Concept of Nation and

Nationalism
Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
  Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson was born on August 26, 1936 in Kunming,
China.
Benedict Anderson  His parents are James O’Gorman and Veronica Beatrice Mary Anderson
 He was also of mixed Irish and Anglo-Irish descent, and his family had been active
in Irish nationalist movements
 In 1941, the Anderson family moved to California, where Benedict received his
initial education.
 In 1957, he received a B.A. in classics from Cambridge University, England. There,
he developed an immense interest in Asian politics and later enrolled in Cornell
University’s Indonesian studies program.
 In 1961, as part of his doctoral research, Anderson went to Jakarta, Indonesia
 After the 1965 communist coup and massacres, Anderson published three studies,
one of which was an outline of the coup.
 In 1966, “Cornell Paper”, caused Anderson to be barred from Indonesia
indeterminately.
 After his exile, he spent a few years in Thailand, taught at Cornell University and
served as director of the Modern Indonesia Program Anderson’s infamous analysis
of nationalism is presented in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).
 He passed away on 2015
Imagine Communities
 In developing his theories, Anderson observes that
the notion of “nation-ness” has become a principal
force in many aspects of modern thought. Both the
rapid expansion of the United Nations and the
political unrest caused by conflict between and
within “sub-nations” around the world are evidence
that nationalism is, indeed, recognized as modern
political moral hegemony.
 Yet despite the influence that nationalism has had on
modern society, the origins of the concept, Anderson
finds, are inadequately explained and recorded.
 His purpose in writing Imagined Communities is to
provide a historical background for the emergence of
nationalism – its development, evolution, and
reception.
Nationalism
 He defines “the nation” as an “imagined political community that is imagined as
both inherently limited and sovereign”
 The nation is:
Imagined because “members . . . will never know most of their fellow
members . . . yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. That
is, the possession of citizenship in a nation allows and prompts the individual to
imagine the boundaries of a nation, even though such boundaries may not
physically exist.
Limited because “even the largest of them . . . has finite, if elastic,
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations”. The fact that nationalists are able to
imagine boundaries suggests that they recognize the existence of partition by
culture, ethnicity, and social structure among mankind. They do not imagine the
union of all under one massive, all-encompassing “nationalism” (See Maps in
Colonialism, Geography and Empire).
 Sovereign because “the concept was born in an age in which
Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the
divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm . . . nations dream of
being free, and, if under God, directly so”. The sovereign state,
therefore, is symbolic of the freedom from traditional religious
structure. It provides the sense of organization needed for an orderly
society, without relying on the then weakening religious hierarchy.

 Community because the nation is “always conceived as a deep,

horizontal comradeship”. Regardless of the dissent and inequalities
within the nation, the imagined alliance among people of the same
imagined nation is so strong as to drive men to heroic deaths in
nationalistic sacrifice.
 Cultural Roots
 Anderson suggests that the following elements historically made possible the imagining of
the nation:
1. 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 had been answered previously by religious faith. The
decline of religious dominance also led to the demotion of the sacred languages. The
growth of secular languages by the sixteenth century lowered the status of Latin as the
only sacred script language. As a result, the older communities lost confidence in the
sacredness of a particular language in its ability to grant them elite admission to certain
spiritual truths.
2. Decline of the belief that “society was naturally organized around and under high centers-
monarchs who…ruled under some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation”. In the 17th
century, the legitimacy of sacral monarchy met its gradual debility in Western Europe.
People began to doubt the belief that society was naturally organized around these
centers.
 Development of the idea of “homogeneous, empty time,” in
which “a sociological organism moving calendrically through
[it] is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which
also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily
through history” .
Two events happening simultaneously, though in separate
places, can link the people involved in those events by this
precise “simultaneity;” that is, they share a consciousness of a
shared temporal dimension in which they co-exist.
 Creole States and Nationalism
 Anderson defines Creole states (new world colonies) as communities that were “formed
and led by people who shared a common language and common descent with those
against whom they fought”
 He affirms that “Creole states” were among the earliest to develop conceptions of
nation-ness, way before the notion of nationalism blossomed in Europe
 For example, Madrid imposed new taxes, enforced metropolitan commercial
monopolies, and obliged trade ships between the two hemispheres of the new world to
first go through the ports of Spain
 Another reason for the early development of national consciousness in the New World
was the rising popularity of the newspaper, linked to the rise of print culture discussed
above.
 Reporting both provincial and world news, these New World newspapers further
encouraged and fortified the imagination of nation-ness. By reading about events both
local and around the world, these New Worlders were able to develop a consciousness
about the existence of other nations, a sense of “us,” versus “them”
Excerpts from Imagined Communities
 Nation, nationality, nationalism-all have proved notoriously difficult to
define, let alone to analyse.
 The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.
- Communism
- Segmentation of bourgeosie
 Nationality- as view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness as well
as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.
CONCLUSION
 According to Anderson's theory of imagined communities, the main
causes of nationalism are the increasing importance of mass
vernacular literacy, the movement to abolish the ideas of rule by
divine right and hereditary monarchy ("the concept was born in an
age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the
legitimacy of the divinely ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm ...
nations dream of being free ... The gage and emblem of this
freedom is the sovereign state", 1991, 7); and the emergence of
printing press capitalism ("the convergence of capitalism and print
technology... standardization of national calendars, clocks and
language was embodied in books and the publication of daily
newspapers")—all phenomena occurring with the start of the
Industrial Revolution.
Reference

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/19/anderson-bene
dict/