Reflexive Nationness: Critique, Repair, and the Reproduction of Cultural Nationalism

ABSTRACT Why does cultural nationalism remain compelling when its public expressions attract ridicule, moral criticism, and political suspicion? Drawing on multi‐sited ethnography in China's traditional‐culture scenes, this article examines how participants respond to criticism by changing the ways they practice national culture. I develop reflexive nationness to explain how collective evaluation and revision of these practices can sustain national belonging. Its central mechanism, reflexive looping, connects the diagnosis of a controversy to practical repairs that organizations preserve as shared standards. When participants use these standards in later activities, they can find renewed grounds for national attachment. I trace this process in a Hanfu club's response to backlash, negotiations over authenticity at a festival, and an etiquette course in which women questioned the teaching of feminine softness. In each setting, responses to criticism became part of the organization of cultural participation. These adjustments also gave participants regarded as cultivated, moderate, and aesthetically credible greater authority to represent national culture and judge others' conduct. The article extends scholarship on everyday nationhood by showing how collective evaluation reproduces national belonging and how standards developed through repair connect everyday attachment to cultural governance.