Imagined Communities
Metadata
- Author: Benedict Anderson
- ASIN: B00G2DO172
- ISBN: 1844670864
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B00G2DO172
- Kindle link
Highlights
Supposing ‘antiquity’ were, at a certain historical juncture, the necessary consequence of ‘novelty’? If nationalism was, as I supposed it, the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness, should not awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create its own narrative? Seen from this perspective, the atavistic fantasizing characteristic of most nationalist thought after the 1820s appears an epiphenomenon; what is really important is the structural alignment of post-1820s nationalist ‘memory’ with the inner premises and conventions of modern biography and autobiography. — location: 120
Conversely, the fact that the Soviet Union shares with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the rare distinction of refusing nationality in 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. — location: 155
Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time. — location: 163
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. — location: 181
The ‘political’ power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. — location: 195
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.’ — location: 198
(This is why so many different nations have such tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans, Argentinians . — location: 278
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. — location: 285
The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering – 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 Marxism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence. — location: 288
The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. — location: 298
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.7 And, as truth-languages, imbued with an impulse largely foreign to nationalism, the impulse towards conversion. — location: 344
13 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). — location: 385
Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, — location: 418
But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. — location: 420
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. — location: 452
Christendom assumed its universal form through a myriad of specificities and particularities: this relief, that window, this sermon, that tale, this morality play, that relic. — location: 466
It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present. — location: 488
its not quite tht
We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that. (Contrast sugar, the use of which proceeds in an unclocked, continuous flow; it may go bad, but it does not go out of date.) 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. — location: 644
of course now we do have a continuous flow.
What are we to make of a scientific materialism which formally accepts the findings of physics about matter, yet makes so little effort to link these findings with the class struggle, revolution, or whatever. Does not the abyss between protons and the proletariat conceal an unacknowledged metaphysical conception 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. — location: 683
Gellner stresses the typical foreignness of dynasties, but interprets the phenomenon too narrowly: local aristocrats prefer an alien monarch because he will not take sides in their internal rivalries. Thought and Change, p. 136. — location: 739
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. — location: 745
crucial
Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel-door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German translation, and ‘within 15 days [had been] seen in every part of the country.’8 In the two decades 1520–1540 three times as many books were published in German as in the period 1500–1520, an astonishing transformation to which Luther was absolutely central. — location: 871
The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new reading publics – not least among merchants and women, who typically knew little or no Latin – and simultaneously mobilized them for politico-religious purposes. Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that was shaken to its core. The same earthquake produced Europe’s first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans. (François I’s panic was as much political as religious.) — location: 888
non dynastic non city states. is crucial.
In every instance, the ‘choice’ of language appears as a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development. — location: 916
cd be nation defining tho
First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. — location: 944
Their disadvantaged cousins, still assimilable to the emerging print-language, lost caste, above all because they were unsuccessful (or only relatively successful) in insisting on their own print-form. ‘Northwestern German’ became Platt Deutsch, a largely spoken, thus sub-standard, German, because it was assimilable to print-German in a way that Bohemian spoken-Czech was not. High German, the King’s English, and, later, Central Thai, were correspondingly elevated to a new politico-cultural eminence. — location: 957
The fate of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the zones incorporated into today’s Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the USSR is especially exemplary. A family of spoken languages, once everywhere assemblable, thus comprehensible, within an Arabic orthography, has lost that unity as a result of conscious manipulations. To heighten Turkish–Turkey’s national consciousness at the expense of any wider Islamic identification, Atatürk imposed compulsory romanization.23 The Soviet authorities followed suit, first with an anti-Islamic, anti-Persian compulsory romanization, then, in Stalin’s 1930s, with a Russifying compulsory Cyrillicization. — location: 967
For a useful discussion of this point, see S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, chapter 5. That the sign ough is pronounced differently in the words although, bough, lough, rough, cough, and hiccough, shows both the idiolectic variety out of which the now-standard spelling of English emerged, and the ideographic quality of the final product. — location: 1018
In the second place, there are serious reasons to doubt the applicability in much of the Western hemisphere of Nairn’s otherwise persuasive thesis that: The arrival of nationalism in a distinctively modern sense was tied to the political baptism of the lower classes … Although sometimes hostile to democracy, nationalist movements have been invariably populist in outlook and sought to induct lower classes into political life. In its most typical version, this assumed the shape of a restless middle-class and intellectual leadership trying to sit up and channel popular class energies into — location: 1039
The anthropologist Victor Turner has written illuminatingly about the ‘journey’, between times, statuses and places, as a meaning-creating experience. — location: 1124
All such journeys require interpretation (for example, the journey from birth to death has given rise to various religious conceptions.) — location: 1125
In a pre-print age, the reality of the imagined religious community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless travels. — location: 1137
Why are we … here … together?’) — location: 1158
this is all superb
but many a peninsular official, living down the same street, would, if he could help it, not read the Caracas production. — location: 1253
lol telegraph n times
First, in almost all of them ‘national print-languages’ were of central ideological and political importance, whereas Spanish and English were never issues in the revolutionary Americas. Second, all were able to work from visible models provided by their distant, and after the convulsions of the French Revolution, not so distant, predecessors. The ‘nation’ thus became something capable of being consciously aspired to from early on, rather than a slowly sharpening frame of vision. Indeed, as we shall see, the ‘nation’ proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent. It became available for pirating by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands. — location: 1415
Exalted by the philhellenism at the centres of Western European civilization, they undertook the ‘debarbarizing’ of the modern Greeks, i.e., their transformation into beings worthy of Pericles and Socrates. — location: 1487
this connects romanticism with nationalism - Byron etc. modern greece (country ) can connect with ancient
But once it had occurred, it entered the accumulating memory of print. The overwhelming and bewildering concatenation of events experienced by its makers and its victims became a ‘thing’ – and with its own name: The French Revolution. Like a vast shapeless rock worn to a rounded boulder by countless drops of water, the experience was shaped by millions of printed words into a ‘concept’ on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model. Why ‘it’ broke out, what ‘it’ aimed for, why ‘it’ succeeded or failed, became subjects for endless polemics on the part of friends and foes: but of its ‘it-ness’, as it were, no one ever after had much doubt.33 — location: 1619
fucking ukip
Before climbing the ramp of his jet, he kissed the earth for the photographers and announced that he was taking a small quantity of sacred Iranian soil with him. This take is lifted from — location: 1756
— location: 1757
soil! linkijng power and legitimacy to the earth
The key to situating ‘official nationalism’ – willed merger of nation and dynastic empire – is to remember that it developed after, and in reaction to, the popular national movements proliferating in Europe since the 1820s. If these nationalisms were modelled on American and French histories, so now they became modular in turn. — location: 1768
A thoroughly English educational system was to be introduced which, in Macaulay’s own ineffable words, would create ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.’ — location: 1839
In mind and manners he was as much an Englishman as any Englishman. It was no small sacrifice for him, because in this way he completely estranged himself from the society of his own people and became socially and morally a pariah among them… . He was as much a stranger in his own native land as the European residents in the country. — location: 1867
hard not to feel perceptions of those abroad of he homeland had a part to play. differentiation with locals
The Japanese peasantry was freed from subjection to the feudal han-system and henceforth exploited directly by the state and commercial-agricultural landowners.28 In 1889, there followed a Prussian-style constitution and eventually universal male suffrage. — location: 1904
suffrage as path to conscription
The most striking example of this – an example which in its odd way looks forward to contemporary Saudi Arabia – was his encouragement of a massive immigration of young, single, male foreigners to form the disoriented, politically powerless workforce needed to construct port facilities, build railway lines, dig canals, and expand commercial agriculture. This importing of gastarbeiter paralleled, indeed was modelled on, the policies of the authorities in Batavia and Singapore. And as in the case of the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya, the great bulk of the labourers imported during the nineteenth century were from southeastern China. It is instructive that this policy caused him neither personal qualms nor political difficulties – no more than it did the colonial rulers on whom he modelled himself. Indeed the policy made good short term sense for a dynastic state, since it created an impotent working class ‘outside’ Thai society and left that society largely ‘undisturbed.’ — location: 1976
fascinating !
The utility of foreigners and guests is so great that they can be given a place of sixth importance among the royal ornaments… . For, as the guests come from various regions and provinces, they bring with them various languages and customs, various knowledges and arms. All these adorn the royal court, heighten its splendour, and terrify the haughtiness of foreign powers. For a country unified in language and customs is fragile and weak… . — location: 2114
largely spontaneous popular nationalisms — location: 2124
In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm. — location: 2129
In the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it. — location: 2136
not sure thats whats going on here
and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I. — location: 2141
The thuggery was mainly the work of the notorious ‘pandoors,’ part of the army put at the disposal of the county administrators and deployed as a violent rural police. — location: 2242
Surely they also reflect the characteristic mindset of a well-known type of leftwing European intellectual, proud of his command of the civilized languages, his Enlightenment heritage, and his penetrating understanding of everyone else’s problems. In this pride, internationalist and aristocratic ingredients are rather evenly mixed. — location: 2270
and what Debray calls ‘our secular antagonism to Germany’.8 Magna Carta, the Mother of Parliaments, and the Glorious Revolution, glossed as English national history, entered schools all over the British Empire. — location: 2362
should not be surprised therefore if the pilgrimages of these boys, terminating in Dakar, were initially read in French [West] African terms, of which the paradoxical concept négritude – essence of African-ness expressible only in French, language of the William Ponty classrooms – is an unforgettable symbol. — location: 2438
ahh. michel tournier four kings.
Called dienstmaleisch (perhaps ‘service-Malay’ or ‘administrative-Malay’), it belonged typologically with ‘Ottoman’ and that ‘fiscal German’ which emerged from the polyglot barracks of the Habsburg empire. — location: 2562
It is always a mistake to treat languages in the way that certain nationalist ideologues treat them – as emblems of nation-ness, like flags, costumes, folk-dances, and the rest. — location: 2573
fucking farage on his fucking train
(Here there are resemblances to the conjuring up of mediaeval Christendom through visual representations and bilingual literati.) — location: 2589
not sure wbat the point is here
Nationalist leaders are thus in a position consciously to deploy civil and military educational systems modelled on official nationalism’s; elections, party organizations, and cultural celebrations modelled on the popular nationalisms of ninteenth-century Europe; and the citizen-republican idea brought into the world by the Americas. — location: 2591
Except for the absence of monarchical institutions, the picture is not much different from that of the innumerable petty principalities within the Holy Roman Empire, of which Liechtenstein, on Switzerland’s eastern border, is a last odd relic. — location: 2629
The ‘last wave’ of nationalisms, most of them in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa, was in its origins a response to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism. As Marx put it in his inimitable way: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole face of the globe.’ — location: 2661
So too, if historians, diplomats, politicians, and social scientists are quite at ease with the idea of ‘national interest,’ for most ordinary people of whatever class the whole point of the nation is that it is interestless. Just for that reason, it can ask for sacrifices. — location: 2893
note populism post
(If people imagined the proletariat merely as a group in hot pursuit of refrigerators, holidays, or power, how far would they, including members of the proletariat, be willing to die for it?) — location: 2901
this and footnote is something that has been a common recdent narrative
If English-speakers hear the words ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ – created almost four-and-a-half centuries ago – they get a ghostly intimation of simultaneity across homogeneous, empty time. — location: 2908
yes - Dartmoor
Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed. — location: 2924
bizlang
The passage can, of course, up to a point be translated. But the eerie splendour of ‘probable Meridian of time,’ ‘Mechanicall preservations,’ ‘such Mummies unto our memories,’ and ‘two Methusela’s of Hector’ can bring goose-flesh to the napes only of English-readers. — location: 2949
If every language is acquirable, its acquisition requires a real portion of a person’s life: each new conquest is measured against shortening days. — location: 2959
What limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness but one’s own mortality. — location: 2960
The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. — location: 2976
tho lol “the fact of the matter is” but a+ apothegm
(Thus for the Nazi, the Jewish German was always an impostor.) — location: 2979
sean spicer hitler did not gas his own people
The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and ‘breeding’ among aristocracies. — location: 2980
bourgeois nationalist, but Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau.18 Nor that, on the whole, racism and anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.19 — location: 2983
As has been repeatedly emphasized official nationalism was typically a response on the part of threatened dynastic and aristocratic groups – upper classes – to popular vernacular nationalism. — location: 2987
Colonial racism was a major element in that conception of ‘Empire’ which attempted to weld dynastic legitimacy and national community. — location: 2989
It did so by generalizing a principle of innate, inherited superiority on which its own domestic position was (however shakily) based to the vastness of the overseas possessions, covertly (or not so covertly) conveying the idea that if, say, English lords were naturally superior to other Englishmen, no matter: these other Englishmen were no less superior to the subjected natives. — location: 2990
Indeed one is tempted to argue that the existence of late colonial empires even served to shore up domestic aristocratic bastions, since they appeared to confirm on a global, modern stage antique conceptions of power and privilege. — location: 2992
It could do so with some effect because – and here is our second reason – the colonial empire, with its rapidly expanding bureaucratic apparatus and its ‘Russifying’ policies, permitted sizeable numbers of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off centre court: i.e. anywhere in the empire except at home. — location: 2994
Notice that there is no obvious, selfconscious antonym to ‘slant.’ ‘Round’? ‘Straight’? ‘Oval’? — location: 3086
except see “round eye”
and a sensitivity to status, prominent traits well into the twentieth century. Fed by — location: 3096
victimhood
One should therefore not be much surprised if revolutionary leaderships, consciously or unconsciously, come to play lord of the manor. — location: 3211
that has been, for a century now, on the trail of an aboriginal Eden. — location: 3333
this
Here the peculiarity of the new census becomes apparent. It tried carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining. — location: 3371
The flow of subject populations through the mesh of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations and immigration offices created ‘traffic-habits’ which in time gave real social life to the state’s earlier fantasies. — location: 3376
Organized roughly by the quadrant, their main features were written-in notes on marching and sailing times, required because the mapmakers had no technical conception of scale. Covering only terrestrial, profane space, they were usually drawn in a queer oblique perspective or mixture of perspectives, as if the drawers’ eyes, accustomed from daily life to see the landscape horizontally, at eye-level, nonetheless were influenced subliminally by the verticality of the cosmograph. Thongchai points out that these guide-maps, always local, were never situated in a larger, stable geographic context, and that the bird’s-eye view convention of modern maps was wholly foreign to them. — location: 3412
Boundary-stones and similar markers did exist, and indeed multiplied along the western fringes of the realm as the British pressed in from Lower Burma. But these stones were set up discontinuously at strategic mountain passes and fords, and were often substantial distances from corresponding stones set up by the adversary. — location: 3423
Dartmoor
Thongchai notes that the vectoral convergence of print-capitalism with the new conception of spatial reality presented by these maps had an immediate impact on the vocabulary of Thai politics. Between 1900 and 1915, the traditional words krung and muang largely disappeared, because they imaged dominion in terms of sacred capitals and visible, discontinuous population centres. — location: 3431
They were on the march to put space under the same surveillance which the census-makers were trying to impose on persons. Triangulation by triangulation, war by war, treaty by treaty, the alignment of map and power proceeded. — location: 3442
Pure sign, no longer compass to the world. In this shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series, available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and textbook covers, tablecloths, and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable, everywhere visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms being born. — location: 3471
It is noticeable how heavily concentrated archaeological efforts were on the restoration of imposing monuments (and how these monuments began to be plotted on maps for public distribution and edification: a kind of necrological census was under way). — location: 3528
The ‘weft’ was what one could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made up of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series, and was to be handled in this light. — location: 3591
fungible
(No subsequent revolution has had quite this sublime confidence of novelty, not least because the French Revolution has always been seen as an ancestor.) — location: 3810
And since in the vanguard of most European popular nationalist movements were literate people often unaccustomed to using these vernaculars, this anomaly needed explanation. None seemed better than ‘sleep,’ for it permitted those intelligentsias and bourgeoisies who were becoming conscious of themselves as Czechs, Hungarians, or Finns to figure their study of Czech, Magyar, or Finnish languages, folklores, and musics as ‘rediscovering’ something deep-down always known. — location: 3855
It is an astonishing sign of the depth of Eurocentrism that so many European scholars persist, in the face of all the evidence, in regarding nationalism as a European invention. — location: 4044