50

The literature on nationalism too ofien relies upon over-simplified accounts of the phenomenon. It tends to treat national identifies in exclusive and binary terms; and it tends to portray the ideological content of nationalist movements in static and stereotyped ways. This paper combats these deficiencies. It employs secondary analysis of opinion data available for the general population there, contrasted with primary analysis of data front 355 interviews with political elites and school teachers in the context of Catalonia in Spain, in order to : demonstrate that most citizens in Catalonia do not consider themselves either only Catalan or only Spanish; trace the evolution of hegemonic definitions of Catlanitat from primordial and exclusionary to territorial and assimilationist; and map the distribution of alternative and contradictory conceptions of membership across different segments of the society.