Do Nations Have Navels?

From Ernest Gellner's Nationalism (p 96-97):

"The Estonians, for example, are a fine example of highly sucessful navel-free nationalism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they did not really exist as a self-conscious category: they could only refer to themselves as 'those who lived on the land', in distinction to Swedish or German burghers or Russian bureaucrats. There wasn't even an ethnonym.

"However, just as the previously operative conditions of agrarian society permitted or favored domination by a tiny alien minority, now the conditions of modern life favoured the demographic majority, however unfavorable its political baseline. A national culture was born, by the usual nineteenth-century methods (national theatre, museum, education). The process was brilliantly successful and very thorough: the ethnographic museum in Tartu, for instance, has approximately one cultural object for every ten Estonians, and is sustained by a conscientious network of informants. Estonian culture is not in peril: rates of literacy, the level of education and general consciousness are extremely high. Political independence was secured on the collapse of the Tsarist empire and recovered on the collapse of the Bolshevik one. The fact that there is no historic precident for a linkage of Estonian culture with a state does not matter in the least: this nationalism is so brazenly devoid of any navel that it does not even deign to invent one, and yet the national culture iss so vigorous as to be in no danger at all, and the political will accompanying it is also strong and effective."