Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Paperback – September 13, 2016

Anderson highlights the ''imaginary'' part of nationalism. The nation is just a mental construct, and a recent one at that. This can require a shift in mental gears to one who feels devotion to his 'nation' is what makes life significant. And anyone that feels his group is connected to some eternal past/future will be stunned. Anderson covers abundant historical and emotional evidence to support his theme.

For example, what unites millions of diverse individuals? What shared customs confirms their connectedness? Not daily prayers to God, but morning/evening mental unity with all fellow news readers/listeners. -

''The significance of this mass ceremony –Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers –is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull.''

How can this isolated, individual action produce unity?

'''Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?'' (33)

Each reader/listener knows exactly the thoughts of all! What connection. What unity!

1 Introduction
2 Cultural Roots
3 The Origins of National Consciousness
4 Creole Pioneers
5 Old Languages, New Models
6 Official Nationalism and Imperialism
7 The Last Wave
8 Patriotism and Racism
9 The Angel of History
10 Census, Map, Museum
11 Memory and Forgetting Travel and Traffic: On the Geo-biography of Imagined Communities
Bibliography
Index

Anderson is not sympathetic to nationalism. From the introduction -

''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 history, as inescapable as “neurosis” in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable.’'

Wow!

The connection/contrast of nationalism with religion surfaces consistently.

''The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, 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.''

This distinction is crucial for modern nationalism.

''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 freedom is the sovereign state.''

Key idea. Nationalism is a recent invention due to the demise of Christendom.

Many other insights. Writing is not always smooth or clear. Sometimes feels like reader is thrown into the middle of a conversation without background. Some subjects seem to continue beyond what is needed. Examples so detailed that idea submerged.

Nevertheless, interesting and eye opening.

(This note added 6/2/18. Recently found the work of Professor Hans Kohn. Spent lifetime of scholarship on Nationalism, history, meaning, impact, etc., etc.. Great!)

The recent rise of nationalism, as reflected by the vitriolic nature of national politics in many countries had inspired me to seek answers in Benjamin Anderson’s seminal work. ‘The Imagined Communities’ was originally published in 1983, and the current revised edition was released in 2006. This is the definitive text on the nationalism. Anderson postulates that nations are a complex, socio-political, and cultural constructs that emerge in the imagining of groups of people. He traces three main, interrelated themes of influence in the imagining of nations.
Firstly, he explores the influence of language, script and mass literacy, with the fall of the old ‘sacred’ languages like Latin and the spread of vernacular language through the advent of ‘print capitalism’ (a happy merger between print technology and capitalism). Secondly, the de-authorization of centripetal power structures, like monarchies and dynasties with divinely vested rule is examined. Finally, the very notion of time are reimagined is flat and continuous.
Benedict Anderson makes his concepts relevant to global citizens by drawing examples from Europe and the former colonies in the Americas and Asia. The independence achieved by the colonies in the Americas were in a different time and had different influences, compared to the fairly recent colonial independence of the South East Asian countries. Being a South East Asian scholar, Anderson lovingly contrasts the colonies of French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, detailing the influences that caused Indochina to fragment into three separate states (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), while the vast and varied island populations of Dutch East Indies to meld with relative harmony into Indonesia. Also explored are the shaping of a nation’s borders and consciousness by its conquerors by means of economic and military defined maps, national census that require categorisation of people and the propaganda of antiquities in museums.
This is a compelling read, albeit a fairly difficult one. Anderson writes mainly in English, but scattered in are words, sentences and paragraphs in innumerable other languages, thus the narration is stunted. Also, the author writes for a more educated audience, as a layperson in the fields of sociology, political science, and history, I struggled with the sometimes unhelpful footnotes and references. Nevertheless, this is a compelling read, and I am happy to note translated to many languages to reach a wider audience.

Great on Nationalism as a finished modular Euro-Western product. Weak on the Afro-Asian aspect. Modernist prophet of nationalism of the gang of four: Gelner, Bedourie, Hobsbawm.

A classic look at the inherent constructedness of nationalism, Anderson's book and his definition of the nation as a (limited and sovereign) imagined community are still essential to any study of modern nationalism or the rise of nation-states. He bases the rise of the nation on the development of print culture in Europe, which helped popularize vernacular literature and standardize national languages. Two criticisms: (1) despite his use of examples from around the world, his analysis is still quite Eurocentric. For example, I'm not sure if his theory can deal with the fact that China had print culture 500 years before Gutenberg, had a standardized script 1000 years before that, yet did not form a "nation" that would fit his definition. (2) The nationalism Anderson describes in detail is really a nationalism of literate elites, especially beyond his "first wave" of nationalism in the Americas. Here Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen would be a good complement. But the book is still extremely valuable, and eye-opening for anyone who believes that their nation really has primordial origins.