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    © All Rights Reserved
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    8 views15 pages

    Anderson, Cultural Roots

    Uploaded by

    CIELO OTADOY

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 15
    ee 2 Se Cultural Roots eS No mote arretting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism F exist: dhan cenotaph ‘and tombs’of Unknown Soldiers. ‘The public ccromonial reverence accorded these mobiments precisely ‘because Bey na Ted ore them, has no true precedents in earlier times:' To feel the force of this snodemity one has only to imagine the general reaction tothe busy- ‘body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier's name or insisted on : 1. Taeancion Gress hd ceotaph bu or ecif; Lnownnividal who ‘orcs, for one reason or another, could not be retrieved for regular burial. Lowe this 9 IMAGINED COMMUNITIES ered with impatient silence.> At the ifaedom, He belong co the preset, wo wr, by bit vires and bis achicrements” Beagles Micha, "buy, Hone Gray Add aU, Miliary 10 ‘CULTURAL ROOTS same time, in different ways, religious thought also: responds: 60: obscure intimations of ty, generally by transforming fatality into continuity {karma, original sin, ete.) In this way, it concerns itself with thelinks between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child’s com ception and birth without dimly apprehending 2 corribined con~ nectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a Language of ‘continuity’? (Again, the disadvantage of evolutionary/progressive thought is an almost Heraclitean hostility to any idea of continuity.) bring up these peibaps simpleminded observations primarily because in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only © the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of IMAGINED COMMUNITIES ‘lide into a limidess future, It is the magic of nationalism to rorn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, ‘Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born Prench; but after all, France is eternal.” {HE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY ‘Few things ate more impressive than the vas rositotial stretch ofthe ‘Ummah Islam from Morocco to the Sul Archipelago, of Christendom > from Paraguay to Japan, and of the Buddhist world from Sri Lanka incorporated conceptions of immerise communities. Bat Christenom, ‘the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom - which, though we think of it today as Chinese, imagined itself not as Chinese, but at © 48 pei 4972, p-105, Erphaa added. Similarly, Kemal Rate named one of his BONED "LF i danke (tee Bua) tod andere Saneria Bak | {enon Watson, Nantel Sin, p. 289), Thee bas flrish today nod here isso ‘Feuon fy deur shor many Turks pombly nor excloling Kemal Newel, ricaly So '. Hence the equasimisy with which Sizicized Mongols and Manches were cceptad at Sons of Heaven, B IMAGINED COMMUNITIES the whites, declaring he fof rib andthe changes, ed giving them rate ‘property in land cruelty, a cosmic optit impregnation with white, private property, ike everyone ese. (How different Fermin’s attitude is From the later Europeso. imperialist’s preference for ‘genuine’ Malays, Gurkhas, and Hautas over ‘balf-breeds," ‘semi-etucated natives" ‘wags’, andthe like.) ‘ Yee if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the greet global communities ofthe past wereiimagined, the reality of - such'-appatitions depended. on an idea largely. forcign to the contemporary Westem mind: the non-arbitraritess of the sign. The ideograms of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations oft. We are familiar with the long dispute over the ayfpropriate language (Latin or vernacular) for the mass. In the Islamic tradition, until quite recently, the Qur'an was literally untranslateble (and therefore untranslated), because ‘Allah's truth was accessible only through the unsubsticuedble true signsof written Arabic, There is no idea here of a world so separated from langeage that all languages arc equidistant (and thus inter~ igns for it. Ineffeet, ontological reality is apprdhensible 16, John yack, The Spaush American Rrooatons, 1808-1926, p, 260. Emphasis "Church Geeek seems not to have achieved the states ofa truth-language. The se fh are rv bt on yf wearily tat (Greek repained ing demoti sped (unlike Lasa} in machof the Bateta pre eee nee 6 CULTURAL ROOTS “the majority of lords nd many incapable of stodying personally IMAGINED COMMUNITIES "between earth and heaven, (The awesomeness-of excommunication reflects this commology.) ‘Yer for all the grandeur and power of the. great religiously imagined communities, their suelfconscious coherence waned steadily after the late Middle Ages. Among the reasons for this decline, Iwish bere to emphasize only the two which are directly related to these communities’ anighe sacredness. ‘First was the effect ofthe explorations ofthe non-European world, hich mainly but by no means exclusively da Europe ‘abruptly widened the cultural and geographic horizon and hence alo men's conception of possible forms of human life." The process is already apparent in the greatest ofall Buropean travel-books. Consider the following awed description of Kublai Khan by the good Venetian Christian Marco Polo af she end of the thirteenth century:1? teste of Minit March, in ee [heer eet ce Easier. Being aware Hit this was one of our principal solemmisies, tie commanded all the Chistian to attend him, and to bring with them th Book: which contains Be oor Conpel of the Evangelisu. After cuttur manner in which his niajesty act regarded the faith of the Chris ‘What isso remarkable about this passage is not so much che great 7's term Kublai a hypocrite or H:—respect to umber of subjects, extent of territory, and amount of revenue, he surpasses every sovereign that has heretofore been or that Peter, ati is certainly a rich succession, for his treasure is immense a rent country ander bit Conral "AL Brick Auerbach, Mimi, p. 282 aga Me Bae Be Danek of Mer ep 18-9 Eph adel Node that, though kimsed, the Evangel is not reéd. 16 1B. The Trove of Mae Poe p-132. 14, Henti de Montesquiew, Persian Lewes, p. i, The Lames Penanes ist appeared 721. 7 IMAGINED COMMUNITIES heresy, nor even as a demonic personage (dim little Carter scarcely CULTURAL ROOTS international [sic] enterprise.” In a word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred: languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized. THE DYNASTIC REALM “These days itis perhaps difficult ro put oneself empathetically into a € world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only f imaginable ‘political’ system, For in fundamental ways serious" original Prench ls more modest and historically exact: Save mais drips ein eon profes en ne nationale, ke commerce du livre se morcelle: Chea ne ei, trate tipi ify In monarchies, however, where rule is reserved for Ege ‘ant eensereesagrn son reeno IMAGINED COMMUN! ‘One must alo semember that thete antique monarchical states alee Sbheevated ford, is the later dynasts’ titulature. Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohemla, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, CULTURAL ROOTS > mixtures twere signs of a superordinate status, Itis characteristic that there has not been an ‘English’ dynasty ruling in London since the cleventh century (if then); and what ‘nationality’ are we po.assign to f the Bourbons? F During the seventeenth century, however for reasons that need Enot detain ts here~ the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy began its slow decline in Wertern Europe. in 1649, Chatles Sriart was beheaded in the first of the modern world’s revolutions, and f during the 1680s one ofthe mote important European states wat ruled by a plebeian Protector rather than a king. Yet even in the age of $f Pope and-Addison, Anne Stuart was still healing the sick by'the laying Fon of royal hands, cures committed also by the Bourbons, ‘Louis XV ‘and XVI, in Bnlightened France till the end of the ancien égime.™ But a set 79 the pie of Lgiimay hod be dl ad el 2 Pe the attendance at if pistacubr x crane etetin cere He Greece, Sweden, Denmark ~and JapanP* = encton oth news of hier beir-aparea murder ln this manner Perera red corer nbich (ufone was wuble orale id, Pi) 25. Geller raeses the typical foreignoes of dymanics, bur irpret the sherpa omen loc aerate ean mom nome wl Bot take aides in heir ae Tho Ch. a Sephen Gren, “Ta Government nd Adina Regt Ra. ‘VI (1910-1825),’ PRD tbetis, Univertty of London 1971, p, 92. a IMAGINED COMMUNITIES © ha Sate ‘an, 1914, ‘dynastic states made up the majotity -of the ‘membershipiof the world political system, but, 2 we shall be noting | fadetsil below, many dynatts had for some time been reaching for 2 ‘national’ cachet asthe old principle of Legitimacy withered dlently ‘away. While the of Frederick the Great (t. 1740-1786) were ‘heavily staffed by ‘foreigners’, those of his great-nephew Friedrich ‘Wilhelm tlt 1840) were, as a result of Scharnhorst’s, ‘Goeisenau’'s sewier’s spectacular reforms, exclusively APPREHENSIONS OF TIME Ie would be short-sighted, however, to think of the imagined communities of nations’ as: simply growing out of and replacing religions communities and dynastic realms, Beneath the decline of sacred communities; languages abd lineages, « fimdimemtal change ‘was taking place in modes of apprehending the world, which, more hay saying ce, made i poible to “BUA the tation, To get a feeling for this change, one cafi profitably turn to’the ‘vinual representations of the sacred communities, such ag the eliefa and srained-glass windows of mediaeval churches, or the paintings of arly ttalian and Flemish masters, A characteristic feature of such 2 CULTURAL ROOTS which the Suing of imagined ray wes overwbelningly vinal European Latin-reading clerisy was one essential element in the ssructuring of the Christin imagination, the mediation of its sense that Christ's second coming could occur at any moment: St. ie Paul had said that “the day of the Lord cometh like a thie! - @ Bishop Otto of Freising to refer repeatedly to ‘we who hi tees placed at the end of time.’ Bloch concludes that 2s soon as mediaeval men “gave themselves up to meditation, nothing was farther from their thoughts than the jrospect of ling Future for a young and vigorous human race." ‘Auerbach gives an unforgettable sketch of this form of conscious- ness AMAGINED COMMUNITIES ‘Towatis the eud of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly Inowh a1 Capitan Tiago, was giving a diner party. Although, Sa kis coment ik iv mwarling co compare tay bitricl novel wih “Seite eeee eee, 6 * CULTURAL ROOTS contrary to his viual practice, he had announced it only that Cagendng Getty or. ifn be, iocaruee eunetve for not having arcived earlier. “The diner was being given ats house ou Anloague Street. Sisct we do no récal the sect number, we shall describe fein sacha way that ir may still be retognlzed- that is, if earthquaket’have not yet deseroyed it. We donot believe that its owner will have had it tor down; since such: work i uscally left co God or to Nerure, which, besides, bods many contacts with or Government S ‘thine comme surely unecetsry, It should suffice t note Edun sigh for she Sine ta lags ered nce to Pipi wre) ‘of a dinner-party being discuued by hondreds of unnanted people, who do not know each other, in quite different parts of Manila, ina : particular month of « particular decade, immediately conjures up the | imagined community. And in the phease ‘a house on Anloague Street’ | which ‘we shall describe in such a way that it may sill'ie recognized,” the wold be recogsers ae we tlpieoreaden The casual pro-- grewion of this howe from the ‘interior’ tie of the novel to the ‘eter’ of che (Man ear everyy if gives shyponic . ty, embracing ‘Guracer, author and reader, acving onward through clendrical = ime Notice to the tone, While Rial ha rt the fainter iden of i ad 0 command of tod wath nitinol nine f) fenaptwaaton floes Mest Guerre " i a Nose forename rsa i the wee sentence, from the past b» IMAGINED COMMUNITIES readers’ individual identities, he writes to them with an ironical intimacy, as though their relationships with-cach other are not in the smallest degree problematic.” Nothing giver one a: more Foucauldian seme of abrupt dis continuities of consciousness than to compare Noli with. the. most celebrated previous literary work by an.‘Indio', Francisco Balagtas (Balrazar)'s Pinagdaanang Bahay vi Forte at ni Laura sa Cahariong Albania (The Story of Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania), the first printed edition of which dates from 1861, though itmay have been composed as early s 1838. For although Balagtas was ill alive wns Rial at bor wih Be melee im every bade respect foreign to that of Noll. Its setting ~a fabulous mediaeval Albania ~ is eal eared tne ad spe Fon se Blond of ‘modi Sia ne pnad of earcipioe: ho cit ‘CULTURAL ROOTS f Aladin. The ‘spoken flashback’ was for Balagtas the orily alternative Sto a straightforward single-file narrative. If we learn of Florante’s © and Aladin’s ‘simultaneous’ pasts, they are connected by- their ceri rie at By i rs of ep, Hw dt E) Meching Parvot), evidently the first Latin American work in this BE seare. In the words of ane critic, this extis‘a ferociousindictment of FRE Sprnish administration in Mexico: ignorance, superstition and [> corruption are icen t0 be its. most notable: characteristics." The f enseatal form of this ‘nationalist’ ordi eoey Helesg

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