Imagined Communities PDF

— Titroduction | se a Perhaps without being much noticed yet, a fundamental transforma- tion in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements is upon us. Its - most visible signs are the recent wars between Vietnam, Cambodia — and China. These wars are of world-...

— Titroduction | se a Perhaps without being much noticed yet, a fundamental transforma- tion in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements is upon us. Its - most visible signs are the recent wars between Vietnam, Cambodia — and China. These wars are of world-historical importance because they are the first to occur between regimes whose independence and — revolutionary credentials are undeniable, and because none of the - belligerents has made more than the most perfunctory attempts to _ - justify the bloodshed in terms of a recognizable Marxist theoretical _ perspective. While it was still just possible to interpret the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969, and the Soviet military interventions in ; Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Af an ghanistan (1980). in terms of — according to taste — ‘social imperialism,’ | ‘defending socialism,’ etc., no one, I imagine, seriously believes that ~- such_~vocabularies have much bearing on what has occurred in —. Indochina. , - an , , Oo , oe | If the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia in December 1978 and January 1979 represented. the first large-scale | conventional war waged by one revolutionary Marxist regime against - another, China’s assault on Vietnam in February rapidly confirmed _ | , 7 | 1. This formulation is chosen simply to emphasize the scale and the style of the | fighting, not to assign blame. To avoid possible misunderstanding, it should be said that _ _ the December 1978 invasion grew out of armed clashes between partisans of the Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES the precedent. Only the most trusting would dare wager that in the declining years of this century any significant outbreak of inter-state — hostilities will necessarily find the USSR and the PRC -— let alone the smaller socialist states — supporting, or fighting on, the same side. Who can be confident that Yugoslavia and Albania will not one day come to blows? Those variegated groups who seek a withdrawal of the Red Army from its encampments in Eastern Europe should remind © themselves of the degree to which its overwhelming presence has, since 1945, ruled out armed conflict between the region’s Marxist regimes. Such considerations serve to underline the fact that since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms — the People’s Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and so forth — and, in so doing, has grounded itself firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the prerevolu- tionary past. Conversely, the fact that the Soviet Union shares with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the rare distinction of refusing nationality 1n its naming suggests that it is as much the legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century internationalist order.” | Eric Hobsbawm is perfectly correct in stating that “Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance, i.e., nationalist. There is nothing to suggest two revolutionary “movements going back possibly as far as 1971. After April 1977, border raids, initiated by the Cambodians, but quickly followed by the Vietnamese, grew in size and scope, culminating in the major Vietnamese incursion of December 1977. None of these raids, however, aimed at over- throwing enemy regimés or occupying large territories, nor were the numbers of troops involved comparable to those deployed in December 1978. The con- troversy over the causes of the war is most thoughtfully pursued in: Stephen P. Heder, ‘The Kampuchean—Vietnamese Conflict,’ in David W. P. Elliott, ed., The Third Indochina Conflict, pp. 21-67; Anthony Barnett, “Inter-Communist Conflicts and Vietnam,’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 11: 4 (October— December 1979), pp. 2-9; and Laura Summers, ‘In Matters of War and ibid., pp. 10-18. Socialism Anthony Barnett would Shame and Honour Kampuchea Too Much,’ 2. Anyone who has doubts about the UK’s claims to such parity with the USSR should ask himself what nationality its name denotes: Great Brito-Irishe oe 2 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  a INTRODUCTION a — that this trend will not continue.’® Nor is the tendency confined to | the socialist world. Almost every year the United Nations admits new members. And many ‘old nations,’ once thought fully con-— _ solidated, find themselves challenged by ‘sub’-nationalisms within their borders — nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding this — _ sub-ness one happy day. The reality is quite plain: the ‘end of the era of nationalism,’ so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. — -. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the | |ss Butpolitical life of our time. On if the facts are clear, their explanation remains a matter of | long-standing dispute. Nation, nationality, nationalism — all have | proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyse. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern - world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre. Hugh. - Seton-Watson, author of far the best and most comprehensive __ - English-language text on nationalism, and heir to a vast tradition | of liberal historiography and social science, sadly observes: ‘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, author of the path-breaking The Break-up of Britain, and heir to the scarcely less vast tradition of Marxist historiography and social ~ science, candidly remarks: ‘The theory of nationalism represents — _ Marxism’s great historical failure.” But even this confession is somewhat misleading, insofar as it can be taken to imply the © - regrettable outcome of a long, self-conscious search for theoretical | clarity. It would be more exact to say that nationalism has proved an | uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that — , reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted. How else to 7 explain Marx’s failure to explicate the crucial adjective in his - memorable formulation of 1848: ‘The proletariat of each country _ , 3, Etic Hobsbawm, ‘Some Reflections on “The Break-up of Britain” 5 New Left , Review, 105 (September—October 1977), p. 13. , Oo 63), | Se a , 4. See his Nations and States, p. 5. Emphasis added. , | «5. See his “The Modern Janus’, New Left Review, 94 (November—December 1975), _ p. 3. This essay is included unchanged in The Break-up of Britain as chapter 9 (pp. 329- Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  , IMAGINED COMMUNITIES must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’?° How else to account for the use, for over a century, of the concept _ “national bourgeoisie’ without any serious attempt to justify theore- - tically the relevance of the adjective? Why is this segmentation of the bourgeoisie — a world-class insofar as it is defined in terms of the relations of production — theoretically significant? The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the ‘anomaly’ of nationalism. My sense is that on this topic both Marxist and liberal theory have become etiolated in a late Ptolemaic effort to ‘save the phenomena’; and that a reorientation of perspective in, as it were, a Copernican spirit is urgently required. My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. ‘To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century’ was the sponta- neous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became ‘modular, capable of being - transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspond- ingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations. I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep attachments. | | 6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in the Selected Works, I, p. 45. Emphasis added. In any theoretical exegesis, the words ‘of course’ should flash red lights before the transported reader. 7. As Aira Kemilainen notes, the twin ‘founding fathers’ of academic scholarship on nationalism, Hans Kohn and Carleton Hayes, argued persuasively for this dating. Their conclusions have, I think, not been seriously disputed except by nationalist ideologues in particular countries. Kemildinen also observes that the word ‘nationalism’ did not come into wide general use until the end of the nineteenth century. It did not ,4 occur, for example, in many standard nineteenth century lexicons. If Adam Smith conjured with the wealth of ‘nations,’ he meant by the term no more than ‘societies’ or ‘states.’ Aira Kemiladinen, Nationalism, pp. 10, 33, and 48-49. , Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  INTRODUCTION 7 | Oo oe CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS ——— Before addressing the questions raised above, it seems advisable to consider briefly the concept of ‘nation’ and offer a workable defini- _ tion. Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of _ - nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes _ | of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio- cultural concept — in the modern world everyone can, should, will a ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender — vs. the irremediable. | particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis. (3) The ‘political’. power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. — In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never — produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, ‘Marxes, or Webers. This ‘emptiness’ easily gives rise, among cos- -. mopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension. _ Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly conclude that there is ‘no there there’. It is characteristic that even so _ | sympathetic a student of nationalism as Tom Nairn can nonetheless write that: ‘ “Nationalism” is the pathology of modern developmental - Oo history, as inescapable as “neurosis” in the individual, with much the. | same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for 7 descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust | upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable.’® | | | Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypos- | - tasize the existence of Nationalism-with-a-big-N (rather as one might Age-with-a-capital-A) and then to classify ‘it’ as an ideology. — (Note that if everyone has an age, Age is merely an analytical _ expression.) It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with — ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’, ; SO Tn an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following , , 8. The Break-up of Britain, p. 359. re Ce Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the 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.” Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that ‘Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.’*” With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”’' The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that ‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are ima- gined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically — as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction ‘society. We may today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien regime as a class; but surely it was 9. Cf. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 5: ‘All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.’ We may translate ‘consider themselves’ as ‘imagine themselves.’ 10. Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ in OEuvres Completes, 1, p. 892. He adds: ‘tout citoyen francais doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi an XIlIle siécle. Il n’y a pas en France dix familles qui puissent fournir la preuve d’une origine franque...’ 11. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, p. 169. Emphasis added. 6 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  | ae INTRODUCTION. oC - | imagined this way only very late.’ To the question ‘Who is the | ~ Comte de X?’ the normal answer would have been, not “a member of the aristocracy,’ but ‘the lord of X,’ ‘the uncle of the Baronne de | ~Y,. or ‘a client of the Duc de Z..’ a _ The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, _ | encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, ifelastic, - boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself - coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not — — dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their | “nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, — Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. a : - It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in — ~ which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy _ of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to | maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with — the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between | each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of | being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this _ a freedom is the sovereign state. | - OC | Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual ~ inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this” fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so limited imaginings. | oe eo. ~ many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such ‘These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent _ _.. history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal | sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism. ' Oo 7 | ; 7 | a 4 2. Hobsbawm, for example, ‘fixes’ it by saying that in 1789 it numbered about ~ 400,000 in a population of 23,000,000. (See his The Age of Revolution, p. 78). But would this statistical picture of the noblesse have been imaginable under the ancien régime? — Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  BLANK. PAGE Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  Oo Cultural Roots — No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism | exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public - ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times.” To feel the force of — this modernity one has only to imagine the general. reaction to the __busy-body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, — contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal | remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly — national imaginings.” (This is why so many different nations have such | 1. The ancient Greeks had cenotaphs, but for specific, known individuals whose , ~ bodies, for One reason or another, could not be retrieved for regular burial. I owe this information to my Byzantinist colleague Judith Herrin. Oo, + -2.° Consider, for example, these remarkable tropes: 1. “The long grey line hasnever -. failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and - a grey, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, honour, - country.’ 2. “My estimate of [the American man-at-arms] was formed on the battlefield. , many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him _ now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military = __ characters, but also as one of the most stainless [sic].... He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism [sic]. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  Oo Cultural Roots — No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism | exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public - ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times.” To feel the force of — this modernity one has only to imagine the general. reaction to the __busy-body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, — contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal | remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly — national imaginings.” (This is why so many different nations have such | 1. The ancient Greeks had cenotaphs, but for specific, known individuals whose , ~ bodies, for One reason or another, could not be retrieved for regular burial. I owe this information to my Byzantinist colleague Judith Herrin. Oo, + -2.° Consider, for example, these remarkable tropes: 1. “The long grey line hasnever -. failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and - a grey, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, honour, - country.’ 2. “My estimate of [the American man-at-arms] was formed on the battlefield. , many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him _ now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military = __ characters, but also as one of the most stainless [sic].... He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism [sic]. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their | absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans, Argentinians...?) | The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings. As this affinity is by no means fortuitous, it may be useful to begin a consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death, as the last of a whole gamut of fatalities. | If the manner of a man’s dying usually seems arbitrary, his mortality is inescapable. Human lives are full of such combinations of necessity and chance. We are all aware of the contingency and ineluctability of our particular genetic heritage, our gender, our life- era, our physical capabilities, our mother-tongue, and so forth. The great merit of traditional religious world-views (which naturally must be distinguished from their role in the legitimation of specific systems of domination and exploitation) has been their concern with man-in- : the-cosmos, man as species being, and the contingency of life. The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Chris- tianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human sufter- ing — disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death. Why was I born blind? Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter retarded? The religions attempt to explain. The great weakness of all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marx- ism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence.” At He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and his achievements.’ Douglas MacArthur, ‘Duty, Honour, Country,’ Address to the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, May 12, 1962, in his A Soldier Speaks, pp. 354 and 357. 3. Cf. Régis Debray, ‘Marxism and the National Question,’ New Left Review, 105 (September—October 1977), p. 29. In the course of doing fieldwork in Indonesia in the 1960s I was struck by the calm refusal of many Muslims to accept the ideas of Darwin. At first I interpreted this refusal as obscurantism. Subsequently I came to see it as an honourable attempt to be consistent: the doctrine of evolution was simply not compatible with the teachings of Islam. What are we to make of a scientific materialism 10 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  | | CULTURAL ROOTS | the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality _ into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.). In this way, it concerns — itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the ~ mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child’s conception = and. birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, : _ fortuity, and fatality in a language of ‘continuity’? (Again, the | disadvantage of evolutionary/progressive thought is an almost Her- —aclitean hostility to any idea of continuity.) | a I bring up these perhaps simpleminded observations. primarily _ | because in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only | _ the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of — thought. The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, — brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did. not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of. continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular — transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and — ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always _ loom out of an immemorial past,” and, still more important, glide oe which formally accepts the findings of physics about matter, yet makes so little effort to. Tink these findings with the class struggle, revolution, or whatever. Does not the abyss | between protons and the proletariat conceal an unacknowledged metaphysical con- oe ception of man? But see the refreshing texts of Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism and ‘The Freudian Slip, and Raymond Williams’ thoughtful response to them in _ _-. *Timpanaro’s Materialist Challenge,’ New Left Review, 109 (May-June 1978), pp. 3-17. 4, The late President Sukarno always spoke with complete sincerity of the 350 years of colonialism that his ‘Indonesia’ had endured, although the very concept _ _ ‘Indonesia’ is a twentieth-century invention, and most of today’s Indonesia was only | _ conquered by the Dutch between 1850 and 1910. Preeminent among contemporary — __- Indoneésia’s national heroes is the early nineteenth-century Javanese Prince Diponegoro,. ~ although the Prince’s own memoirs show that he intended to ‘conquer [not liberate!] Java,’ rather than expel ‘the Dutch.’ Indeed, he clearly had no concept of ‘the Dutch’ as | a collectivity. See Harry J. Benda and John A. Larkin, eds., The World of Southeast Asia, — p. 158; and Ann Kumar, ‘Diponegoro (1778?—1855),’ Indonesia, 13 (April 1972), p.103. Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES | into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, ‘Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.’ Needless to say, I am not claiming that the appearance of nation- alism towards the end of the eighteenth century was ‘produced’ by the erosion of religious certainties, or that this erosion does not itself require a complex explanation. Nor am I suggesting that somehow nationalism historically ‘supersedes’ religion. What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self- consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which — as well as against which — it came into being. For present purposes, the two relevant cultural systems are the religious _ community and the dynastic realm. For both of these, in their heydays, were taken-for-granted frames of reference, very much as nationality is today. It is therefore essential to consider what gave these cultural systems their self-evident plausibility, and at the same time to underline certain key elements in their decomposition. a , THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY Few things are more impressive than the vast territorial stretch of the Ummah Islam from Morocco to the Sulu Archipelago, of Christen- dom from Paraguay to Japan, and of the Buddhist world from Sri Lanka to the Korean peninsula. The great sacral cultures (and for our purposes here it may be permissible to include ‘Confucianism’) incorporated conceptions of immense communities. But Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom — which, though we think of it today as Chinese, imagined itself not as Chinese, but as Emphasis added. Similarly, Kemal Atatiirk named one of his state banks the Eti Banka (Hittite Bank) and another the Sumerian Bank. (Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 259). These banks flourish today, and there is no reason to doubt that many Turks, possibly not excluding Kemal himself, seriously saw, and see, in the Hittites and ~ mythographies. :. Sumerians their Turkish forebears. Before laughing too hard, we should remaind ourselves of Arthur and Boadicea, and ponder the commercial success of Tolkien’s 12 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  ec ETURAL ROOTS) OB central — were imaginable largely through. the medium of a sacred _ Janguage and written script. Take only the example of Islam: if - Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other’s languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless under- stood each other’s ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic. In this sense, written Arabic functioned _ Jike Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds. (So today mathematical language continues an old tradition. Of what — the Thai call + Rumanians have no idea, and vice versa, but: both © | comprehend the symbol.) All the great classical communities con- | ceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium ofa sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power. Accord- 7 | ingly, the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or Chinese was, in _ theory, unlimited. (In fact, the deader the written language — the | | farther it was from speech — the better: in principle everyone has access _ to. a pure world of signs.) — OO OS - Oo Yet such classical communities linked by sacred languages had a -. character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations. - One crucial difference was the older communities’ confidence in the | oo unique sacredness of their languages, and thus their ideas about. _ _ admission to membership. Chinese mandarins looked with. approval -— on barbarians who painfully learned to paint Middle Kingdom | ideograms. These barbarians were already halfway to full absorption.” — _ Half-civilized was vastly better than barbarian. Such an attitude was a 7 certainly not peculiar to the Chinese, nor confined to antiquity. Consider, for example, the following ‘policy on barbarians’ formulated | _ Vargas: Oo Oo oe Be _. by the early-nineteenth-century Colombian liberal Pedro Fermin de To expand our agriculture it would be necessary to hispanicize our. __- Indians. Their idleness, stupidity, and indifference towards normal endeavours causes one to think that they come from a degenerate race | _ which deteriorates in proportion to the distance from its origin...it would be very desirable that the Indians be extinguished, by miscegenation with | | 13 So | a 5. Hence the equanimity with which Sinicized Mongols and Manchus were _ - accepted as Sons of Heaven. , oe Oe , | Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES : the whites, declaring them free of tribute and other charges, and giving them private property in land.° How striking it is that this liberal still proposes to ‘extinguish’ his _ Indians in part by ‘declaring them free of tribute’ and ‘giving them private property in land’, rather than exterminating them by gun and microbe as his heirs in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States began to do soon afterwards. Note also, alongside the condescending cruelty, a cosmic optimism: the Indian is ultimately redeemable — by impreg- nation with white, ‘civilized’ semen, and the acquisition of private property, like everyone else. (How different Fermin’s attitude is from the like.) ae | later European imperialist’s preference for ‘genuine’ Malays, Gurkhas, | and Hausas over ‘half-breeds,’ ‘semi-educated natives,’ “wogs’, and the Yet if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the | great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign. The ideograms of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it. We are familiar with the long dispute over the appropriate language (Latin or vernacular) for the mass. In the Islamic tradition, until quite recently, the Qur’an was literally untranslatable (and therefore untranslated), because | Allah’s truth was accessible only through the unsubstitutable true signs of written Arabic. There is no idea here of a world so separated from language that all languages are equidistant (and thus inter- changeable) signs for it. In effect, ontological reality is apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth- language of Church Latin, Qur’anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese.’ added. a | , And, as truth-languages, imbued with an impulse largely foreign to 6. John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808-1826, p. 260. Emphasis 7. Church Greek seems not to have achieved the status of a truth-language. The reasons for this ‘failure’ are various, but one key factor was certainly the fact that Greek remained a living demotic speech (unlike Latin) in much of the Eastern Empire. This insight I owe to Judith Herrin. | 14 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  - - CULTURAL ROOTS an oe nationalism, the impulse towards conversion. By conversion, I mean. not so much the acceptance of particular religious tenets, but alchemic absorption. The barbarian becomes ‘Middle Kingdom’, the Rif _ Muslim, the Ilongo Christian. The whole nature of man’s being is - sacrally malleable. (Contrast thus the prestige of these old world- Heaven, | languages, towering high over all vernaculars, with Esperanto or — ~ Volapiik, which lie ignored between them.) It was, after all, this possibility of conversion through the sacred language that made it - possible for an ‘Englishman’ to become Pope® and a ‘Manchw’ Son of oe But even though the sacred languages made such communities as Christendom imaginable, the actual scope and plausibility of these -. communities can not be explained by sacred script alone: their readers _ were, after all, tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans.” A fuller a, explanation requires a glance at the relationship between the literatiand _ their societies. It would be a mistake to view the former as a kind of theological technocracy. The languages they sustained, if abstruse, had none of the self-arranged abstruseness of lawyers’ or economists’ | jargons, on the margin of society’s idea of reality. Rather, the literati - were adepts, strategic strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the apex was divine.'° The fundamental conceptions about ‘social groups’ -_- were centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and - horizontal. The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is only _ comprehensible in terms ofa trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, anda conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual -. intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated —. the name AdrianIV. 7 a 8, Nicholas Brakespear held the office of pontiff between 1154 and 1159 under — _ 9. Marc Bloch reminds us that ‘the majority of lords and many great barons [in - _ mediaeval times] were administrators incapable of studying personally a report or an account.’ Feudal Society, I, p. 81. — a , 10. This is not to say that the illiterate did not read. What they read, however, was : not words but the visible world. ‘In the eyes of all who were capable of reflection the — material world was scarcely more than a sort of mask, behind which took place all the , really important things; it seemed to them also a language, intended to express by signs a more profound reality.’ Ibid. p. 83. | oe Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES | between earth and heaven. (The awesomeness of excommunication reflects this cosmology.) — 7 oo Yet for all the grandeur and power of the great religiously imagined communities, their unselfconscious coherence waned steadily after the late Middle Ages. Among the reasons for this decline, I wish here to emphasize only the two which are directly related to these commu- nities’ unique sacredness. | : First was the effect of the explorations of the non-European world, which mainly but by no means exclusively in Europe ‘abruptly widened the cultural and geographic horizon and hence also men’s conception of possible forms of human life.’'' The process is already apparent in the greatest of all European travel-books. Consider the following awed description of Kublai Khan by the good Venetian Christian Marco Polo | at the end of the thirteenth century:* | The grand khan, having obtained this signal victory, returned with great pomp and triumph to the capital city of Kanbalu. This took _ place in the month of November, and he continued to reside there during the months of February and March, in which latter was our festival of Easter. Being aware that this was one of our principal ~ solemnities, he commanded all the Christians to attend him, and to bring with them their Book, which contains the four Gospels of the Evangelists. After causing it to be repeatedly perfumed with incense, in a ceremonious manner, he devoutly kissed it, and directed that the same should be done by all his nobles who were present. This was his usual practice upon each of the principal Christian festivals, such as Easter and Christmas: and he observed the same at the festivals of the Saracens, Jews, and idolaters. Upon being asked his motive for this — conduct, he said: “There are four great Prophets who are reverenced and worshipped by the different classes of mankind. The Christians regard Jesus Christ as their divinity; the Saracens, Mahomet; the Jews, Moses; and the idolaters, Sogomombar-kan, the most eminent — | among their idols. I do honour and show respect to all the four, 11. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 282. | - that, though kissed, the Evangel is not read. 16 , 12. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, pp. 158-59. Emphases added. Notice Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  Be CULTURAL ROOTS | BC | and invoke to my aid whichever amongst them is in truth supreme in Oo - heaven.’ But from the manner in which his majesty acted towards them, it is evident that he regarded the faith of the Christians as the | _ truest and the best... oe 7 oe oe Oo ; What is so remarkable about this passage is not so much the great Mongol dynast’s calm religious relativism (it is still a religious relativism), ~ as Marco Polo’s attitude and language. It never occurs to him, even though he is writing for fellow-European Christians, to term Kublaia — _ hypocrite or an idolater. (No doubt in part because ‘in respect to _ number of subjects, extent of territory, and amount of revenue, he | surpasses every sovereign that has heretofore been or that now is in the | a world.’)'° And in the unselfconscious use of ‘our’ (which becomes - their’), and the description of the faith of the Christians as ‘truest,’ _ rather than ‘true,’ we can detect the seeds of a territorialization of faiths which foreshadows the language of many nationalists (‘our’ nation is | ‘the best’ — in a competitive, comparative field). == 88 oe What a revealing contrast is provided by the opening of the letter __-written by the Persian traveller ‘Rica’ to his friend ‘Ibben’ from Parisin es The Pope is the chief of the Christians; he is an ancient idol, worshipped now from habit. Once he was formidable even to princes, for he would depose them as easily as our magnificent = et sultans depose the kings of Iremetia or Georgia. But nobody fears him 7 a any longer. He claims to be the successor of one of the earliest Christians, called Saint Peter, and it is certainly a rich succession, for “his treasure is immense and he has a great country under his control. - The deliberate, sophisticated fabrications of the eighteenth century _ Catholic mirror the naive realism of his thirteenth-century predecessor, but by now the ‘relativization’ and ‘territorialization’ are utterly self conscious, and political in intent. Is it unreasonable to see a paradoxical in 1721. — Se OS 13. The Travels of Marco Polo, p. 152. So a So _ 14, Henri de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, p. 81. The Lettres Persanes first appeared Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES | elaboration of this evolving tradition 1n the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomei- ni’s identification of The Great Satan, not as a heresy, nor even as a demonic personage (dim little Carter scarcely fitted the bill), but as a nation? ~ Second was a gradual demotion of the sacred language itself. Writing of mediaeval Western Europe, Bloch noted that ‘Latin was not only the language in which teaching was done, it was the only language taught.’'° (This second ‘only’ shows quite clearly the sacredness of Latin — no other language was thought worth the teaching.) But by the sixteenth century all this was changing fast. The reasons for the change need not detain us here: the central importance of print-capitalism will be discussed below. It is sufficient to remind ourselves of its scale and pace. Febvre and Martin estimate that 77% of the books printed before 1500 were still in Latin (meaning nonetheless that 23% were already in vernaculars).'° If of the 88 editions printed in Paris in 1501 all but 8 were in Latin, after 1575 a majority were always in French.'’ Despite a temporary come-back during the Counter-Reformation, Latin’s hegemony was doomed. Nor are we speaking simply of a general popularity. Somewhat later, but at no less dizzying speed, Latin ceased to be the language of a pan- European high intelligentsia. In the seventeenth century Hobbes (1588— 1678) was a figure of continental renown because he wrote in the truth- language. Shakespeare (1564-1616), on the other hand, composing in the vernacular, was virtually unknown across the Channel.’® And had English not become, two hundred years later, the pre-eminent world- imperial language, might he not largely have retained his original insular obscurity? Meanwhile, these men’s cross-Channel near-contemporaries, Descartes (1596-1650) and Pascal (1623-1662), conducted most of their correspondence in Latin; but virtually all of Voltaire’s (1694— 1778) was in the vernacular.’ ‘After 1640, with fewer and fewer books coming out in Latin, and more and more in the verna- cular languages, publishing was ceasing to be an international [sic] 15. Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 77. Emphasis added. , 18 | 16. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 248-49. 17. Ibid., p. 321. 18. Ibid., p. 330. 19. Ibid., pp. 331-32. Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  os CULTURAL ROOTS Oo enterprise.’”” In a word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in | which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territonialized. OS THE DYNASTIC REALM These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself empathetically into a — _ world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only 7 - imaginable ‘political’ system. For in fundamental ways ‘serious’ mon- > _-archy lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life. _ Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre ofa legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states _ were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and - sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another.** Hence, para- doxically enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires and | kingdoms were able to sustain their rule over immensely heteroge- ~ time.” os a a neous, and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of | - One must also remember that these antique monarchical states co 20. Ibid., pp. 232-33. The original French is more modest and historically exact: “Pandis que l’on édite de moins en moins d’ouvrages en latin, et une proportion | 7 toujours plus grande de textes en langue nationale, le commerce du livre se morcelle en Europe.’ L’Apparition du Livre, p. 356. — , , oe | a _ 21. Notice the displacement in rulers’ nomenclature that corresponds to this _ transformation. Schoolchildren remember monarchs by their first names (what was _. William the Conqueror’s surname?), presidents by their last (what was Ebert’s _ Christian name?). In a world of citizens, all of whom are theoretically eligible for | the presidency, the limited pool of ‘Christian’ names makes them inadequate as __ specifying designators. In monarchies, however, where rule is reserved for a single 7 | 19 | , surname, it is necessarily ‘Christian’ names, with numbers, or sobriquets, that supply the requisite distinctions. © ee , , 22. We may here note in passing that Nairn is certainly correct in describing the : 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland as a ‘patrician bargain,’ in the sense | that the union’s architects were aristocratic politicians. (See his lucid discussion in The | Break-up of Britain, pp. 136f.). Still, it is difficult to imagine such a bargain being | Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES | expanded not only by warfare but by sexual politics — of a kind very different from that practised today. Through the general principle of -_verticality, dynastic marriages brought together diverse populations under new apices. Paradigmatic in this respect was the House of _ Habsburg. As the tag went, Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube! Here, in somewhat abbreviated form, is the later dynasts’ titulature.7° Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, — etc; Archduke of Austria [sic]; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow; Duke of Loth[a]ringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, and Guastella, of Ausschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa, and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gérz, and Gradiska; Duke of Trient and Brizen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lausitz and in Istria; Count of Hohenembs, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc.; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro, and above etc. | | the Windisch Mark; Great Voyvod of the Voyvodina, Servia.... This, Jaszi justly observes, was, ‘not without a certain comic aspect... the Habsburgs.’ | _ the record of the innumerable marriages, hucksterings and captures of In realms where polygyny was religiously sanctioned, complex systems of tiered concubinage were essential to the integration of the realm. In fact, royal lineages often derived their prestige, aside from any aura of divinity, from, shall we say, miscegenation?~* For such struck between the aristocracies of two republics. The conception of a United Kingdom was surely the crucial mediating element that made the deal possible. 23. Oscar Jaszi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, p. 34. 24. Most notably in pre-modern Asia. But the same principle was at work in monogamous Christian Europe. In 1910, one Otto Forst put out his Ahnentafel Seiner Kaiserlichen und Koniglichen Hoheit des durchlauchtigsten Hern Erzherzogs Franz Ferdinand, listing 2,047 of the soon-to-be-assassinated Archduke’s ancestors. They included 1,486 Germans, 124 French, 196 Italians, 89 Spaniards, 52 Poles, 47 Danes, 20 Englishmen/women, as well as four other nationalities. This ‘curious document’ is cited in ibid., p. 136, no. 1. I can not resist quoting here Franz Joseph’s wonderful 20 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  i CULTURAL ROOTS = = ; | mixtures were signs of a superordinate status. It is characteristic that _ there has not been an ‘English’ dynasty ruling in London since the — Bourboss?™> ~. eleventh century (if then); and what ‘nationality’ are we to assign to the - During the seventeenth century, however — for reasons that need 7 / not detain us here — the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy _ began its slow decline in Western Europe. In 1649, Charles Stuart was ~ beheaded in the first of the modern world’s revolutions, and during | the 1650s one of the more important European states was ruled by a oe _ plebeian Protector rather than a king. Yet even in the age of Pope and 7 - : Addison, Anne Stuart was still healing the sick by the laying on of royal hands, cures committed also by the Bourbons, Louis XV and XVI, in Enlightened France till the end of the ancien régime.”° But after 1789 the principle of Legitimacy had to be loudly and self-consciously __ _. defended, and, in the process, ‘monarchy’ became a semi-standardized _ model. Tenné and Son of Heaven became ‘Emperors.’ In far-off Siam _ : Rama V (Chulalongkorn) sent his sons and nephews to the courts of St. Petersburg, London and Berlin to learn the intricacies ofthe world- model. In 1887, he instituted the requisite principle of succession-by- ~ Jegal-primogeniture, thus bringing Siam ‘into line with the “civilized” _ - monarchies of Europe.’”’ The new system brought to the throne in — ~ 1910 an erratic homosexual who would certainly have been passed — over in an earlier age. However, inter-monarchic approval of his ascension as Rama VI was sealed by the attendance at his coronation of a ‘princelings from Britain, Russia, Greece, Sweden, Denmark — and | “reaction to the news of his erratic heir-apparent’s murder: ‘In this manner a superior | power has restored that order which [ unfortunately was unable to maintain’ (ibid., p. _ | M5 Gellner stresses the typical foreignness of dynasties, but interprets the phe- 7 _-. nomenon too narrowly: local aristocrats prefer an alien monarch because he will not = , _ take sides in their internal rivalries. Thought and Change, p. 136. re 26. Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges, pp. 390 and 398-99. + 27, Noel A. Battye, “The Military, Government and Society in Siam, 1868-1910, PhD thesis, Cornell 1974, p. 270... Se oe ae , 28. Stephen Greene, “Thai Government and Administration in the Reign of Rama VI (1910-1925),’ PhD thesis, University of London 1971, p. 92. Oo Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES | As late as 1914, dynastic states made up the majority of the membership of the world political system, but, as we shall be noting | in detail below, many dynasts had for some time been reaching for a ‘national’ cachet as the old principle of Legitimacy withered silently away. While the armies of Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786) were heavily staffed by ‘foreigners’, those of his great-nephew Friedrich Prussian.’~” , Wilhelm III (r. 1797-1840) were, as a result of Scharnhorst’s, Gnei- senau’s and Clausewitz’s spectacular reforms, exclusively ‘national- APPREHENSIONS OF TIME It would be short-sighted, however, to think of the imagined com- | munities of nations as simply growing out of and replacing religious communities and dynastic realms. Beneath the decline of sacred com- munities, languages and lineages, a fundamental change was taking place in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to ‘think’ the nation. | To get a feeling for this change, one can profitably turn to the visual representations of the sacred communities, such as the reliefs and stained-glass windows of mediaeval churches, or the paintings of early Italian and Flemish masters. A characteristic feature of such — representations is something misleadingly analogous to ‘modern dress’. The shepherds who have followed the star to the manger where Christ is born bear the features of Burgundian peasants. The Virgin Mary is figured as a Tuscan merchant’s daughter. In many paintings the commissioning patron, in full burgher or noble cos- tume, appears kneeling in adoration alongside the shepherds. What seems incongruous today obviously appeared wholly natural to the eyes of mediaeval worshippers. We are faced with a world in which 29. More than 1,000 of the 7,000—8,000 men on the Prussian Army’s officer list in 1806 were foreigners. ‘Middle-class Prussians were outnumbered by foreigners in their own army; this lent colour to the saying that Prussia was not a country that had an army, but an army that had a country.’ In 1798, Prussian reformers had demanded a ‘reduction by one half of the number of foreigners, who still amounted to about 50% of the privates....’ Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, pp. 64 and 85. 22 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  | CULTURAL ROOTS oO | the figuring of imagined reality was overwhelmingly visual and aural. | Christendom assumed its universal form through a myriad of specifi- | cities and particularities: this relief, that window, this sermon, that — tale, this morality play, that relic. While the trans-European Latin- reading clerisy was one essential element in the structuring of the _ Christian imagination, the mediation of its conceptions to the - illiterate masses, by visual and aural creations, always personal and. particular, was no less vital. The humble parish priest, whose fore-_ | bears and frailties everyone who heard his celebrations knew, was still _ the direct intermediary between his parishioners and the divine. This juxtaposition of the cosmic-universal and the mundane-particular ‘meant that however vast Christendom might be, and was sensed to be, it manifested itself variously to particular Swabian or Andalusian — communities as replications of themselves. Figuring the Virgin Mary with ‘Semitic’ features or ‘first-century’ costumes in the restoring | spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the med- iaeval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and - present.°? Bloch observes that people thought they must be near. | the end of time, in the sense that Christ’s second coming could occur at any moment: St. Paul had said that ‘the day of the Lord cometh , Tike a thief in the night.’ It was thus natural for the great twelfth- century chronicler Bishop Otto of Freising to refer repeatedly to ‘we _ _ who have been placed at the end of time.’ Bloch concludes that as soon as mediaeval men ‘gave themselves up to meditation, nothing | was farther from their thoughts than the prospect of a long future for a young and vigorous human race.’”*! i Oo | ness? ee - Oe ; : __. Auerbach gives an unforgettable sketch of this form of conscious- oe 30. For us, the idea of ‘modern dress,’ a metaphorical equivalencing of past with - present, is a backhanded recognition of their fatal separation. - - 2B a , _ 31, Bloch, Feudal Society, I, pp. 84-86. , , ne | - 32, Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 64. Emphasis added. Compare St. Augustine’s descrip- tion of the Old Testament as ‘the shadow of [i.e. cast backwards by] the future.’ Cited in , Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 90. | ; a Oo an Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES : | Ifan occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, so that in the former the latter is as it were - announced and promised and the latter ‘fulfills’... the former, then a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally — a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension... It canbe established | only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, | which alone is able to devise sucha plan ofhistory andsupplythekeyto | its understanding.... the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always | been, and will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omnitemporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event. He rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present.” In such a view of things, the word ‘meanwhile’ cannot be of real significance. | Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet to be well studied, with the development of the secular sciences. Butitis a conception of such fundamental importance that, without taking it fully into account, we will find it difficult to probe the obscure genesis of nationalism. What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Ben- jamin, an idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ in which simultaneity 1s, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and | calendar.>* Why this transformation should be so important for the birth of the imagined community of the nation can best be seen if we consider the basic structure of two forms of imagining which first flowered in 33. Walter Benjamin, Iluminations, p. 265. , 24 34. Ibid., p. 263. So deep-lying is this new idea that one could argue that every essential modern conception is based on a conception of ‘meanwhile’. | Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  | CULTURAL ROOTS)” oe oe a Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper.” For these forms provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation, So Consider first the structure of the old-fashioned novel, a structure _ typical not only of the masterpieces of Balzac but also of any con- —_ temporary dollar-dreadful. It is clearly a device for the presentation of __ Times -_ simultaneity in ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ or a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile’. Take, for illustrative purposes, a segment ofa _. simple novel-plot, in which a man (A) has a wife (B) anda mistress (C), who in turn has a lover (D). We might imagine a sort of time-chart for this segment as follows: | oe ; Events:. A quarrels with Bo A telephones C D gets drunk in a bar. a Cand Dmake love =~ Bshops.—_—_—A dines at home with B a , oo Oo - , D plays pool Chas an ominous dream 7 | - Notice that during this sequence A and D never meet, indeed may not even be aware of each other’s existence if C has played her cards _ oe right.-° What then actually links A to D? Two complementary conceptions: First, that they are embedded in ‘societies’ (Wessex, _ | Liibeck, Los Angeles). These societies are sociological entities of such _. firm and stable reality that their members (A and D) can even be ' described as passing each other on the street, without ever becoming _ acquainted, and still be. connected.*’ Second, that A and D are Be _ 35. While the Princesse de Cleves had already appeared in 1678, the era of _- Richardson, Defoe and Fielding is the early eighteenth century. The origins of the a modern newspaper lie in the Dutch gazettes of the late seventeenth century; but the ©. _... newspaper only became a general category of printed matter after 1700. Febvre and” Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 197. — Se _ _ ---- 36. ‘Indeed, the plot’s grip may depend at Times I, II, and III on A, B, C and D not ‘knowing what the others are up to. an Fo -_ a a 37. This polyphony decisively marks off the modern novel even from so brillianta - «forerunner as Petronius’s Satyricon. Its narrative proceeds single file. If Encolpius bewails. _ Ascyltus. — SO re - his young lover’s faithlessness, we are not simultaneously shown Gito in bed with Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES ] embedded in the minds of the omniscient readers. Only they, like God, _ watch A telephoning C, B shopping, and D playing pool all at once. That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, but by actors who may be largely unaware of one another, shows the. | novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his readers’ minds”? | The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the _ nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”” An American will never meet, or even know _ the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow- activity. a Z Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But — he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous The perspective I am suggesting will perhaps seem less abstract if we , turn to inspect briefly four fictions from different cultures and different epochs, all but one of which, nonetheless, are inextricably bound to nationalist movements. In 1887, the “Father of Filipino Nationalism’, José Rizal, wrote the novel Noli Me Tangere, which today is regarded as the greatest achievement of modern Filipino literature. It was also almost the first novel written by an ‘Indio.’*’ Here is how it marvel- lously begins:*” a Towards the end of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly 7 known as Capitan Tiago, was giving a dinner party. Although, books. , 38. In this context it is rewarding to compare any historical novel with documents or narratives from the period fictionalized. 39. Nothing better shows the immersion of the novel in homogeneous, empty time than the absence of those prefatory genealogies, often ascending to the origin of man, which are so characteristic a feature of ancient chronicles, legends, and holy 40. Rizal wrote this novel in the colonial language (Spanish), which was then the lingua franca of the ethnically diverse Eurasian and native elites. Alongside the novel appeared also for the first time a ‘nationalist’ press, not only in Spanish but in such ‘ethnic’ languages as Tagalog and Ilocano. See Leopoldo Y. Yabes, “The Modern Literature of the Philippines,’ pp. 287-302, in Pierre-Bernard Lafont and Denys Lombard (eds), Littératures Contemporaines de l’Asie du Sud-Est. 41. José Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (Manila: Instituto Nacional de Historia, 1978), p. 1. My translation. At the time of the original publication of Imagined Communities, I 26 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  Oo CULTURAL ROOTS contrary to his usual practice, he had announced it only that after- noon, it was already the subject of every conversation in Binondo, in — other quarters of the city, and even in [the walled inner city of] -___ Intramuros. In those days Capitan Tiago had the reputation ofalavish host. It was known that his house, like his country, closed itsdoorsto. | | _ - nothing, except to commerce and to any new or daring ideas a So the news coursed like an electric shock through the community of parasites, spongers, and gatecrashers whom God, in His infinite: | — a goodness, created, and so tenderly multiplies in Manila.Some hunted / | polish for their boots, others looked for collar-buttons and cravats. _ | | - But one and all were preoccupied with the problem of how to greet their host with the familiarity required to create the appearance of a longstanding friendship, or, if need be, to excuse themselves for not , ; - having arrived earlier, oe ne __-' The dinner was being given at a house on Anloague Street. Since we do not recall the street number, we shall describe it in suchaway that it may still be recognized — that is, if earthquakes have not yet destroyed it. We do not believe that its owner will have had it torn ae | ~ down, since such work is usually left to God or to Nature, which,. besides, holds many contracts with our Government. me a «Extensive comment is surely unnecessary. It should suffice to note that right from the start the image (wholly new to Filipino writing) ofa dinner- ' party being discussed by hundreds of unnamed people, who do not know : each other, in quite different parts of Manila, in a particular month ofa particular decade, immediately conjures up the imagined community.And inthe phrase ‘a house on Anloague Street’ which ‘we shalldescribeinsucha ---way that it may still be recognized,’ the would-be recognizers are we- __ Filipino-readers. The casual progression of this house from the ‘interior’ time of the novel to the ‘exterior’ time of the [Manila] reader’s everyday life | gives a hypnotic confirmation of the solidity of a single community, _ " embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward through calendrical time.** Notice too the tone. While Rizal has not the faintest | had no command of Spanish, and was thus unwittingly led to rely on the instructively , -. corrupt translation of Leon Maria Guerrero. | | | 27 SO - _ 42. Notice, for example, Rizal’s subtle shift, in the same sentence, from the past : tense of ‘created’ (crid) to the all-of-us-together present tense of ‘multiplies’ (multiplica). Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES - idea of his readers’ individual identities, he writes to them with an ironical intimacy, as though their relationships with each other are not in the smallest degree problematic.*” ee Nothing gives one a more Foucauldian sense of abrupt disconti- nuities of consciousness than to compare Noli with the most cele- brated previous literary work by an ‘Indio’, Francisco Balagtas — | (Baltazar)’s Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa Cahariang Albania [The Story of Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania], _ the first printed edition of which dates from 1861, though it may have > been composed as early as 1838.** For although Balagtas was still alive when Rizal was born, the world of his masterpiece is in every basic respect foreign to that of Noli. Its setting — a fabulous mediaeval Albania — is utterly removed in time and space from the Binondo of the 1880s. Its heroes — Florante, a Christian Albanian nobleman, and his bosom-friend Aladin, a Muslim (‘Moro’) Persian aristocrat — remind us of the Philippines only by the Christian-Moro linkage. Where Rizal deliberately sprinkles his Spanish prose with Tagalog | words for ‘realistic’, satirical, or nationalist effect, Balagtas unselfcon- sciously mixes Spanish phrases into his Tagalog quatrains simply to heighten the grandeur and sonority of his diction. Noli was meant to be read, while Florante at Laura was to be sung aloud. Most striking of all is Balagtas’s handling of time. As Lumbera notes, ‘the unravelling of the plot does not follow a chronological order. The story begins in _ medias res, so that the complete story comes to us through a series of | | speeches that serve as flashbacks.’*” Almost half of the 399 quatrains are accounts of Florante’s childhood, student years in Athens, and subsequent military exploits, given by the hero in conversation with 43. The obverse side of the readers’ anonymous obscurity was/is the author’s immediate celebrity. As we shall see, this obscurity/celebrity has everything to do with 35, 93.. the spread of print-capitalism. As early as 1593 energetic Dominicans had published in Manila the Doctrina Christiana. But for centuries thereafter print remained under tight ecclesiastical control. Liberalization only began in the 1860s. See Bienvenido L. Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry 1570-1898, Tradition and Influences in its Development, pp. , 28 45. Ibid., p. 120. | 44. Thid., p. 115. Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  | | _ = CULTURAL ROOTS =——————S -— Aladin.*° The ‘spoken flashback’ was for Balagtas the only alternative - to a straightforward single-file narrative. If we learn of Florante’s and _ Aladin’s ‘simultaneous’ pasts, they are connected by their conversing _ -_- voices, not by the structure of the epic. How distant this technique is | _ from that of the novel: ‘In that same spring, while Florante was still. studying in Athens, Aladin was expelled from his sovereign’s court |...’ In effect, it never occurs to Balagtas to ‘situate’ his protagonistsin ‘society,’ or to discuss them with his audience. Nor, aside from the about his text.” oe re re — mellifluous flow of Tagalog polysyllables, is there much ‘Filipino? _.- In 1816, seventy years before the writing of Noli, José Joaquin © Fernandez de Lizardi wrote a novel called El Periquillo Samiento [The Itching Parrot], evidently the first Latin American work in this genre.In the words of one critic, this text is ‘a ferocious indictment of Spanish | | administration in Mexico: ignorance, superstition and corruption are — _. seen to be its most notable characteristics.” The essential form of this _ ~ content:*” re OC - ‘nationalist’ novel is indicated by the following description of its From the first, [the hero, the Itching Parrot] is exposed to bad _ influences — ignorant maids inculcate superstitions, his mother in- a _ dulges his whims, his teachers either have no vocation or no abilityto 46. The technique is similar to that of Homer, so ably discussed by Auerbach, oa Mimesis, ch. 1 Odysseus’ Scar’), OC 47, “Paalam Albaniang pinamamayanan 7 a ng casama, t, lupit, bangis caliluhan, Oo : _ - , , acong tangulan mo, i, cusa mang pinatay , a sa tyo, i, malagqui ang panghihinayang.’ , So , SO ‘Farewell, Albania, kingdom now OS oe _. of evil, cruelty, brutishness and deceit! , CO a , _ I, your defender, whom you now. murder , en _ Nevertheless lament the fate that has befallen you.’ a OO ne 29 ‘This famous stanza has sometimes been interpreted as a veiled statement of Filipino -. patriotism, but Lumbera convincingly shows such an interpretation to be an _ anachronistic gloss. Tagalog Poetry, p. 125. The translation is Lumbera’s. I have — the 1861 imprint. | ee a slightly altered his Tagalog text to conform to a 1973 edition of the poem based on __ ; , 48. Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, p. 34, re 49, Tbid., pp. 35~36. Emphasis added.. 7 oo oO 7 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES discipline him. And though his father is an intelligent man who wants | his son to practise a useful trade rather than swell the ranks of lawyers and parasites, it is Periquillo’s over-fond mother who wins the day, _ sends her son to university and thus ensures that he will learn only superstitious nonsense... Periquillo remains incorrigibly ignorant _ despite many encounters with good and wise people. He is unwilling | to work or take anything seriously and becomes successively a priest, a gambler, a thief, apprentice to an apothecary, a doctor, clerk in a provincial town... These episodes permit the author to describe hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, while at the same time driving home one major point — that Spanish government and the education system encourage parasitism and laziness... Periquillo’s adventures several times take him among Indians and Negroes.... Here again we see the ‘national imagination’ at work in the movement ofa solitary hero through asociological landscape ofa fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside. This picaresque tour d’horizon — hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes — is nonetheless not a tour du monde. The horizon is clearly bounded: it is that of colonial Mexico. Nothing assures us of this sociological solidity more than the succession of plurals. Forthey conjure up a social space full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppres- siveness of this colony.” (Contrast prisons in the Bible. They are never imagined as typical of this or that society. Each, like the one where Salome _ was bewitched by John the Baptist, is magically alone.) _ Finally, to remove the possibility that, since Rizal and Lizardi both wrote in Spanish, the frameworks we have been studying are somehow ‘European’, here is the opening of Semarang Hitam [Black Semarang], a tale by the ill-fated young Indonesian communist-nationalist Mas Marco Kartodikromo,”! published serially in 1924:°° 50. This movement of a solitary hero through an adamantine social landscape is typical of many early (anti-)colonial novels. : 51. After a brief, meteoric career as a radical journalist, Marco was interned by the Dutch colonial authorities in Boven Digul, one of the world’s earliest concentration camps, deep in the interior swamps of western New Guinea. There he died in 1932, after six years confinement. Henri Chambert-Loir, ‘Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c. 30 Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  : a CULTURAL ROOTS —————™ | | It was 7 o’clock, Saturday evening; young people in Semarang never stayed at home on Saturday night. On this night however nobody 7 was about. Because the heavy day-long rain had made the roads wet | and very slippery, all had stayed at home. a Oo oe For the workers in shops and offices Saturday morning was atime — of anticipation — anticipating their leisure and the fun of walking = oo around the city in the evening, but on this night they were to be | disappointed — because of lethargy caused by the bad weatherandthe a sticky roads in the kampungs. The main roads usually crammed with all sorts of traffic, the footpaths usually teeming with people, all were ; | deserted. Now and then the crack of a horse-cab’s whip could be heard spurring a horse on its way — or the clip-clop of horses’ hooves > pulling carriages along. an : oe a , ---- Semarang was deserted. The light from the rows of gas lamps a. shone straight down on the shining asphalt road. Occasionally the _ ' OO clear light from the gas lamps was dimmed as the wind blew from the | -east. Se Oo oo ne oe A young man was seated on a long rattan lounge reading a — / newspaper. He was totally engrossed. His occasional anger and at ae other times smiles were a sure sign of his deep interest in the story. He turned the pages of the newspaper, thinking that perhaps he could — ' find something that would stop him feeling so miserable. All of a So sudden he came upon an article entitled: _ a | a Bn PROSPERITY | Oo Oo | _ A destitute vagrant became ill a | OO and died on the side of the road from exposure. | a - The young man was moved by this brief report. He could just imagine the suffering of the poor soul as he lay dying on the side of - the road... One moment he felt an explosive anger well up inside. _ Another moment he felt pity. Yet another moment his anger was 1890-1932) ou L’Education Politique,’ p. 208, in Littératures contemporaines de V’Asie du _ Sud-Est. A brilliant recent full-length account of Marco’s career can be found in Takashi _. Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926, chapters 2—5 and 8. 52. As translated by Paul Tickell in his Three Early Indonesian Short Stories by Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c. 1890-1932), p..7. Emphasis added. _ - oO , Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb01609.0001.001. Downloaded on behalf of University of Rochester  IMAGINED COMMUNITIES - : directed at the social system which gave rise to such poverty, while making a small group of people wealthy. — | Here, as in El Periquillo Sarniento, we are in a world of plurals: shops, - offices, carriages, kampungs, and gas lamps. As in the case of Noli, we- the-Indonesian-readers are plunged immediately into calendrical time and a familiar landscape; some of us may well have walked those ‘sticky’ Semarang roads. Once again, a solitary hero is juxtaposed to a socioscape described in careful, general detail. But there is also something new: a hero who is never named, but who is frequently referred to as ‘our young man’. Precisely the clumsiness and literary na