The President’s initiative to expose aspects of Maltese culture and identity at il-Festa f’Sant’ Anton is a welcome one, as interest in this area seems to be on the rise. Obviously it takes more than għana and bigilla to figure out what makes us Maltese.

Defining and encapsulating the sense of nationality and of nationhood has not been so easy in history. According to Ernest Renan, writing in 1882, what makes a nation is not race, language, geography or religion, but “the possession in common of a legacy of memories” and “the desire to live together, the will to put to good use the heritage that has been received undivided”.

That was before globalisation and the internet.

More recently (1983, 1991), Benedict Anderson went so far as to suggest that communities are “imagined” as opposed to being “actual” because any assumed or claimed affinity cannot be based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members. Community was therefore a social construct imagined by people who perceived themselves as part of that group, although everybody did not know or meet everybody else.

The latter theory still begs the question raised by the former. Why do people feel that they belong to and relate to a particular community or nation in time and space rather than to another? Has the world really become a global village where there is not much space left for diversity or difference or a nationality-driven motivation? Or are we all duped by the mass media?

What is at issue here, of course, is not citizenship. That could be just a passport. Nor is it humanity, the characteristics of which are broadly universal.

Even in Malta, one of the world’s very smallest and most densely populated nations, if we still accept that, there is some confusion about this phenomenon.

There is some confusion about this complex phenomenon, partly in the light of EU membership exigencies; mass illegal or irregular immigration since 2002; the relatively strong electoral showing by Imperium Europa in the recent European Parliament elections; and the emphasis being placed on the integration of recently arrived immigrants from widely different backgrounds as a panacea, possibly with the right to vote as well.

Without being xenophobic, what we try to do at the University’s Institute of Maltese Studies is dig up our roots as a nation and a people in time and space, also in relation to other populations – culture clash and assimilation tensions or adjustments, for instance.

The new part-time evening courses starting in October, for which registration is now open, will comprise culture and identity; music, song and dance; art, architecture and landscape; migration and settlement, including minority ethnic groups; agricultural production, insects, food and cuisine; spirituality, religion and society, including popular festivals and festas.

It takes more than għana and bigilla to figure out what makes us Maltese

We also study the role of languages in Malta, including Maltese, Italian and English; flora, fauna and natural heritage, including water supply and shortage, even climate change; archaeology in self-perception and public debate; history, politics and governance at the central and local levels.

We explore culture and identity as manifested in other related spheres comprising occupations and leisure, such as printing and publishing; theatre and drama; archives and museums; trade and the dockyard legacy; marriage and the family in tradition and as the times are a-changing; sports, especially football; some medico-legal aspects, and even DNA.

All in all, postgraduate degrees in Maltese studies essentially constitute a pioneering and most topical approach to understanding and evaluating ourselves, our past, present and future. This is a necessary, indeed urgent exercise, in the face of globalisation and rapid changes, for all those who value ethnicity, diversity and identity, both individually and collectively.

Lectures at the institute, held in English, are conducted by foremost well-published scholars, researchers and exponents of these various aspects affecting our lives and mind-sets, of which we are not always so conscious or knowledgeable, or which we may take for granted.

The following topics figure among recent Institute of Maltese Studies research theses at Master’s and doctoral level: folk and pop music; radically changed ethnographies as in St Paul’s Bay; modernity and secularisation; legends; fishermen’s lives; human smuggling and trafficking; education in colonial and post-colonial Malta; aesthetics in literature; comparative origins of Maltese and Sicilian surnames; and a critical revisionist approach towards collective memory.

Other current research areas include women in wartime; adult illiteracy; post-colonial theatre shows; political parties in the formation of a national identity; from stigma to inclusion in mental health; and various other investigations pertinent to the institute’s inter-disciplinary mission statement, which is accessible on the web.

At this juncture in the galloping evolution of Maltese society, culture, politics and identity, I honestly believe that a sober academic focus on these topics, feet on the ground, is crucial. This is also why I am pleased that some of our interested postgraduate students, especially for doctorates, hail from countries other than our own.

The institute’s poster for the new courses, illustrated by Antoine Camilleri’s iconic painting Life Beneath the Soil, is called ‘Digging up our Roots’.

Prof. Henry Frendo is director, Institute of Maltese Studies, at the University of Malta.

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