National identity is not naturally experienced but requires social transmission to ordinary people

Evidence

But Znaniecki has observed, for example, that the vast majority of peasants in 19th-century Tsarist Russia was “utterly unconscious that they were supposed to belong to a Russian society united by a common culture.” Again he reports that a 1934–1935 study in the Pripet marshes showed that nearly half of those inhabitants who were ethnically White Ruthenian had no idea that such a nationality existed and regarded themselves as belonging at most to local communities. The nation as a bounded, integral group object is difficult to experience in any direct way, and its psychological existence for the individual depends upon the social transmission of certain kinds of information. What is deceptive here, as elsewhere, is that decades or even centuries after the literati have come to take a nation concept for granted, there may be substantial proportions of the member population who have never heard of such a thing. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1930

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Anderson’s imagined communities and Hobsbawm’s ‘invention of tradition’ — the literati construct nations that subjects never hear of.
• SEED: Article angle: how much of modern ‘national identity’ is elite construction that ordinary citizens silently never absorbed — the transmission gap.