Study Object
The object of study of this work is to analyze the process of construction of the founding narrative, the “national Discourse in Uruguay” and its current re-shaping. To analyse “the imagined nation from within” (inside territorial borders), in the context of a serious economic, political and social crisis that has led to a deterioration of social cohesion and an alarming increase in the rates of emigration (16% of the population Total). To explain the current process we must delve into the elaboration of the founding discourse and the identity symbols that accompanied it, in which framework were established and how this or these speeches are elaborated and re-elaborated according to the historical becoming. The difficulties of this work arise from the very object of study because it refers to a “recent” process, which does not have sufficient enlightening studies of the subject in the different branches of the social sciences, is also working on an “open reality”,unfinished and that is in full development.
Theoretical framework
Starting with the idea of Benedict Anderson on the “Imagined nation”, the backbone of my work is to analyse how the Uruguayans imagine as a nation today. The nations, understood as “imagined” political communities, are characterized by the way in which their members manage to conceive them as such.
The national identity is then composed of a set of landscapes, traditions, historical facts and symbols that represent the experiences, triumphs and disasters that allow the members of the nation to recognize themselves in the “image” of their community. Hobsbawm explains that “[…] By different members of a nation can be in terms of class, gender or race, a national culture seeks to unify them within a cultural identity, represent them as belonging to the same great national family […] Offering other guidelines Identification “.
Nations as historical constructions have for Latin America (and Uruguay is no exception) specific dates, this elaboration imposed or negotiated on the regionalisms translates into a national version of Unity, which invents a past, explains the Present and builds the future. In this way it delineates an ethos that appears fixed, as if it had always existed and is transmitted as an inheritance that belongs to all. In reality this conception conceals the dynamic and continuous construction character that the national identity has. In this logic are given to see images, speeches are explained and actions are legitimized.
In Uruguay, the state emerges before the nation, and the process of development and affirmation makes it the official “diagrammer” of symbols of national identity. In this dialogue between the process of state building and the construction of the speeches around the nation, many stories are elaborated over the last 150 years, not only from the construction of the state but also from the daily vision…
