ABSTRACT In the mid-1990s, young Polynesian men emerged at the frontlines of proindependence sentiment and mobilization in the Society Islands of France’s ‘‘overseas territory,’’ French Polynesia. In this article, I ask why. In pursuing that question, I argue for the theoretical and empirical productivity of shifting the associations between masculinity and nationalist struggle out of the realm of common sense and into that of the sociological; that is, of moving away from the analytics of gender foundationalism and into interrogations of the very social processes through which gender differences, masculinities more specifically, are produced. Through ethnographic analysis of gendered labor practices and their mediation by and through households, I track how young men’s positioning within those most local arenas of social action shaped their engagements with competing local formulations of ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘modernity’’ and, through those engagements, their commitments to large-scale nationalist struggle. [gender, modernity, nationalism, households, labor, Society Islands (French Polynesia)] The microcontexts of everyday analysis are ... the necessary ground to which the big and abstract questions of domination and subordination, power and resistance have to be chased. Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994 O n September 6, 1995, international media reports briefly unbal- anced Tahiti’s reputation as a tropical paradise. The early morning images coming out of the South Pacific island were set at its international airport, usually a peaceful place where runways and resting planes nestle between the lush mountains of the island’s center and a seemingly infinite expanse of aqua green Pacific Ocean. On this September morning, however, young Polynesian men were facing off with rocks and clubs against French military police, launching Molotov cocktails at the soon-to-be-gutted airport runways and setting fire to terminal build- ings and to cars in the airport parking lot. 1 The protest spread over the course of the day, as the young men left the airport and were joined by others as they marched the several kilometers to the upscale shopping district of downtown Papeete, the cosmopolitan capital of this ‘‘overseas territory’’ of France. There, protesters began a night of smashing storefront windows, looting, and setting fire to commercial and apartment buildings as well as to cars parked along the city’s streets. ‘‘Tahiti’s Black Wednesday’’ (Le mercredi noir de Tahiti), or simply ‘‘the Riots’’ (les emeurtes), as this protest was doubly christened in the state-run daily newspaper, took place the day after France’s locally televised deto- nation of its first nuclear test in more than three years in the islands of French Polynesia (La De ´pe ˆche de Tahiti 1995). Young men’s centrality in the September riots was a continuation of their central role in the many antinuclear testing and proindependence protests staged over the three months leading up to France’s September detonation. Between June and September, those protests included nonviolent marches and sit-ins on a DEBORAH A. ELLISTON Binghamton University, State University of New York A passion for the nation: Masculinity, modernity, and nationalist struggle American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 606 – 630, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. A 2004 by the Regents of the University of California (or the society name). All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals/rights.htm.