Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

-Benedict Anderson
Contents

I. Introduction

II. Cultural Roots

III. The Origins of National Consciousness

IV. Creole Pioneers

Contents

V. Old Languages, New Models

VI. Official Nationalism and Imperialism

VII. The Last Wave

Contents
VIII. Patriotism and Racism

IX. The Angel of History

X. Census, Map, Museum

XI. Memory and Forgetting

Introduction
• Aim:
To offer some tentative suggestions for a
more satisfactory interpretation of the
'anomaly' of nationalism.
• Topic:
Nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism
Concepts and Definition
• Nation: It is an imagined political
community that is imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign.
• It is imagined because members will never
know most of their fellow-members, yet in
the minds of each lives the image of their
communion.

Introduction
Concepts and Definition
• It is limited because it has finite, though elastic
boundaries beyond which lies other nations.
• It is sovereign because it came to maturity at a
stage of human history when freedom was a
rare and precious ideal.
• It is imagined as a community because it is
conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

Introduction
Cultural Roots
Changes in the following created the
conditions under which nationalism may have
emerged:
• THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY
• THE DYNASTIC REALM
• APPREHENSIONS OF TIME
The Religious Community
• Decline of belief that there is a sacred text
that irrevocably embodies truth.
• Changes in the religious community gave
rise to the belief that nationalism was a
secular solution to the question of
continuity that has been answered
previously, by religious faith.

Cultural Roots
The Religious Community
Cause of the fall:
• Effect of the explorations of the non-
European world
• Gradual demotion of the sacred language.
Old sacred languages were fragmented,
vernaculars gained popularity.

Cultural Roots
The Dynastic Realm
• The principle of Legitimacy of sacral
monarchy began its slow decline.
• Decline of the belief that society was
naturally organized around and under high
centers-monarchs who ruled under some
form of cosmological dispensation or divine
providence.

Cultural Roots
Apprehensions Of Time
• The idea of a sociological organism moving
calendrically through homogenous, empty
time is a precise analogue of the idea of
the nation, which also is conceived as a
solid community moving steadily through
history.

Cultural Roots
Two forms of imagining in Europe, 18th
century:
• The Novel
• The Newspaper
Provided technical means for representing
the nation, an imagined community.

Cultural Roots
The Origins of National
Consciousness
Cultural consciousness took the form of
nationalism due to the interaction between:
• a system of production and productive relations
(capitalism)
• a technology of communications (print)
• the fatality of human linguistic diversity
Capitalism
• The expansion of the book market aided by:
• change in the character of Latin
• the impact of the Reformation, which led to
the mass production of religious texts
• the spread of particular vernaculars as
instruments of administrative centralization

The Origins of National Consciousness

Print
• Print languages laid the foundation for national
consciousness by:
• creating unified fields of exchange and
communication
• giving a new fixity to language
• they created languages-of-power of a kind
different from the older administrative
vernaculars

The Origins of National Consciousness

Creole Pioneers
• Creole States: communities that were formed
and led by people who shared a common
language and common descent with those
against whom they fought.
• Creole (Criollo)- person of (at least
theoretically) pure European descent but
born anywhere outside Europe.
The first nations to conceive nation-ness were not in Western Europe
but in Latin America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Factors Of Latin American Nationalism

• the tightening of control on creole
communities
• Liberalism and the Enlightenment

Creole Pioneers
Factors…
• the improvement of trans-Atlantic
communication
• the willingness of the ''comfortable classes'' to
make sacrifices in the name of freedom
• creole functionaries pilgrimage
• provincial creole printmen and the rise of the
newspaper

Creole Pioneers
Old Languages, New Models
• Onset of the age of nationalism in Europe.
• Two striking features:
• “National print-languages” were of central
ideological and political importance.
• the nation became something capable of
being consciously aspired to from early on
due to the ''models'' set forth by the
Creole pioneers.
• Vernacular print capitalism is important to
class formation, particularly the rise of the
bourgeoisie.
• The nobility then were potential consumers
of the philological revolution.
• As soon as the events of the Americas
reached the European nobility through
print, the imagined realities of nation-states
became models for Europe.
Old Languages, New Models
Official Nationalism and
Imperialism
• From about the middle of the 19th C there
developed ''official nationalism'' in Europe.
• The oligarchy’s prime models were the self
naturalizing dynasties of Europe.
• Official nationalism concealed a discrepancy
between nation and dynastic realm.
Official Nationalism and Imperialism
The Last Wave
• The last wave of nationalism was the
transformation of the colonial-state to the
national state facilitated by:
• increase in physical mobility
• increasing bureaucratization
• the spread of modern-style education

The Last Wave

• Official nationalism brought the idea of
''national histories'' into the consciousness
of the colonized.
• The Last Wave arose in a period of world
history in which the nation was becoming
an international norm and in which it
became possible to ''model'' nationness in
a more complex way than before.

The Last Wave

 Patriotism and Racism
• Nation came to be:

imagined modeled adapted transformed

• People’s attachment for the invention of their

imagination, why they are ready to die for
their inventions?

Patriotism and Racism

• Nation-ness is ''natural'' in the sense that it
contains something that is not chosen
(much like gender, skin color, and
parentage).
• Nationalism thinks in terms of historical
destinies, while racism dreams of eternal
contaminations whose origins lie outside of
history.
• Nation was conceived by language, not in
blood.
Patriotism and Racism
The Angel of History
• Nationalism has undergone a process of
modulation and adaptation, according to
different eras, political regimes, economies,
and social structures.
• To limit or prevent wars, nationalism is the
pathology of modern developmental history,
do our slow best to learn the real, and
imagine experience of the past.
The Angel of History
Census, Map, Museum
• These three institutions of power profoundly
shaped the way in which the colonial state
imagined its dominion:
• CENSUS
• MAP
• MUSEUM

Census, Map, Museum

CENSUS
• Created ''identities'' imagined by the
classifying mind of the colonial state
• The fiction of the census is that everyone is
in it, and that everyone has one, and only
one, extremely clear place.

Census, Map, Museum

MAP
• Basis of a totalizing classification.
• Designed to demonstrate the antiquity of
specific, tightly bounded territorial units.
• Served as a logo, instantly recognizable
and visible everywhere, that formed a
powerful emblem for the anticolonial
nationalism being born.
Census, Map, Museum
MUSEUM
• Allowed the state to appear as the guardian
of tradition, and this power was enhanced
by the infinite reproducibility of the symbols
of tradition

Census, Map, Museum

Memory and Forgetting
• The 19th century imagining of fraternity,
emerging naturally in a society fractured by
the most violent racial, class and regional
antagonism, show that nationalism
represented a new form of consciousness.
• Selective 'historical' memory and forgetting
is an integral part of nation creation.

Memory and Forgetting

Discussion Questions:
1. How do you understand “nation” as defined
by Benedict Anderson?
2. What do you think is the significance in the
decline of religious and dynastic influences
in the rise of nationalism?
3. What do you think was the most powerful
factor that led to imaginings that produced a
community, called “nation”?
4. What is the role of racism in erasing nation-
ness and nationalism?