Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism

In Chapter Ten, “Census, Map, Museum,” Anderson focuses on three institutions that together shaped the way colonial territories (and the post-colonial states that succeeded them) imagined their domains. The census, map, and museum exemplify how humans, geography, and ancestry were organized and manipulated to administer colonial states and to establish the legitimacy of their rule. These institutions were inherited and adapted by post-colonial regimes to serve their own programs of political administration and national identity-formation.

Historical analyses of the censuses crafted by European administrators and used in colonial south-east Asia demonstrate how race replaced religion over time as the primary means of classifying inhabitants. Colonial powers constructed lists of ‘identities’ that were often a hodgepodge of linguistic, ethnic, and geographical classifications and sub-classifications. These labels said more about the confusion of the colonial state’s classifying mind and the accidental boundaries of empire than the lived experience of the natives they purported to assess. Anderson suggests that “[i]t is extremely unlikely that […] more than a tiny fraction of those categorized and subcategorized [in a 1911 Dutch census of Malaysia] would have recognized themselves under such labels” (165).

The systematic quantification of these problematic ethnic-racial classifications aided the colonial state in organizing its educational, legal, public-health, police and other bureaucracies. The census constructed a detailed yet simplistic ‘grid’ that was imposed on the indigent populations of the colony. This grid effaced certain native identifications while inventing others more congenial to the colonial mindset, increasingly suppressing religious affiliations while emphasizing racial categories as essential.

The map also contributed to the totalizing, classificatory grid with which European colonial powers imagined and administered their imperial domains. Ancient sacred geographies, the product of the native religious imagination, were replaced by mathematically-calculated maps using the Mercator projection. This rationalized and formalized space in a purely geometrical fashion. Colonial administrations surveyed and quantified distances and boundaries, aligning their increasingly accurate maps with their projection of power. Political boundaries drawn on maps delimited the ethnic and linguistic groups that spilled over those borders. To legitimize the spread of their power, the colonial European states constructed ‘historical maps’ of the territories they occupied in an effort to establish the ‘property history’ of the new possessions to which they laid claim. This created “a sort of political-biographical narrative” for each of these realms that postcolonial nation-states adopted and adapted after gaining independence (175).

Finally, the establishment of museums in the colonies was instrumental in portraying the colonial state as the protector of native cultural antiquities, thus serving to legitimize its imperial occupation. Anderson observes that “museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political” (178). Colonial archaeology first began to flourish in the 19thcentury as administration of the colonies shifted from commercial regimes such as the Dutch and British East India Companies to European governments. Archaeological efforts focused on the restoration of imposing monuments (for example, Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur in Indonesia) and sought to enhance the prestige of the colonial power which patronized their rehabilitation.

Archaeological restorations undertaken by colonial administrations were deeply imbued with ideological considerations. The ancient builders of the monuments were always presented as superior to the contemporary natives, who were thought to be either their degenerate descendants or of another ‘race’ entirely. These architectural marvels thus served as a constant reminder to the natives that they were a fallen people unworthy of self-determination. In addition, restored monuments lent themselves to official ‘logo-ization,’ which both detached them from their particular historical contexts and enabled them to emblematize the nation in infinitely repeatable images.

Census, map and museum epitomize colonial instruments of power, which were adopted (and often adapted) by postcolonial nation-states to establish their national identity and serve the needs of political administration. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s theory of knowledge/power, Anderson argues that, in combination, these institutions enable the total surveillance of the region under control by imposing a comprehensive, flexible, classificatory grid upon its peoples, regions, religions, languages and monuments. Such technologies of power, inherited from colonial regimes, proved indispensable to their postcolonial successor states.

In Chapter Eleven, “Memory and Forgetting,” Anderson explores how nations came to conceive of their origins and imagine their unity as individual, sovereign communities. The construction of national identity involves both the creation (and sanctioning) of certain ‘memories,’ and the ‘forgetting’ of historical facts that are unpalatable or unassimilable to the national consciousness. Anderson argues that “[a]ll profound changes in consciousness [including the birth of a national consciousness] bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives” (204). These narratives of identity elide historical discrepancies and bridge discontinuities, enabling the imagination of unified, ancestral national communities.

The imagining of the nation during the era of nationalism involved two distinct historical stages. As previously noted, Anderson asserts that nationalism emerged first in the New World, then in the Old. The American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions were seen at the time as without historical precedent, ushering in a new age of human liberation and a republican form of government. They were moments of historical rupture, epitomized by the French revolutionary regime’s decision to scrap the Christian calendar and inaugurate a new era with the Year One, starting from the proclamation of the French Republic in 1792.

Soon, however, this original apocalyptic enthusiasm was replaced by a historical perspective. The nationalist movements which developed in Europe in the first half of the 19thcentury thought of themselves as building upon the precedents and models offered by the French and American revolutions, and thus taking part in an established historical tradition of nation-making. Anderson asserts that on both sides of the Atlantic, nationalism now came to be read “genealogically—as the expression of an historical tradition of serial continuity” (195).

In the “second generation” of nationalisms that swept through Europe, unlike in the Americas, the fundamental importance of language for national consciousness was decisive. New nationalisms, rooted in the linguistic identity of peoples, began to imagine themselves as awakening from an epochal sleep, during which their national aspirations lay dormant. This ‘sleep’ suggested the immense antiquity of one’s nationality, rooted in the misty, centuries-old origins of the vernacular language one spoke. For those becoming conscious of themselves as Czechs, Hungarians, or Finns, this felt like a rediscovery of something innate. By contrast, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 makes no mention of the history of English settlement in the New World, nor justifies its legitimacy by any claim to the antiquity of the ‘American’ people. National memory fictionalizes history to establish a reassuring sense of fraternity.

Anderson emphasizes the ideological re-creation of historical fact in the construction of national genealogies. English history textbooks teach that the Norman William the Conqueror was a Founding Father of the English nation, though he spoke no English (which didn’t exist in the 11th century), and, in fact, subjugated the pre-English Saxon King Harold. American schoolchildren are taught that the hostilities of 1861-65 were a great ‘civil’ war between ‘brothers,’ rather than a conflict between two sovereign nation-states, the Confederacy and the United States. The popular national imagination, as well as official nationalism, contribute to this fictionalizing process, particularly when violent racial, class, and/or regional antagonisms threaten to fracture society.

In an “Afterward” published in the 2006 edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson describes the publication and translation history of the book in the near-quarter-century since its first appearance in 1983. He also briefly reflects on the polemical purposes of the book’s argument. Among these are the intent to show that both Marxism and Liberalism have hitherto provided inadequate accounts of nationalism. Another of Anderson’s main aims is the desire to revise the Euro-centric historical account of nationalism’s origins by recognizing the pioneering role played by the independence movements in North and South America.