Re -imagining the ties that bind: State practices of nation -building in post -civil war El Salvador (1992--2000)

In the post-civil war period, new ideas about national culture, history and identity have emerged in El Salvador. This dissertation examines official sites and practices that promote certain ideas about the nation to ask how this informs us about the construction of national collective identity as a nation building process. The research situates the Salvadoran State in a middle ground amid a cluster of significant actors who shape knowledge and meaning about the post-civil war nation. These actors include mass media, culture elites, intellectuals, social scientists (including anthropologists), agencies of the international community, local indigenous communities, and transnational emigrants. It is a competitive terrain as actors represent distinct interests and approaches to how to define the nation.;What is exciting about nation building efforts in El Salvador are the new actors that have emerged to influence the State in the shaping of knowledge about the nation. The participation of United Nations agencies demonstrates that post-war nation building in a peripheral nation is not an intimate, domestic project. Local/global tensions arise as some in El Salvador resist universal or globalizing projects. Instead they prefer to focus on what is unique and particular about the nation. Indians and emigrants are two interest groups that press upon the State and its project of re-imagining national identity. Indigenous communities re-emerge in a challenge to past assimilationist and exclusionary policies and tendencies. While massive emigration and dependence on the economic contributions of emigrants forces the State re-think the parameters of the nation. Strengthening affective ties to El Salvador for these transnational "hermanos lejanos" (far away brothers and sisters) is a high priority of the State.;As the State mediates and contends with various actors, influences and visions about the nation, it is the new National Museum of Anthropology that strives to represent the national imagination. The contribution of this study is that it chronicles an important period in the cultural history of El Salvador, doing so by exploring the dynamics of nation building in the 21st century.