PITFALLS OF NATIONALISM IN ERITREA by Tekle M. Woldemikael
published in
Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development:
Eritrea in the 21st Century, 2009
تحليل مثير للاهتمام عن احتفالات عيد الاستقلال
http://www.chapman.edu/our-faculty/files/publications/pitfalls%20of%20nationalism.pdf
A very interesting analysis of the Independence Day celebrations, some highlights:
"This article examines how the state
manipulates the public to participate in 24 May Independence Day as a national holiday, and how and why the public
participates in the state-organized celebrations. The writer argues that the 24 May celebration serves multiple ideological
functions for the state and society. These include providing the state with a sense of broad popular support for its rule,
thus allowing the government to believe in the ideological illusion that state and society live in seamless harmony,
while at the same time providing the people (the hafash, or “masses”) with psychological release from the dire
economic and political plight that characterizes contemporary life in Eritrea. This project of the state, however, will be
“ultimately undermined and defeated by what Achille Mbembe aptly terms the ‘the historical capacity for indiscipline
of society’” In the case of Eritrea, the unruliness of the “masses” has taken different forms, from
internal self-criticism within the ruling party, to open disapproval of, and resistance to, the regime by Eritreans both at
home and in the diaspora. "....
"However, behind the festivities and celebrations, we have to look at how the ruling party operates using different technologies of
power. The government’s celebrations are planned to manipulate the public to participate in the ceremonies and
experience the madness and temporary euphoria that the festivities induce."
" One can think of the guerrilla movement as a prison or cage—a
cage of the Goffmanesque type, one that forms a “total institution.” Erving Goffman stated that the total institution
“may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the
wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life”. It is an institution where all the aspects of the life of individuals under the institution are controlled and regulated
by the authorities of the organization. The concept of total institution has been applied to prisons, mental hospitals,
boarding schools, concentration camps, and boot camps (Goffman 1961) and may also be applied to the EPLF, a
guerrilla movement.
