Notes on Benedict Anderson

• 1: Introduction
• 2: Cultural Roots
• 3: The Origins of National Consciousness
• 4: Creole Pioneers
• 5: Old Languages, New Models
• 6: Official Nationalisms and Imperialism
• 7. The Last Wave

1: Introduction

• Current conflicts between Marxist nations have no class conflict inherent in them, and are instead based on national terms.
• Nations aren’t necessarily set in stone, many are breaking off newly.
• Paradoxes of Nationalism:
  • objective modernity vs subjective antiquity
  • absolute universality vs irredeemable particularity
  • political power vs philosophical poverty/incoherence
• More like a religion
• Proposed definition:
  • Imagined community:
    • Most people will never interact
    • Gellner says nations are invented, but they’re imagined, not “false”.
  • (Imagined as) Inherently limited and Sovereign:
    • There must be an other
    • Unlike religion, which seeks to encompass and be universally applicable to all
  • Community?:
    • Conceived as horizontal, despite all differences
    • Allows people to die for the abstract nation

2: Cultural Roots

• All religions have answers for the metaphysical - why do people die, why is someone blind, the concept of a continuity.
• Evolutionary/progressive styles of thinking answer these with stoic silence, “do not know”. Marxism included.
• The idea of Nationalism turns chance to magical destiny.
• Not a suggestion that Nationalism superseded religion, but that the phenomenon can be understood by aligning it against largely held cultural beliefs, and not self-consciously held political beliefs.
• Consider religious communities:
  • Vast territorial reaches, imaginable only through a sacred language and written script that is far removed from all those involved.
  • Distinct difference from modern imagined community: confidence in the sacredness of the language, hence allowing for incorporation via learning the sacred script. Han behaviour towards “barbarians”, Colombian liberal on “extinguishing (American) Indians” by giving property, inter-marriage, as opposed to straight up genocide.
  • Still, the language is only known to a select few. Centripetal society with only the clergy/top religious leaders having the power to translate the divine language to the common tongue.
  • How did the religious communities break up into incoherence over time? Two things:
    • Exploration of other (non-European?) worlds, expanding cultural horizon. Marco Polo writes about the Khan, assigning soft territorial limits to his imaginings of religion. Rica 4 centuries later, does it intentionally.
    • The demotion of the sacred language, as a result of the explosion of vernacular and expanded education. Highly probably a result of Print Capitalism.
• Consider Dynasties:
  • Kinship based on a centre, legitimized not through the power of the people but through ‘divine will’. No contesting it, if you’re under the ambit of it. Expanded through warfare and sexual politics.
  • This power starts waning in the 16th century. Dynasties happen to be the primary till the early 20th century, but near the end you can see them, too, reaching into “national consciousness” to legitimize their rule.
• Consider the imagination of time and culture. Messianic time ≠ Modern time. Simultaneity-along-time vs Homogeneous, empty, common time.
• We can consider a social organism moving through homogeneous time, like the characters in a contemporary novel that never interact, but do their work and we know, as the omnipotent reader, their relation to society. It isn’t the narration of events among heroes of the epics. The reader in the contemporary novel might draw analogue to their own real world, the situation may be placed such by the author. The old one, the story is flashbacks in a conversation. The modern one has the hero in detail, but not specific - a nationalist story can generalise to any such person, a symbol rather than a person, invoking the full spirit of the imagined community.

3: The Origins of National Consciousness

TODO

4: Creole Pioneers

(Rough)

• there was fear of lower class
• First novel 1816
• shared journey, administrative bounds beyond just market
• Europeans not in Europe. Call for administrative freedom while trying to maintain the borders.
• Would not have happened without print capitalism:
  • Print in New Spain for 2 centuries, but under the church
  • Newspaper as source of income for print capitalists:
  • Newspapers create an imagined community due to the structure of all the content on one page
  • Newspapers also provincial and plural
• Summary: Framework if new consciousness comes from creole journey and creole printmen, not economic interest, Liberalism, or Enlightenment

5: Old Languages, New Models

(Rough)

• In Europe, unlike America, “national print languages” important
• Growth of comparative history does something:
  • Writing gives rise to the conception of extra-European antiquity. Linguistics as the first science with evolution at it’s very core, (Hobsbawm The Age of Revolution)
  • Since no language now belongs to God, it now belongs to the language’s native speakers and readers
• Lots of examples of vernacular attaining print status.
• The middle class starts to rise:
  • Literate in the vernacular, that now has print status. Literate bourgeoisie.
  • Increasing infiltration in involvement in the bureaucracy.
  • Kinship across borders no longer based on communities of marriage (think kings), but awareness of plurality. Yet, limited by language.
• Whichever language gets print-status benefits disproportionately its speakers if competing against a minority tongue.
• Nairn: ‘middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history … language they understood.’ Does not explain why the idea is so popular
• Reason for popularity is writing. ‘Memory of print’. Experience shaped into a concept, carried over print, imagined as a model.

6: Official Nationalisms and Imperialism

(Rough)

• Scots had no barricade, compare to 13 colonies.
• On shared journey: Pal and Indian Magistrates, 409
• Not just Indians, but South Africans, Australians, etc.
• Even Japan did the no lateral journey thing
• Official nationalisms:
  • Not possible until popular linguistic nationalism
  • Response by power group to maintain their status
  • Conservative, reactionary.
  • Discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm.

7. The Last Wave

TODO

• Shared journey through common schooling
• Shared journey preserves ‘Indonesia’ p. 132
• Not about language, but print capitalism.
• Swiss got print-capitalism late.
• Last wave made possible by achievements of industrial Capitalism p. 139