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ABSTRACT This chapter explores the materials and materiality of the everyday lives of farmers living in the ancient Maya farming community of Chan located in west central Belize. Limestone bedrock and soil matrix were the substance of Chan's landscape. In constructing their community and across their daily lives, Chan's residents used, modified, and transformed earth and stone to build houses, agricultural terraces, quarries, and workshops that were the basis of everyday life at Chan. The local resources and products that residents created from earth and stone were critical in their development of a resilient community. Exploring the materiality of the everyday lives of Maya farmers provides a fertile ground for understanding the significance of ordinary people's daily lives in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of the current trend to criticise elite-centred approaches to the study of nationalism, this article sheds light on ways in which elite and popular notions of nationhood are mediated. Thus, public discourse on national identity is explored as a discourse that ordinary people can influence and in which elites make claims to represent the people. To illustrate the dynamics of representative claim-making and reception, the article uses a case study from German public discourse; the debate about Thilo Sarrazin's 2010 book G ermany Does Away With Itself. It finds that, although Sarrazin clearly breaches well-established rules in national identity discourse, his ideas gain traction from the moment he becomes accepted as representing ordinary Germans. The findings are discussed against the backdrop of the history of German national identity discourse and anti-essentialist approaches treating nationhood as a political claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the theoretical opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism with empirical research on the ways in which a group of ordinary Australians talked about multiculturalism in the 1980s and again in the 2000s. It shifts attention from identity work to the understanding of day-to-day social relations: it finds that they are strongly nationalist and yet also display a cosmopolitan embrace of the benefits of cultural diversity. They draw on the inclusionary resources of Australian nationalism and its history to strengthen their cosmopolitanism and calm their anxieties about living with diversity. Their commonsense conceptualising of Australia's contemporary multicultural society in terms of a mix of individuals rather than an ensemble of groups is crucial to understanding why cultural diversity has been embraced within the framework of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]