Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
Eric HobsbawmRead
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the distinction between fearing foreign people and accepting their cultural contributions.
Eric Hobsbawm's quote suggests that while societies may express xenophobic attitudes towards foreign individuals, they often embrace and enjoy aspects of the cultures those individuals bring, as seen in the popularity of Indian and Chinese cuisine. This reflects a complex relationship where cultural products are welcomed while the people behind them may still face discrimination or prejudice.
Themes
XenophobiaCultureAcceptanceForeignCuisine
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about cultural diversity at a community event.
More from Eric Hobsbawm
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It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans.
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Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.
Eric HobsbawmRead
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
Eric HobsbawmRead
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