Blog
Review: Imagined Communities
[Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. (Original edition published in 1983.)]
A quirky book that takes as one of its starting points the historically lousy job that the liberal and marxist traditions had done of theorizing nationalism, Imagined Communities became a widely-read classic with the revival of scholarly and popular attention to the topic that occurred in the 1990s. Anderson’s tendency to make shorthand references to people and events that assume a familiarity with European history that most of us in North America lack, and his tendency to include quotations in languages other than English without providing translations, are occasional irritants, but the combination of lively writing and a grounded, innovative approach makes this book still worth reading three decades after its original publication.
To say that nations are “imagined communities” gets at the idea that we will never meet the vast majority of people with whom we share that identification, and there are huge differences amongst us along any number of axes, yet we still manage to imagine ourselves as shared members of the same collective entity: the nation. And nationalism is best approached not by treating it as a political ideology like certain other ‘-isms’ such as liberalism or marxism, but as deeply intertwined with the nation as a social form — it’s an attachment to that form and to that way of imagining human collectivity.
Previously dominant forms of collective imagining included the religious community — Christendom, the Umma, etc. — and the old dynastic realm, which was both socially organized and imagined much differently from the contemporary nation-state. The nation and corresponding attachments emerged, Anderson argues, through the conjunction of shifts in how we see time and the social world, the emergence of print technology, the increased importance of vernacular languages, and the imperatives of capitalism. He writes, “What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity” (42-3).
Though many scholars before and since this book treat Europe as the home of nationalism, Anderson points out that it first emerged in the Americas in the rebellions of creole elites in Latin America and the future United States against the empires from which they sprang. While, in the Latin examples, the tightening grip of Madrid and the emergence of liberal ideas played a role in creating the conditions for rebellion against the empire, they were not themselves sufficient. Creole elites in each Spanish jurisdiction shared common experiences, common journeys through space and through social contexts and institutions, and common limitations of their roles within the empire, which created shared consciousness and a shared commonsense about a ‘naturally’ existing “we” clearly distinct from the imperial core despite shared language and culture. As well, the emergent newspapers created a widely-shared social ritual that also organized people’s consciousness and sense of belonging in ways that not only built a “we” that corresponded to the existing imperial administrative units but also helped to cement a new notion of the social world as discrete social units moving through linear, ‘empty’ time.
The next form of nationalism to emerge was popular nationalism in Europe, starting from about 1820. Certain shifts making this possible hard already largely occurred. For instance, a sense of ongoing social transition over time — that is, a sense of history — emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment. During the same era, the encounters of European explorers and traders with peoples on other continents normalized the idea of humanity as plural. These helped to make it plausible that at a later moment it would become conceivable to see the natural form of global social organization as being different national units moving forward in parallel. Additionally, language had become an object of study, particularly of historical study, and the languages that had held together the previous religious imaginaries — Latin, in the Western European case — came to be seen as just one more language among many and their sacred place was eroded. For purely practical reasons, empires came to take up vernacular languages for their administration rather than Latin.
In this context, both the model of nationalism from the Americas plus the example of the French Revolution could be taken up and adapted in popular ways in Europe. In the Americas, nationalism did not emphasize shared and distinct language in defining a nation, as both the empire and the colonies which rebelled shared the same tongue. In Europe, much popular nationalism was organized around vernacular languages and deliberate efforts to create national print-languages as part of forging linguistic minorities in the continent’s polyglot imperial territories into nations. Capital-driven print technology played a major role in this, as did the efforts of language-oriented scholars. This helped forge reading publics, which at the time were some mix (depending on the area) of nobility, landholders, professional, bureaucrats, and capitalists. In the Americas, at least at first, there was no particular effort to use nationalism to inspire lower-class investment in the national projects, whereas this was true from the start in Europe.
Partly in reaction to the rise of popular nationalisms, and the corresponding emergence of a sense that linguistic national communities should exist autonomously in a collection of equals, the imperial entities of Europe countered with official nationalisms of their own as deliberate policy. From the start, as a “willed merger of nation and dynastic empire” (86), these official nationalisms always contained a tension between the particular emerging (but often concealed) nation at the heart of the empire and the larger imperial project, but they still often had a major impact in shaping the practices and consciousness of those subject to them.
The final form of nationalism that Anderson identifies was that in the emerging, postcolonial states in the 20th century. Postcolonial nationalisms, he says, were generally a mix of populist enthusiasm and careful calculation by the newly sovereign states. The postcolonial states inherited a great deal from the colonial states they succeeded, not just geographic scope but also the journies of education and administration in which elite consciousness was formed and the various categories and practices instilled under empires which formed consciousnesses that continued into the post-imperial period. He traces the colonial emergence of technologies like the census, the map, and the museum for developing totalizing observation and classification in the colonies and the connection of an abstracted narrative claiming continuity with the distant past, all of which carried over in various ways into postcolonial state practices.
Anderson also points out that even revolutionary seizure of the state, as in the Soviet Union or China or Vietnam, tends to result in those who seize it having their choices and their path to a large degree conditioned by the already-existing state form. One of the many ways this is true is with respect to nation and nationalism. He uses this to explain what at the time of the original writing was the emerging phenomenon of war between actually-existing socialist states that looked much like any other inter-state wars.
There’s lots to like, here. Lots of the arguments Anderson makes are plausible. The emergence of a new social form and related imaginative identification through the accidental conjunction of certain changes sounds plausible. The emergence of shared consciousness and shared imagination through shared practices also sounds realistic. The modularization and adaptation of the social form once it exists in the world also sounds very life-like. In addition, one theme that emerged in my recently-completed class in postcolonial theory is that many postcolonial theorists posit a role for the novel in the shaping of consciousness without saying much about how that might happen, whereas Anderson generally connects texts to changes in consciousness through particular kinds of practices. All of that said, though, he stops short of doing the work necessary to demonstrate that this is what did happen. Certainly the correspondence between elite journeys in the Spanish colonies in the Americas, and later in different ways in European colonies in Africa and Asia, and the actual national attachments that emerged (with no other real correspondence to pre-colonial social organization or imagination) is a strong enough correlation that we should take it seriously. But there must be ways to document this emergence more thoroughly in terms of the shifts of consciousness observable among the people involved.
I have a few other quibbles as well. For instance, he has a short chapter presenting a theory of racism, and basically arguing that it isn’t as inherent to nationalism as many left and liberal European intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s would have argued. He points out that the organization of racial oppression bears more resemblance to the organization of class oppression than it does to the organization of nation and of national sentiment, and argues that instances of racism and nationalism being integrated are an imperial imposition and not inherent to the national form. I think there are some reasonable points here — the relationship between racism and class oppression, for instance — but I think it drastically underestimates the persistence of race as a feature of national identification in former imperial centres and in former settler colonies like Canada.
Related to that, I think much more needs to be said about the interplay of capacity to imagine self as part of a nation and one’s place within the social relations that constitute that nation. How are subordination within and exclusion from nations socially organized, and how does that relate to how they are imagined?
It is intriguing to think about how these ideas might relate to Canada, something he does not mention at all but the sort of thing I’m going to be thinking about rather a lot in the next few months. It seems like the emergence of an English-dominated Canadian nation and nationalism is in some ways quite distinct from any other in the Americas in that it involved a gradual, mutual separation from the imperial core rather than a more contentious break. My sense is that many of the Canadian founding elites were not creole, unlike in the U.S. and Latin America, but were born in the metropole. The Canadian state was also to a certain extent created as a distinct and no-longer-purely-colonial entity for imperial administrative and political convenience rather than any kind of overwhelming local pressure that it be so. I think these things might help explain the odd juxtaposition of pseudo-national consciousness that was clearly integrated into and subordinate to, at least in its dominant strand, an unapologetic imperial consciousness for almost a century. That was not displaced by a more clearly national consciousness until the 1960s.
In any case, this is an important book for me to have read — well, re-read, actually — as I move into what is going to be a fairly heavy reading course organized around thinking critically about English Canadian nationalism. I was initially a bit resistant to the idea of reading something I’ve already read, but am now convinced it was a good idea, and would certainly recommend engagement with Anderson’s work to anyone trying to think about such questions.
[Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. This post originally appeared on his personal blog, as have many other book reviews. Scott has two books of Canadian history entered through the words of activists coming out in late 2012.]
It is late at night (I just watched Mick Jagger live on the Saturday Night Live TV show) and I just skimmed the above article, so far, kind of like glancing at an impressionist painting, but that’s okay (in my eyes). I get the gist of it. As for nationalism, for national identity, I think of the importance of CBC television, and of how Stephen Harper, and his clone-drones, have stripped Canadians of part of our souls, by all the cuts he has made to it. The Montreal Jazz Festival is a priceless jewel, to name just one feature of it. I feel proud of it, and I live way over here on Vancouver Island. I feel proud that Canada has 2 official languages, because we can do it, we can swing it. To name just one benefit of knowing two languages - it protects against Altzheimer’s Disease - stretches your brain and makes more pathways in there. I majored in French in high school, and when I got to spend a few days in Montreal, the taxi drivers were so sweet to me as I tried to speak to them in halting high school French. I don’t think Stephen Harper cares if we become exactly like Americans. A strange man - doesn’t care about the environment, and doesn’t care about culture. What a bare-bones, flat-footed, colourless landscape he proposes, and without either clean air or water, or fish in the sea! And this man has FOLLOWERS !?
#1. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on May 20th 2012 at 3:48am
“English Canadian Nationalism?” I don’t think it is necessary to separate it out like that, is it? Don’t you like to watch the Montreal Jazz Festival on TV, Scott? The French have good things to offer, going right back to France in Europe. Look how they welcomed the black jazz musicians and jazz in Paris, when they were still so marginalized in the USA. and actually banned by the Nazis. Look at the French Revolution, and the Statue of Liberty, which maybe have something to do with the rioting Quebec university students of today. At least they are organizing and standing up for something! I don’t know if English-speaking University students are even bothering to vote in elections. Are they just going to roll over and play dead for Stephen Harper and his clone-drones? Is there anyone in that grey-suited gang for them to look up to and emulate, or to give them hope for the future? Have they all given up already? Could be. Quel dommage. C’est fini. Pauvre Canada. Pauvre.
#2. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on May 20th 2012 at 12:02pm
Hi Madeline…as always, thanks for reading!
I really don’t agree that asking the question that I’m asking implies AT ALL any negative attitude towards Quebec or towards French culture…it’s just a different question. And, frankly, there is plenty of material reason for recognizing that though trajectories of state formation and national attachment in what is now Quebec and what is now the rest of Canada cannot help but be interrelated, they are distinct enough that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with starting from an examination of one or from an examination of the other. Also, I approach nationalism not as a nationalist, not as someone saying “Mine is better than yours,” but as someone deeply skeptical of nationalism, particularly of dominant and oppressive nations and nationalisms such as those of English Canada.
So of course French music, French culture, French history are just as worthy of admiration and respect as any other peoples’. Also, I think the uprising by Quebec students is inspiring and amazing and I hope it spreads far and wide.
#3. Posted by Scott Neigh on May 20th 2012 at 1:30pm
Thank you for the clarification. Words can be slippery things. Perhaps what we should be looking at is identity. What is my identitiy, and what do I stand for? Then if a politician says “Go shoot that guy and kill him, for your country,” I can answer, “No, that is contrary to my beliefs. My beliefs.”
#4. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on May 20th 2012 at 4:01pm
Where Nationalism is a good thing, is when a Swiss person says, “This is Switzerland and we are determined to stay out of wars, ” and when a Canadian says, “We are Canadian and we don’t want to be war-prone like the Americans.” “We are Canadians and we don’t want our wealthy class to be so greedy like the Americans that they destroy the economy.” There is a covert class war, a war against the poor in Canada. Reduce services to the poor and to women, which means children too, and buy outmoded F 35 Stealth Fighter jets for tens of billions of dollars instead. You think the Harper government won’t use their military against Canadian citizens? Look at the arrests and containments of peaceful protestors already happening, and these are University students. Detained with public toilets that have no doors, men and women together, and no toilet paper, according to one CBC televised testimony. When Canadians complain, just stare them down. There is no trickle-down benefit to having a disgustingly over-rich class in Canada like Stephen Harper and his grey-suited, philistine clone-drones would have us believe. If Peter MacKay showed up at a Soup Kitchen, in order to score some political points, the clientele would not talk to him, because it is written all over him: “I am accountable to nobody. I am the Lord of the Manor. Ask your silly questions. They are as nothing to me.” “Home Jeeves, and land this government helicopter gently.”
#5. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on May 21st 2012 at 11:33am
Yes, words can be slippery. Part of my goal in doing this reading and thinking is to come up with more satisfying-to-me ways to talk about nationalism. I’d imagine thinking about identity and belief might be part of that process.
And linking progressive social goals with some form of national consciousness is certainly a practice with a long history in lots of different places…it’s also a practice that I want to think through very carefully, however, as I’m not convinced that it is always the only or the best approach to try and achieve those goals when it comes to a nation like Canada. I appreciate lots of people feel that it _is_ a sound approach, of course.
#6. Posted by Scott Neigh on May 21st 2012 at 11:52am
I am thinking of how it comes down to good and evil. In the second world war, there was no doubt about it, from our side. The Nazi side lost their way, their moral way, to a terrible extent. Swiss Psycho-analyst Carl Jung said they had been taken over by the war god Wotan. Now the god that fuels wars is oil. The Nazis had lost power and prestige and they desperately wanted it back, no matter how many suffered and died in the process. Might makes Right! Individuality is so important in those circumstances. People who cannot be swept away by propaganda, and will hold firm to decency. Shakespeare holds true to this day: To thine own self be true…......and thou canst be false to any man. And to this day, the Western world has found no better guide to morality than the Bible. The Ten Commandments. The Beatitudes.
#7. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on May 21st 2012 at 12:35pm