IMAGINED COMMUNITIES by Benedict K. Anderson

“Imagined”

members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion 

Imagined Community

• regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. 

• Fraternity= willingness to give life up for this imagined community

Limited

• even the largest of them, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.

• No matter how large it is, it still has boundaries, and beyond it there are other nations

• There is no nation that sees itself covering all of humanity

Sovereign

• the concept was born in an age in. which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.

• People were starting to reject the idea that power came from a divine right or royal blood inheritance 

• In this new world of competing beliefs nations (people) began to imagine themselves as FREE AND GOVERNING

Symbol of freedomis a sovereign state

Paradoxes according to Theorists of Nationalism

1. Paradox 1: Nation as Modern but feels ancient historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists

2. Paradox 2: Nationalism as Universal idea, but always different nationality is sui generis( a class of its own) 

   1. Its a specific form so deeply tied to its own history/ culture it cannot be compared to another 

3. Paradox 3: Powerful but not deep. The 'political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence.

   1. nationalism has never produced its own grand thinker

   2. 'emptiness' easily gives rise, among cos­mopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension.

fluid concept

Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” article revolves around the nation as a ___________viewed the nation as a socially constructed, ___________shaped by shared beliefs and experiences.

Eric Hobsbawm

According to __________'Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance, i.e., nationalist.” 

Hugh Seton-Watson:

According to ___________Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no "scientific definition" of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists

Tom Nairn

• The theory of nationalism represents Marxism's great historical failure.'

  • "Nationalism" is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as "neurosis" in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it.

  •  is like a sickness in the history of national development 

Ernest Renan

According to ____________Now the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that all have forgotten many things.” 

Ernest Gellner

“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”

Charles Hirschman “CENSUS”

According to _________- study of the mentalites of the British colonial census-makers

• Hirschman's facsimiles ( copy)  of the 'identity categories' of successive censuses

  • There has been a rapid series of changes, in which categories are continuously agglomerated, disag­gregated, recombined, intermixed, and reordered

William Henry Scott & the Philippines “CENSUS”

1. Felipe II of 'Spain or King Philip

2. principales, hidalgos pecheros, and esclavos

William Henry Scott & the Philippines

1. Philippines is came from the name of _________

2. Social classifications are the following_______,________,________,______

Mason Hoadley and Indonesia “CENSUS”

1. The Dutch East India Company

2. Chinezen

Mason Hoadley and Indonesia “CENSUS”

Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia came from various backgrounds. The1. ___________(VOC) lumped them all into one imagined group called 2. __________(Chinese).

Thongchai Winichakul “MAPS”

1. Siam

2. Map

3. Cosmograph and diagram­ matic guides

1. ________ was not colonized, though in the end, its borders were colonially determined.

2. What is a ________ according to Thongchai it is scientific abstraction of reality. represents some thing which already exists objectively 'there.' Created imagined boundaries into actual territories.

   • Powerful tools that were essential for running colonial administrations and for justifying military control

3. 2 types of maps in Siam________ and _______

1. Boundary Stones

2. Mercatorian map

1. ___________these stones were set up discontinuously at strategic mountain passes and fords, and were often substantial distances from corresponding stones set up by the adversary.

2. ___________brought in by the European colonizers, was beginning, via print, to shape the imagination of Southeast Asians.

Print Capitalism

Mass printing production → helped disseminate the production of maps

Logo Map

1. Map-as-logo, practice of the imperial.states of colouring their colonies on maps with an imperial dye.

   1. E.g British colonies (pink-red) French (purple-blue) Dutch (yellow­ brown)

MUSEUM

• the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political.    

• The present proliferation of museums around Southeast Asia suggests a general process of political inheriting at work. 

COMMERCIALIZING HERITAGE

• the disbelief of the rulers themselves in the real sacredness of local sites. reproducibility, a reproducibility through print and photography made it easy for imperial rulers to commercialize sacred sites: from local spiritual meaning to turning them into logos of colonial authority and heritage.

  • Reducing sacred cultural heritage of NATIVES by the colonizers trivialized the culture and traditions,((stripping the sociocultural meanings of things) to fit into the narrative and selfish goals of the elite

1. WARP

2. WEFT

1. ____________ a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state's real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments,

2. ______________serialization: the assumption that the world was made up of replicable plurals.

• That’s why colonial governments could label and treat people as part of a group—like “the Chinese” or “the nationalists”—even before those people saw themselves that way.

1. Intelligentsia

2. Bilingualism 

   
   

1. __________It is generally recognized that the “_______” were central to the rise of nationalism in the colonial territories. It is no less generally recognized that the intelligentsias' vanguard role derived from their bilingual literacy, or rather literacy and bilingualism.

2. ___________meant access, through the European language-of-state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century.

1. Pilgrimage

2. Negritude

1. ____________It refers to the movement of colonial subjects across administrative, educational, and geographic spaces.

• These were journeys through colonial institutions—schools, courts, military, bureaucracy—not to shrines but to sites of shared state experience.

2. __________refers to the essence of African-ness expressible only in French , language of the William Pont classrooms.

THE LAST WAVE

1. End of Empires, Rise of Nation-StatesAfter World War I.

2. After World War II: Nation-States Became the Global Norm.

3. Postcolonial Nations Imitated Older Models
   

1. Mazzini

2. Uvarov

1. _________: Believed in democratic nationalism — nationalism led by the people, full of passion and ideals.

2. __________Believed in state-led institution nationalism — using schools and media to shape national identity from above.