Nation

Anderson’s (2006) position is that nationality and nationalism are “cultural artefacts” (p. 4) created at the end of the eighteenth century. Some try to make capital “N” nationality an ideology like liberalism and fascism rather than a word more similar to kinship or religion (p. 5). Anderson defines a nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign…it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 6). Additionally, it is limited “because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind” (p. 7). Nations are 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. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions,and the allomophism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state" (p. 7). It is a community "because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (p. 7).

Anderson (2006) states that according to Gellner, nationalism invents nations where they don't exist" (p. 6). Anderson continues, "Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (p. 6). Nationalism began to solidify when people became aware of others like them through print. Anderson (2006) states, "But they did come to visualize in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language...The general growth in literacy, commerce, industry, communications and state machineries that marked the nineteenth century created powerful new impulses for vernacular linguistic unification within each dynastic realm" (p. 77-8).

Nationalism in the colonial world exhibits itself through the census, the map, and the museum (p. 163). The census helped construct and quantify "ethnic-racial classifications" (p.168), and this put a "flow of subject populations through the mesh of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations, and immigration offices" (p. 169). "...the census filled in politically the formal topography of the map" (p. 174). The map set up boundaries (p. 174) and created a "'piece' [that] could be wholly detached from its geographic context" (p. 175). It also establishes neighbors (p. 175). The museum is political (p.178) as it positions its citizens into classifications (p. 182).

Printing and Nationalism

Print language led to nationalism in three ways: 1) they created a unified people through a singular language and created an outlined audience which led to the idea of a nation (p. 44); 2) it also fixed language into particular forms; and 3) they created a language of power for those whose language was closer to the written form (Anderson, 2006, p. 45).

Dying for Nationalism

According to Anderson (2006), "The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality. Dying for one's country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps Amnesty International can not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will. Dying for the revolution also draws its grandeur from the degree to which it is felt to be something fundamentally pure" (p. 144).

Racism

According to Anderson (2006), "...nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations ...The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all claims in divinity among rulers and to "blue" or "white" blood and 'breeding' among aristocracies" (p. 149).

References:

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.