. Findings reveal a link between a nation's world-system position and the structure of its symbols. Leaders of core nations adopt more basic anthems and flags than their semiperiphery and periphery counterparts. However, modernization has no such influence.

This paper is designed to provide a critical engagement with Michael Billig's seminal thesis of Banal Nationalism (1995), perhaps the most influential study of everyday forms of nationhood. With an increasing number now focusing on the (re) production, dissemination and negotiation of the national through routine texts and practices (cf Foster, 2002; Edensor, 2002; Madianou, 2005; Brubaker et al., 2006; Bratsis, 2006) and others employing the concept of banality in relation to non-national (Gorringe, 2006) and post-national identities (Aksoy and Robins, 2002; Szerszynski and Urry, 2002; Beck, 2006; Cram, 2001), it would seem like an opportune moment to assess Billig's contribution and also the limits of his approach.

Conventionally, flags are explained as symbols of group solidarity that achieve force through ritual processes. Alternatively, flags may be seen as symbols with positive or negative associations derived from our experiences with physical space. While this article accepts these interpretations, it also argues that they need to be augmented. Flag meaning is not entirely a social or linguistic construction because there is a link between flag displays and our inherent predispositions to cues about social rank. Our evolved social intelligence makes us sensitive to the topographic features of flag displays that signal relationships of dominance and subordination.

This research examined the psychological underpinnings of concern for national symbols and ritualistic-ceremonial activities or "symbolic involvement." We propose and test a distinction between symbolic and "instrumental" involvement or concern for the functionality of national institutions and their capability to provide instrumental benefits to citizens. Items comprising the two constructs were found to be empirically distinct, evidenced by statistically reliable and orthogonal dimensions in exploratory factor analysis. Moreover, evidence based on divergent patterns of relations with various forms of national membership indicates that symbolic and instrumental involvement are rooted in distinct motivational concerns related to identity expression and object appraisal, respectively. These findings suggest that national symbolism evokes a psychological attachment to the nation as an abstracted social entity, but not as a concrete functional system.

It is believed that when exposed to the national anthem of their native country, people react with feelings of pride and patriotism and that the anthem has the power to unite people around similar associations. We examined these beliefs empirically. In Experiment 1, Israelis of various ages and subcultures listened to their anthem and to three other songs, and wrote down associations that came to mind. It was found that the anthem evoked more national associations than any other song and that this was a shared tendency despite the subcultural divergences. In Experiment 2, a marginal group in Israeli society participated in a similar task and appeared to regard the anthem more negatively than mainstream Israelis. In Experiment 3, associations relating to the anthem were compared to those relating to other national symbols (the flag and an emblem). The flag, but not the emblem, evoked similar association patterns. Results are discussed in light of social identity theory.

Three experiments tested whether the subliminal presentation of national symbols automatically elicited societally prescribed normative values in the New Zealand (NZ) context using a lexical decision task. Consistent with research in the United States, the presentation of the NZ flag (Study 1), but not another consensually validated NZ national symbol (The Silver Fern, Study 2), increased the cognitive accessibility of egalitarian value concepts. The NZ flag did not, however, activate values in a comparable sample of foreign nationals (Study 3). National flags, it seems, automatically activate normative values for ingroup members, and this effect is not limited to nations with a high frequency of flag-display behavior such as the United States.

Michael Billig's book, Banal Nationalism, published in 1995, has a significant international reputation and is one of the books most commonly quoted in Anglophone studies on nationalism. This article follows on from the various books and articles that were published for the 20th anniversary of the book and underlines the way in which the posterity of this thesis is partly based on a misunderstanding, or a misappropriation. In a context in which the end of nations seemed imminent, Banal Nationalism aimed to demonstrate that, on the contrary, nationalism was indeed spread massively and invisibly throughout the world, and particularly in established Western democracies. Yet today this book is considered one of the founding texts of the bottom-up approach to national identity, which puts individuals at the heart of the fabrication of nations. This article discusses how this interpretation has come about.

Artefacts containing national or ethnic symbols, such as flags and maps, are frequently used by 14-year-old youth in a multiethnic, suburban municipality in Stockholm. Appearing as ornaments or trinkets to outsiders, to the initiated they are distinctive group markers displaying multiple political and ideological affiliations. As visual symbols these artefacts invoke communicative, but non-verbal, processes: they interpellate viewers who answer with their reactions. Thus these objects serve to both banally reproduce nationalism and ethnicity and to serve as identity markers. These identities are primarily inclusive and non-aggressive. The symbols do not seem to be a sign of resistance to mainstream Swedish society in line with much work in the field of youth culture. Instead, they are used as a proud, visual display of additional identities complementing a Swedish identity. Ethnicity research often covers linguistic markers or ethnic and national identities. In contrast, the area of youthconsumptionof nationalism, in the form of objects featuring national, ethnic and religious symbols, is as yet not well documented. Based on a year-long fieldwork in a junior high school, this paper documents ways in which minority group students handle material artefacts and what these symbols involved mean to them.

To determine attitudes toward world powers as well as their own national/ethnic group, 960 boys and girls divided into Arab-Christian, Arab-Moslem, Jewish non-Orthodox, and Jewish Orthodox groups, in grades 2 through 12, gave responses to a projective test of flag preference. Factors of ethnicity, religion, sex, and grade level evaluated by analysis of variance indicated some similarities, but also important differences between the various groups. In ranking the flags non-Orthodox and Orthodox Jews had very high agreement, Christians and Moslems had high agreement, but combined Arabs versus combined Jewish groups showed little agreement. Christians and Moslems showed some differences. Sex and grade level were not major factors in attitude differences.

Following E. D. Lawson's work (1963, 1965) on the flag preferences of lower and middle-class public school children in the U.S. and Canada, a similar study was carried out with elite private school children. As previously found, responses to the U.N., U.S., Russian, and Canadian flags were very similar for both national samples. In addition, the choice patterns of the elite children in the present study and the non-elites of previous studies were also very similar.

This article discusses examples of mediated and mediating symbols used to build trust in Europe as a shared transnational project. It starts with a general discussion of globalisation and transnational mediation, and then briefly exemplifies how money, flags, anthems and other symbols work to suggest identifications. The five key European symbols ratified by the Council of Europe and the European Union are introduced, presented and analysed, indicating how the EU and other pan-European actors have chosen to express a sense of shared identity and meaning. Each of these key symbols is then scrutinised as multi-layered mediating tools in creating loyalty and reinforcing faith in collective societal institutions of markets and states, and in the corresponding imagined supra-national community. These dominant European symbols are shown to reflect a balance between homogenisation and fragmentation. The analysis locates a core identifying formula of "an ambivalent desire for communication with others". However, it also finds a major set of tensions around this thematic core, understanding European identification as a dynamic process of mediation rather than as a limited and limiting object.

A classic article which examined American civil religion and triggered an academic discussion about civil religion in multiple countries. This is a reprint version of the article that appeared first in Daedalus, volume 96 #1 (Winter 1967), pp. 1-21.

This study examined children's conceptions of flags as social conventions and understandings of the symbolic and psychological consequences associated with transgressions toward flags. Seventy-two children, at 6, 8, and 10 years, answered general questions about flags as social conventions and judged flag-burning scenarios in which intentions of agents and consequences for recipients were varied. Flag-burning acts were motivated by symbolic, accidental, or instrumental intentions and occurred in public or private. Children at all ages viewed flags as social conventions (i. e., alterable), and symbolic acts of flag-burning occurring in public locations were judged more negatively than private transgressions. Age differences were found in evaluations of instrumental violations and in justifications used to evaluate flag-burning incidents. Overall, findings suggest that despite age-related increases in understanding of flags as meaningful collective symbols, children at all ages considered transgressions to be important and to have moral consequences (i. e., psychological harm).

This introduction considers the significance of Michael Billig's (1995) Banal Nationalism to geographers, and how this fits into broader trends of nationalism research in the social sciences. Through an analysis of Web of Science citation trends for the book, we illustrate its spatial and temporal reach in terms of the countries where it has been cited and how its impact has developed since 1995. We also briefly examine how political geographers have engaged the concept of banal nationalism in their research, and what sort of questions it has raised for those conducting research on nationalist discourses and territorial identity narratives more broadly. Considering how political geographers might creatively advance this scholarship, we introduce the individual papers included in this special issue and conclude with a brief gesture to future directions for research beyond Banal Nationalism.