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Thoughts on "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism"

 


In this book there is an attempt, one that I'd characterize as McLuhanist, to bring into intelligibility how material conditions brought about the consciousness of nationalism - inventing a form of membership that until recently did not exist and also made no sense.

The root Anderson locates as, in his opinion, that most substantial is the advent of print. He observes the consequences of print and how it yielded a national consciousness. First he starts, in indeed a manner that I wouldn't be surprised to find written by McLuhan - by expressing a different attitude towards simultaneity that developed due to print culture. The mass produced books and newspapers allowed for a new consciousness in which many people, most of whom one isn't familiar with, all participate in reading the very same words, and in the exact same fashion as countless nameless others. This, Anderson believes, is the fertile ground upon which the Imagined Community of Nationalism could grow upon.

In regards to the details of this growth however, he illustrates multiple different paths - emphasizing that creole nationalisms emerged out of wholly different circumstances compared with metropole (European) nationalisms. The European nationalisms have a particular emphasis on the National Language. According to Anderson, while beforehand the language of the literate was Latin, and it encompassed the literate classes in the entirety of western Christendom, the advent of print turned book-selling into a major industry, and in order to expand into new markets books were increasingly written in the vernacular - the spoken languages that didn't truly have the stature of a "true language" like Latin that had a library of literature and high status - this expansion occurred simply due to the fact that the illiterates (not reading Latin) greatly outnumbered the literate Latin readers, and thus were worthy as a demographic to sell to. A likewise characteristic of Capitalism, which he asserts contributed to the creation of "National Language" was also the tendency towards the standardization of the vernacular prints - which caused a process by which the vernaculars, until this point barely considered languages at all, were subject to more and more proper rules and standards that turned them into concrete literary languages that can be imagined as unique and distinct from one another. He does mention that some countries did employ the vernacular in legal or official capacities prior to print - and that this too contributed to the rise of nationalism - but that these employments were fully pragmatic and had no national character, and in fact, could represent vernaculars that are wholly foreign to the majority of people in the country (for example, French being an official language in England and in Russia).

In contrast to these metropole nationalisms it is clear creole nationalisms care little about language. For them Anderson theorizes what he terms a secular "pilgrimage". According to him, the nationalisms of Spanish America, for example, were headed by bureaucrats, lawyers, officials, and that what happened to make this happen started with the centralization process of monarchical Absolutism - it produced a class of non-personal (that is non-feudal in their bonds) bureaucrats and officials that were at different points assigned to different posts, rather than had a tie to a certain piece of land like the aristocrats do. This caused them to have a sort of imagined community of their own, since they didn't belong to a specific place (since they moved from place to place) but rather to the country as a whole. In the case of Spanish America therefore, they moved within the bounds of the colonial territories (and noteworthily, not between them). They were also surely bitter due to the limitation of their stature, purely due to them being criollo and not peninsulares by birth (peninsulares could serve anywhere, including the metropole, but criollos couldn't, this was partially due to proto-racist attitudes that posited the negative impact of "southern climate" on people's character). The imagined communities that arose gave birth to the creole nationalisms - but also made sure they were different communities from one another therefore making Bolivar's dream of long-living Gran Colombia, for example, all but an unachievable dream.

I found this analysis interesting in the way it directly relates national feelings to material developments and the media.

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