Nation

A nation in this framework is not a state and the definition rules the state out twice over. Nations are layered and overlapping, so a person belongs to several at once and their edges do not partition anybody, and they exist across borders and generations, so neither territory nor a living population defines them. What holds one together is animus carried in sacred objects, rites, land and culture, which is why the second sentence names the machinery rather than listing attributes. Culture in her definition is exactly this, the rites, objects and ideas connecting a national animus through space and time, so the nation is what culture is for. Her verdict on the state follows. Today's so-called nation states are nothing of the sort, being economic markets designed to ensure unequal distribution of wealth, and no state is now a pure nation by ethnicity, religious belief or any other common factor. The consequences run through the rest of the framework. Genocide is the murder of a nation, which is why it does not require killing everyone and can be accomplished by destroying what connects people across time. Colonization is sublation of the will and animus of a nation, which is why it can happen without a border being crossed. And the nation-self is a circle of expansion that is often trapped into a state endogroup, which is the ordinary route by which something layered and overlapping is captured by something bounded.

Nationalism studies divides over whether nations are ancient or modern, with Benedict Anderson's imagined communities and Ernest Gellner treating them as products of modernity and print capitalism, and Anthony Smith arguing for older ethnic cores. All of these still take the nation to be a bounded population with a claim to a territory and a state, which is the assumption Marsh removes. Her definition is closer to diaspora studies and to indigenous conceptions of nationhood that persist without statehood and overlap without conflict. Detaching the nation from territory is what allows her to define genocide and colonization as operations on connection rather than on land or population.