Imagined Communities

- Dec. 1978 & Jan. 1979 - Vietnamese invasion/occupation of Cambodia =

first large scale conventional war waged by one independent, revolutionary
Marxist regime against another
- Feb. 1979 Chinas assault on Vietnam confirms precedent
- Post WWII, every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms
e.g. Peoples Republic of China, Socialist Republic of Vietnam
- Conversely, USSR and UKoGB&NI deny in their names, nationality. A
legatee of the prenational dynastic states but also a precursor of a 21st
century internationalist order
- Many old nations find themselves challenged by sub-nationalisms
within their borders nationalisms that dream of shedding the sub-ness
one day.
- Nationalism has proven to be an uncomfortable anomaly in Marxist
theory meaning it has been largely omitted rather than confronted
- Nation-ness/nationalism = a kind of cultural artefact. To truly understand
them, we need to understand how they came into being and how their
meanings have changed over time and why today they still command
such profound emotional legitimacy.
- The objective modernity of nations to the historians eye vs the
subjective antiquity of such nations/nationalisms in the eyes of
nationalists.
- Nationality is, in a formal sense, universal as a socio-cultural concept:
everyone officially has a nationality just as everyone has a gender
- Tom Nairn: nationalism = the equivalent of infantilism for societies and is
largely incurable
- There is a tendency to hypostasize on the subject of nationalism:
nationalism with a capital N it would be more helpful (says Anderson) to
approach nationalism in the same way we approach things like religion and
kinship (for example) rather than discussing it as we do set ideologies such
as liberalism, communism etc
- Andersons proposition/definition of the nation: it is an imagined
political community and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign
- The nation is an imagined community in the sense that most individual
nationals willth never ever know, nor even meet most of their fellow
compatriots/the fellow inhabitors of this imagined community, no matter

how small their country is. Yet in the minds of each lives the image of their
communion
- Ernest Renan (French political theorist and expert on Middle Eastern
languages): Or lessence dune nation est qui tous les individus aient
beaucoup des choses en commun
- Ernest Gellner (British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist):
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness, it
invents [fabricates, constructs] nations where they do not exist
- All communities, except for primordial villages of face-to-face contact/very
small and basic hamlets etc, are effectively imagined
*[Etiolated = Having lost substance or vigour; feeble]*
Cultural Roots
The Religious Community
- Ummah Ummah Islam stretches from Morocco to the Sulu Archipelago,
Christendom from Paraguay to Japan, Buddhism from Sri Lanka to the
Korean peninsula.
- Sacral cultures/religion incorporated conceptions of immense
communities: everyone belonging to or following such religions = part of a
shared community.
- Confucianism. China considered itself not as Chinese but as central the
Middle Kingdom Zhong Guo
- Christendom, the Islamic Ummah etc. imaginable largely through the
medium of a sacred language and written script
- E.g. If Maguindanao (A largely Islamic Filippino community of people) met
Berbers in Mecca, even though they dont speak a word of each others local
languages i.e. Tagalog and Berber and are thus technically incapable of
communicating orally, they understand each others ideographs because
the ancient texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic.
- In this way, Arabic functioned like Chinese in creating a community out
of signs
- e.g. Thais dont know the Romanian word for +, nor do Romanians know
the Thai word for it, but both comprehend the symbol.
- All the great classical communities conceived of themselves as being
cosmically central through the medium of sacred languages linked to a
superterrestrial order of power.
- By this logic and in this way, the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or
Chinese was, in theory, unlimited

- The deader the written language the further it was/is from speech the
better as in principle, everyone has access to a pure world of signs