Term Paper 1 (LCL071510) - Anderson's Imagined Communities

Examining the “Cultural Artefacts” in Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

           

                        The concepts such as nation, nationalism and nation-ness which Benedict Anderson terms as the ‘cultural artefacts’ undergo a critical and historical investigation in his well known book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The book was originally titled as Imagined Communities and got published in 1983 and got reissued with new chapters and further revised in 1991 and 2006 respectively. Anderson arrived at his theory of ‘imagined communities’ since he felt that neither Marxism nor liberal theory could explain nationalism and believes that a nation is a community socially constructed, and imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.

                        Anderson is an Irish political scientist and, as Encyclopedia Britannica informs, his family heritage crosses national lines (Munro). He was born in China since his father was designated as a custom commissioner in the Imperial Martime Customs. He had to immigrate to the United States in 1941 and pursued his higher education. His early writings, including his doctoral dissertation, focused on Indonesian politics. He criticized Suharto regime which, though imparted uninterrupted rule in Indonesia, became authoritarian regime and fell into internal corruption and economic fall. He was barred from entering the country until after the dictator’s fall in 1998.  The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (1998), Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (2006), and Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination(2007). He published extensively on Indonesian culture and politics are his noteworthy writings. The publication of his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism established Anderson as one of the foremost thinkers on nationalism.

            The chapter titled “Imagined Communities: Nationalism’s Cultural Roots” provides an account of history of emergence of the concept of nation and nationalism. The concept was alien for the people of ancient time. Ernest Renan in his speech titled “What is a Nation?” delivered in Sorbonne in 1882, describes the process of evolution of nation from ancient time where there was no any concept called nation in the sense we use it today. They were unknown to the antiquity (Renan). Anderson inquires into see why is it people have so much commitment to and passion for an institution like nation which is an abstract and dispersed form of community. He states that if one traces the history, it could be observed that people were there who could die for their respective religion. But when it comes to the case of nationalism they could not only die for their nation but are also much concerned about their co-nationals.

            The reason for the emergence of nationalism, according to him, can be derived from the cultural history of nationalism which he traces back to the encounter between capitalism, printing technology and the diversity of national languages over space. From this historical investigation Anderson concludes that when these three join it becomes possible for large communities, peopled by individuals who had no personal or historical or even filiative relation to one another to imagine themselves as ‘fraternally’ joined.  For him nationalism developed as a form of monoculturalism.

It is said that since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms and thus grounded itself firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the prerevolutionary past. It has now become a matter of great dispute to define and provide explanations to these concepts; Nation, nationality, nationalism. There were scholars engaged in discussing the idea of nation who tend to glorify it. For him nation is like a soul, a spiritual principle and the past and the present constitutes this soul. “One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received”. He further proposes that the nation like the individual is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions. For him it is the heroic past with great men and glory is the social capital upon which the national idea rests. (Renan).

            Though a great account of influence of nationalism on modern world can be found there is no theory on nationalism is found. Marxist theory as well has failed to explain the concept and it is said that nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and has been omitted rather than confronting it.  It is said that there is a need for a deeper theoretical understanding of the concepts since both Marxist and liberal theory have become etiolated and a new reorientation of perspective is required. Thus, Anderson tries to explain nation, nationalism and nation-ness which he likes to call as the ‘cultural artifacts’ of a particular kind. In this particular book he looks at how they have come into historical being, in what way their meanings have changed over time and why, today, they have attained such profound emotional legitimacy. He tries to argue that the creation of these cultural artifacts towards the end of the eighteenth century is the result of complex ‘crossing’ of discreet historical forces but once they were created they attained a status in which it could accommodate with varying degrees of self-consciousness and variety of social terrains and also to get merged with or merge with varieties of ideological and political bunches.

            Anderson introduces three paradoxical statements regarding the concept of nation as he finds it necessary to go deep into the concept and thereby states that unlike most other isms, nationalism never produced its own grand thinkers. Therefore, a discreet analysis of the concept and understanding becomes necessary and for which he evolves a description as follows. Nation “is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. He explains that nation is ‘imagined’ because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, they will not have any personal communication with each other but yet in their mind each of them lives the image of their communion. Each community larger than primordial villages are imagined and they must be distinguished by the style in which they are imagined.

            Nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, containing a billion people may be, has finite boundaries and beyond which other nations lie. Therefore the nationalists do not dream of extension of its boundaries as it was possible for a religious community. Renan states that since Europe’s division into nations the attempt to exercise hegemony over the other has never been a long lasting one. It is not possible or in the future to establish a new empires like Roman or Charlemagnian. There is no more any chance to attain any universal domination since a new sort of equilibrium has been established (Renan). In an interview with Anderson that was conducted by Cynthia Foo, he claims that “[t]he whole idea of the nation is that it survives with other nations. It’s impossible to have only one nation in the world, so that the idea of only one nation is something odd. I think there are better things like sport contests, cultural exhibitions, which on the one hand, one could say, “Look what we can do,” and at the same time say, “Well, we’re going to show it to the world and we expect to see what the world has to say,” but on the condition that it means we also accept visits” (Foo).

            Anderson states that nation is sovereign because it originated when Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastical realm. The period is considered as the most mature period in the human history where even the strong advocators of religion cannot deny the living pluralism of its followers’ ontological claims and territorial stretch. The nations, in these circumstances, dreamed of being free and thus this freedom can be said as the feature of its sovereignty. Nation is, however, claimed as community because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may be found in it, nation is always conceived as a “deep, horizontal comradeship”. The 20th century is unprecedented in the number of people who lay down their lives for their nations. Death serves also to symbolize eternal continuity for a nation.

            Renan opines that a nation is a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make (Renan). Frantz fanon, while describing the consciousness of the native in his Wretched of the Earth states that during decolonization the native loses his individualism and comes across a different vocabulary consisting terms such as brother, sister, friend that will change the attitude of the native and the interest of one native will be discovered by the troops as everyone; either as everyone saved or everyone massacred (Fanon 47). The phenomenon of decolonization, and thereby a creation of a new nation, always associated violence and this definitely makes use of or is under the spell of the imagined communion among the people. Anderson states that “ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (257). The death in the name of nationalism is itself the problem to be enquired for which Anderson says the answer lies in the cultural roots of nationalism.

            Anderson then engages in discussing how one of the earlier forms of capitalist enterprises, book- publishing became a commodity and on the process became one of the reasons for the emergence of national consciousness. By and after 1500 there occurred a surge of print publications and the print publishers began establishing ‘international’ publishing houses. The print publishers became the largest capitalist concerned only to make profit since the years 1500 and 1550 and the literate Europe, especially the Latin-readers, became its first market. But as soon as Latin language became less used and read, this capitalist enterprise began to promote publications in vernacular languages.

            The impact of Reformation is said as the second reason for the emergence of nationalism success of which was largely owed to print-capitalism. Protestantism made use of the expanding vernacular print market being created by capitalism while the counter-reformation defended the stronghold of Latin. There occurred a coalition between Protestantism and print capitalism owing to Martin Luther’s central effort in making his theses available in print form and in German language to a very large reading public.

            Anderson views the slow, geographically uneven, spread of particular vernaculars as instruments of administrative centralization by certain “would-be” monarchs as the third cause of rise of national consciousness. This discouraged the monopoly and religious authority of a single language like Latin and it never had a true political analogue. Anderson suggests that the birth of administrative vernaculars, at least initially, must be considered as an independent factor in the sweeping away of the sacred imagined community. He provides the trajectory of use and dominance of vernacular languages in England and Seine and infers that “[i]n every instance the ‘choice’ of language appears as a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development” (Anderson 260). It was unlike the selfconscious language policies pursued by nineteenth century dynasts which confronted hostile popular linguistic-nationalism. Anyhow, Anderson argues that, the elevation of these vernaculars to the status of language-of-power made its contribution to the decline of the imagined community of Christendom.

            Anderson argues that the interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity made the new communities imaginable in a positive sense of it. Earlier, capitalism had to confront adversaries in the form of absence of linguistic unification but soon both capitalism and print created monoglot mass reading public. It is the interplay between fatality, technology, and capitalism which altogether led to irremediable linguistic diversity. He argues that there was nothing better than capitalism which could ‘assemble’ related vernaculars, within the limits imposed by grammars and syntaxes, to mechanically reproduce print-languages capable of dissemination through the market.

            According to Anderson, the print-languages laid the bases for national consciousness in three ways. Firstly, they created unified fields of exchange and communication and then gradually people began to notice thousands and millions of others using and communicating using their same language. And at the end, those thousands and millions of people felt belonged since through these print languages, actually, they were communicating with one another. Anderson says that it is those fellow readers who formed the embryo of the nationally imagined community in their secular, particular, and visible invisibility. Secondly, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language which in the long run, helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation. It helped create standards and build an image of antiquity. Thirdly, print-capitalism created languages-of-power which Anderson says different from the older administrative vernaculars. Those dialects ‘closer’ to print-language sustained its final form and other languages lost their ‘caste’.

            Anderson, following these arguments concludes that the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which set the stage for the modern nation.      The notion of imagined community, certainly, reminds certain literary works such as Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, which attempts to bring forth tension created in the human minds due to forceful divisions of people on the basis of ‘imagined’ boundaries or those shadow lines. Many of the partition novels or other such genres do impart similar tensions surrounding an ‘imagined community’. The ongoing wars which are inseparably linked with giant marketing strategies do shakes the preconceived ideas on nationalism, patriotism, and brotherhood and to view them objectively.

            The idea of imagined community has given ample exploratory scope and Homi Bhabha builds on this influential concept and stresses how nationality is narratively produced, rather than arising from an intrinsic essence. But, it has been criticized by postcolonial theorists. Encyclopedia Britannica states that they contend that using the prism of nationalism to study the history of colonized countries is to conflate the experience of the elite or bourgeoisie with that of the people as a whole. It also provides the postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee’s views on Anderson’s proposals. He rejected Anderson’s representation of nationalism as the creation of creole pioneers and argued that nationalism was an ideology imposed by the colonizing power such that “even our imaginations must forever remain colonized”. It states that apart from gaining share from critics, his work has been valued by many others as a groundbreaking contribution to a non-Eurocentric study of world history and nationalism (Munro).

            Though Anderson claimed nation as an imagined community he certainly points out that such imagining is strictly delimited. This delimitation describes the boundaries of the nation- who is in, who is out- but in doing so it also signals a limitation of what the nation as imagined community can contain. So the nation operates through a process of exclusion, not only of those who are outside it, but also of those aspects of its members that cannot be readily encompassed by description in terms of national identity (Carr-West 81).  Even within a particular community the members do exhibit certain features which in itself lie beyond the essential needs of its composition during its process of formation. The idea of ‘imagined community’ can be taken to even social units such as a particular caste-based community. A group of people begin to evolve certain sorts of values and principles and even a boundary through which it tries to create assert a ‘unified’ identity which is ultimately an ‘imagined’ one. But through this process there is, definitely, a chance for the practice of exclusionary politics which, in a way, may create a sense of absence of ‘belongingness’. The conceptualization of Tulunadu, which got intensified and still continuing, following the partition of earlier Madras presidency based on linguistic predominance, is said to be the part of an act of ‘imagining’ a new community of people sharing common interests.

            The audience of television channels is also an ‘imagined’ community with certain shared tastes which was the construct of media and telecasts news, entertainment programmes and sports which is again an ‘imagined’ one. On the contrary, the celebrity folk do becomes an ‘imagined’ community but here, in both cases imagined community is there. In Diaspora writings too we may come across similar sense of alienation, nostalgia, intense feeling of going ‘home’ back etc. which exhibits the deeply embedded patterns of thought and related emotions created in one’s own mind about his ‘homeland’ which is certainly an imagined community. In a sense, human interactions seem like mere abstractions of what people conceive as real or concrete. The exploitative capitalist manipulation of nationalistic idea may bring hostility among people but the idea of nation, however, sounds better than any of the past forms of administrations; religious or dynastic. Renan states that “[n]ations are not eternal… They have a beginning and they will have an end. At the present moment, the existence of nations is a good and even necessary thing. Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, a liberty that would be lost if the world had only one law and one master (Renan). However, Partha Chatterjee criticizes Anderson’s propositions of imagined communities by highlighting two aspects as erroneous. He states that Anderson focuses on the material, outside domain of the state and ignores the spiritual, inside domain. His concept of nationalism is “modular” since it was developed in Europe and United States. It was then got adopted by the colonies leaving nothing for the colonies to ‘imagine’. The modern west, according to him propagated ‘modular’ forms of national society and it is not true in the case of Asia and Africa and it’s nationalist imagination.. He observes that the history of nationalism or what he terms, nationalism’s autobiography is fundamentally flawed (Chatterjee 217).

            Anderson’s attempt to explore the ‘cultural artifacts’ has gained several critical acclaims and the discourse has paved the way for the critical understanding of the notions. Nationalism, which had been projected as a grand narrative of history of sacrifice for the freedom of nation, emergence and celebration of related concepts such as patriotism, brotherhood certainly turn out to be in need of further critical study. We understand that nation cannot be understood as having a singular meaning but as gaining plurality as per the socio-cultural context in which it takes birth and form.

            Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. "Imagined Communities: Nationalism’s Cultural Roots” . Imagined             Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso,             2006. 253-263.

Carr-West, Jonathan. "The Hybridity of Post-Colonial Literature." Francophone Post-Colonial          Cultures: Critical Essays (2003): 81-84.

Foo, Cynthia. "Interview with Benedict Anderson." Invisible Culture (2009).

Munro, Andre. “Benedict Anderson: Irish Political Scientist”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2015.   Web. 10 Oct. 2015.

Renan, Ernest. "What is a Nation?" Ernest Renan. Paris: Presses-Pocket, 1992. 11.

Vijayasree, C., et al. Nation in Imagination: Essays on Nationalism, Sub-Nationalism and             Narration. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited.  2007, Print.