Imagined Communities PDF

Imagined Communities CHAPTER 1  The wars that took place in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia between December 1978 and March 1979 are the ones Anderson starts with since they involved rival autonomous Marxist regimes invading one another. Vietnam, which had just occupied Camb...

Imagined Communities CHAPTER 1  The wars that took place in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia between December 1978 and March 1979 are the ones Anderson starts with since they involved rival autonomous Marxist regimes invading one another. Vietnam, which had just occupied Cambodia, was invaded by China. Marxist nations are not always on the same side in battles, while sharing the same objectives, because "after World War II every successful revolution has de ned itself in national terms"—and, in fact, particularly nationalist ones. The idea of the nation is now a "universally legitimate [political] value," but there is little consensus on what "nation, nationality, [and] nationalism" truly mean, and there is no solid theory explaining where they came from. This trend does not appear to be slowing down. "A uncomfortable oddity for Marxist philosophy, Marx once stated that "the proletariat of each country must rst settle problems with its own bourgeoisie" despite the fact that Marxists typically disregard the issue of particular nations. In Imagined Communities, Anderson argues that the concept of nationalism requires a "Copernican" rethinking and that "nation-ness [... and] nationalism are cultural artefacts" with a speci c history dating back to the late 18th century and which are so potent in part because of the emotions they elicit in people. Anderson initially examines the "three paradoxes" involved in de ning the country under the subject "Concepts and De nitions." First, nationalists themselves disagree with historians who view nations as a recent development. Second, the concept of a nation is both universal—in the sense that "everyone can, should, and will "have" a nationality"—and irremediably particular—in the sense that there is no overarching standard for what it means to have a certain nationality versus another. Thirdly, despite its emotional and political potency, nationalism is a logical and philosophical impossibility. As a result, it has no "great thinkers," and the majority of serious academics dismiss it as nonsensical or useless. One of these academics' mistakes is thinking that all nationalism is the same thing; according to Anderson, it is a diverse range of phenomena that is more akin to "kinship" and "religion" than to "liberalism" or “fascism.” fi fi fi fi fi  The community is "imagined because the members [...] will never know most of their fellow-members," but they still regard those invisible fellows as a part of their own same group, according to Anderson's de nition of the nation: "It is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." Communities that are imagined are not untrue; any community that is larger than a village must be imagined. What important is how people view their communities, whether as kinship groups, social groups, or, obviously, as groups of fellow citizens. Anderson continues by saying that no nation makes the claim to include everyone, therefore all nations are constrained and understand their bounds. Nations also view themselves as sovereign since historically, they emerged as a replacement for the imagined power of God. Finally, even when nations are not equal, citizens believe that they are part of "a deep, horizontal comradeship" and a brotherly society. The startling question at the heart of Anderson's inquiry is how nationalism, which is barely 200 years old, "generates such colossal sacri ces," as he asks it to conclude his Introduction. ” fi fi CHAPTER 2  "Tombs of Unknown Soldiers" are a key nationalist image; they have signi cance simply because the deceased's identity is unknown and because they represent a community's e orts. This demonstrates that nationalism, in contrast to Marxism and Liberalism, has an obsession with "death and immortality." Everyone passes away, but religion gives life purpose and transforms misery into continuity by, for example, connecting death to rebirth. Therefore, it is no coincidence that nationalism began to take hold at the same time as Europe's religious establishment was overthrown by the Enlightenment. Anderson does not intend to imply that nationalism is a better form of religion or that nationalism caused the decline of religion, but rather that nationalism should be viewed as a "large cultural system" rather than a "self-consciously held political ideology" similar to "the religious community and the dynastic realm.” According to Anderson's argument in the section on "The Religious Community," religions may foster a sense of global oneness by using "a sacred language and written script"—Latin, Chinese, and Classical Arabic allowed people from many language communities to write to one another. Each society believed its own language gave a special gateway into the truths of being and the divine, making "conversion [of outsiders] through the sacred language" a vital goal. As a result, each believed outsiders could become more "civilized" by learning it. The literary minority served as "mediators between earth and heaven" in these societies, which held a rigid hierarchy as their core value. ff fi  The "great religiously conceived societies," however, according to Anderson, started to disappear after the Middle Ages. Two of the most signi cant justi cations are mentioned by him. First, international travel brought people of various religious backgrounds together; Anderson cites Marco Polo and a "Persian traveler" from the 18th century as examples of the growing ties between religion and geography. The vernacular progressively replaced "the holy language" as the main language of printing as it lost importance. Anderson describes how drastically alien a dynastic or solely monarchical regime would be to individuals today in the part titled "The Dynastic Realm." There are no de nite borders, those who dwell under the monarchy are considered subjects rather than citizens, and the monarch's authority derives from divinity. In order to unify their control over many peoples, ruling families intermarried or rulers kept concubines. While in the early 1900s many governments remained formally dynastic (and some even do today), these have mostly sought to justify themselves in the terms of nationalism. This "sacral monarchy" started to wane in the mid-1600s, and by the late 1700s it was no longer the default paradigm for state power, but merely "a semi-standardized model.” fi fi fi  Anderson claims that there is one more "fundamental alteration"—a change in how people perceive time—that "made it feasible to 'think' the nation" at the outset of the lengthy section titled "Apprehensions of Time.” Because there was no "understanding of history as an in nite chain of cause and e ect or a [feeling] of fundamental separations between past and present," medieval Christian painters frequently showed Jesus and the Virgin Mary as persons from their own area or culture. Instead, they thought that God's will had already established the past, present, and future and that Judgment Day could occur at any time (and therefore existed simultaneously). The modern concept of time, "homogeneous, empty time," which views time as a linear, quanti able, empty container in which one thing leads to another and the future is unpredictable, took the place of this earlier one. The novel and the newspaper, Anderson continues, became crucial mediums for "'re-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation." In novels, readers can see di erent characters doing di erent things at the same time, and they can understand the connections among di erent characters who may never actually meet in the book. Like a country, the people are "a sociological entity moving calendrically through uniform, empty time." Anderson presents four instances from various contexts to clarify this intricate argument. fi fi ff ff ff ff  The rst example Anderson uses is the opening section of José Rizal's 1887 novel Noli Me Tangere, which was written in Spanish (the colonial language). In this chapter, nameless people in the ctional village of Manila chat and the narrator addresses future Filipinos. Contrarily, a similar illustrious work produced in Tagalog, the native language of the Filipinos, a few decades earlier has a decidedly oral tone, progresses through "spoken ashback[s]," and never addresses the reader. The third example Anderson uses is the 1816 novel El Periquillo Sarniento by Mexican author José Joaqun Fernández de Lizardi, which criticizes the Spanish colonial government by following a Mexican that the government fails to educate as he visits "hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries," among other places. Geographically, the Mexican country is "clearly delimited," and the colonial authority is implied to have failed this nation as a whole. Semarang Hitam, written by Indonesian nationalist Marco Kartodikromo, is his nal example. It begins with scenes of the city described as "a world of plurals," before switching to an unnamed young man who, after reading a newspaper article about the passing of a similarly anonymous vagrant, becomes enraged at the colonial government. fi fi fi fl  What distinguishes "the newspaper as a cultural product" is Anderson's question. Putting news from di erent parts of the world on the same page is weird. These tales wind up there because to two "imagined linkage[s]": rst, the events in the stories occurred simultaneously; and second, when the newspaper is published, it will be read by readers in the same city at roughly the same time on the same day. The newspaper, as "that remarkable con dence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations," thus "create[s] that remarkable con dence of community in anonymity" (Anderson suggests that the book, and newspapers as "an 'extreme form' of the book," were the rst truly self-contained commodity popularized under industrial capitalism). Anderson concludes by reiterating the conclusions of this chapter. The sacred written language, dynastic rule by a divine monarch, and the religious view of time that made "the origins of the world and of [humans] essentially identical" required, in his view, three ideas to shift from paradigmatic to obsolete, and together, these three ideas separated "cosmology and history," erasing the sense that "the everyday fatalities of existence" had some greater meaning. This made it possible for nationalism to replace religion. Anderson claims that "print- capitalism," the topic of his subsequent chapter, was largely responsible for this accomplishment. fi fi fi fi ff CHAPTER 4  The governments that developed in the Americas throughout the 18th and 19th centuries stand out to Anderson for two reasons: they spoke the same language as their colonizers, and a uent elites, not the common people, spearheaded the freedom campaigns. Instead of being sympathetic to the plight of the masses, especially the enslaved and indigenous people, these elites were actually concerned about violent uprising from the masses. For instance, many of the leaders of the independence movements in Venezuela and the US were driven by a desire to keep slavery, which European powers were starting to oppose. The fact that these colonized elites began thinking in terms of nations before anyone in Europe is remains noteworthy. Two well-known causes in the Spanish Empire were the monarchy's stricter regulations and the "rapid and simple transfer of" European philosophical ideas to the Americas. Due in part to this, all of Latin America's nations, with the exception of Brazil, established republics as soon as they attained independence, modeling them after the United States and France. The astonishing development of so many di erent governments in the Americas, however, and the fact that after independence "the higher creole classes [...] were nancially destroyed" in the short term are not fully explained by the aforementioned factors (although independence surely bene ted them in the long term). ff fi fi ffl  According to Anderson, the fact that each of these places was an administratively separate colony was the underlying reason for the rapid emergence of national identity in each newly independent region of Spanish territory. The many colonies quickly established notions of their own identity despite being separated by challenging terrain, great distances, and a ban on dealing with any territorial entity other than Spain—including one another. However, this is not all. Anderson examines eminent anthropologist Victor Turner's description of the journey, using the pilgrimage as an archetypal kind of journey, and nds that "the ways in which administrative organizations create meaning" are a signi cant element in the establishment of independent governments in Latin America. Religious communities are brought together by pilgrimages. For instance, during a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, "Malays, Persians, Indians, Berbers, and Turks" see one another and discover that they are all Muslims. Similar to how bureaucrats travel from their residences to the capital, this. When they arrive, they run into other bureaucrats from around the nation and inquire, "Why are we... here... together? and develop a sense of unity as citizens of the same state, empire, or nation. fi fi  Creole bureaucrats born in Spain's colonies in Latin America were not allowed to advance beyond their own colonies' capitals despite sharing a cultural heritage with Spaniards. For instance, a Creole from Peru might be able to get employment in Lima but never in Madrid. As a result, creoles born in the same colony were able to jointly lament their shared subjugation to the Spanish. This meant that identity did not form on the level of the empire as a whole, but rather on that of speci c colonies. The creoles were a signi cant social group since they simultaneously controlled and exploited the native populations in their colonies, assisted Spain in maintaining control over them, and were subject to Spain itself. White Creoles also intermarried and had o spring with locals all over the world, resulting in a mixed-race population. This alarmed the European overlords, who in turn reacted with a ferocious racism that conveniently helped the spread of slavery around the world. Until the end of the 1600s, printing presses in the Spanish colonies in the Americas "remained under the tight authority of monarch and church." Information was newsworthy if it spoke to the economic interests of the elite who participated in "the colonial administration and market-system," but independent newspapers initially "began essentially as appendages of the market" Furthermore, readers in one Latin American city rarely read newspapers from other cities, and this news from elsewhere to "create an imagined community among [...] fellow-readers.” fi ff fi  According to Anderson, this particular arrangement of "capitalism and technology"—which was locally produced but never applied throughout the empire—prevented the emergence of "a permanent Spanish-American wide nationalism." A contrast is provided by the British colonies that eventually became the United States. The thirteen colonies easily developed a common identity and a uni ed sense of nationalism because their total area was small —"smaller than Venezuela, and one third the size of Argentina"—and their principal cities, full of avid readers and merchants, were "bunched geographically together." In order to conclude the chapter, Anderson summarizes his main point: because capitalism and technology allowed distinct imagined communities to emerge in each region, independence movements in the Americas from 1760 to 1830 took "plural, "national" forms.” Economic interest, liberalism, and enlightenment were crucial in inspiring the colonies to rebel against empires, but they were insu cient to de ne the dimensions and boundaries of these envisioned communities. fi fi ffi