Abstract

Geographical scholarship examining banal and everyday nationalism has tendedto frame national flags as abstract and passive objects that are taken for grantedand incorporated into the daily lives of citizens in mindless ways. In contrast, thispaper acknowledges flags as lively material objects that can be enrolled by citi-zens to make political points and generate certain “affective atm ospheres.” Itargues that the recognition of agency in debate s concerning everyday nationalismneeds to be pushed further to acknowledge the conscious and active negotiationsof national objects like flags, to account for the diverse ways nations can be prac-tised and performed by citizens. To illustrate our arguments we focus on thememories and reflections of citizens involved in protests in the Aysén region ofChilean Patagonia in 2012. During these incidents, citizen s deployed differentflags in provocative ways to draw attention to their reclamations and apply pres-sure on the Chilean state to improve socio‐economic condition s in the region. Thelegacies of events like the 2012 protests and the associated (re)appropriation ofnational flags enables an interrogation of citizens’ everyday identifications withnations in this border region of Patagonia. More broadly, we use the examp le tocall for the materialities of flags as active objects to be the subject of further geo-graphical inquiry, as one way to reinvigorate explorations of political agency andeveryday nationalism