Escal, Queen Mhaiel M.

BSA 2.1 A

Imagined Communities
By Benedict Anderson

I. Cultural Roots

 Cenotaphs and tombs of the Unknown Soldier are the most powerful symbols of
modern nationalism that exist. Although the bodies in these tombs are identifiable
as mortal remains or immortal souls, they are still filled with eerie national
imaginations.

 The greatest virtue of traditional religious worldviews has been their concern for
man in the cosmos, man as a species being, and the contingency of life (which
must, of course, be distinguished from their role in legitimizing specific systems of
domination and exploitation).

 Marxism does not exempt any evolutionary/progressive schools of thought from this
weakness, which is that such questions are met with impatient silence. Again, the
drawback of evolutionary/progressive thought is an almost Heraclitean hostility to
any idea of continuity. Religious thought also responds to enigmatic intimations of
immortality, typically by transforming fatality into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.).

 The eighteenth century in Western Europe not only heralds the rise of nationalism
but also the decline of religious ideologies. The rationalist secularism of the
Enlightenment era brought its own brand of modern darkness.

 Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have made it through extraordinarily well

throughout thousands of years in a wide variety of societal structures, which is proof
of their creative responses to the phenomenal burden of human suffering brought
on by illness, deformity, sadness, old age, and death.

 The religious community and the dynastic realm are the two relevant cultural
systems for the period of the future. Both of these were accepted frames of
reference in their prime, much like nationality is today. Therefore, it is crucial to
explore what gave these cultural systems their inherent plausibility and to
simultaneously emphasize some crucial components in their disintegration.

 The fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities
integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and
territorialized.
 These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself empathetically into a world in which
the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only imaginable 'political' system.
For in fundamental ways 'serious' monarchy lies transverse to all modern
conceptions of political life.

 During the seventeenth century, however - for reasons that need not detain us here
- the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy began its slow decline in Western
Europe.

 Dynastic states constituted the bulk of the members of the world's political system
as late as 1914, but as we will discuss in more detail below, several dynasties had
been vying for 'national' cachet as the ancient premise of Legitimacy withered away
slowly over time.

 To consider the hypothetical communities of countries as merely evolving from and

replacing dynastic realms and religious communities, however, would be naive.
Underneath the decreasing number of sacred communities, languages, and
lineages, a fundamental shift in ways of perceiving the world took place that, more
than anything else, enabled people to "think" for themselves.

 For a very long time, our own idea of simultaneity has making and its evolution are
undoubtedly linked to the advancement of the secular sciences in ways that have
not yet been thoroughly explored.

 The novel Noli Me Tangere, written by the "Father of Filipino Nationalism" Jose
Rizal in 1887, is now recognised as the masterpiece of contemporary Filipino
literature. Additionally, it was nearly the first book written by a "Indio."

 Seventy years before Noli was written, in 1816, Jose Joaquin. The earliest Latin
American book in this type was undoubtedly El Periquillo Sarniento [The Itching
Parrot] by Fernandez de Lizardi. This poem is "a ferocious indictment of Spanish
administration in Mexico," according to one critic, "with ignorance, superstition, and
corruption seen as its most notable characteristics."

 Once more, we witness the "national imagination" at work as a lone hero traverses
a socioeconomic terrain of a fixity that connects the fictional world to the real world.
This satirical tour of the horizon, which includes hospitals, jails, outlying towns,
monasteries, Indians, and Black people, is not a tour of the entire world. The
horizon is definitely defined as being that of colonial Mexico.

 Here is the beginning of Semarang Hitam [Black Semarang], a story by the

unfortunate young Indonesian communist-nationalist Mas Marco Kartodikromo,
 published serially in 1924, to dispel the notion that because Rizal and Lizardi both
wrote in Spanish, the frameworks we have been studying are somehow "European."

 The imagined community is confirmed by the doubleness of our reading about our
young man reading. He does not find the corpse of the destitute vagrant by the side
of a sticky Semarang road, but e imagines it from the print in a newspaper.

 These interconnected certainties have slowly and unevenly declined, first in

Western Europe and then globally, as a result of economic change, "discoveries"
(social and scientific), and the development of rapid communications a substantial
divergence was created between cosmology and history due to faster and faster
connections. It comes as no surprise, then, that efforts were being made to find a
novel means of meaningfully connecting fraternity, power, and time. The advent of
print capitalism, which allowed an increasingly large number of people to think about
and relate to themselves in radically novel ways, may have sparked this
inquiry more than anything else and made it more fruitful.

II. The Origins of the National Consciousness

 Book publishing, one of the earliest forms of capitalism, experienced all of the frantic
market-seeking of the system. The earliest printers established offices all over
Europe. The majority of humanity is monolingual both then and now. The potentially
enormous markets represented by the monoglot masses would beckon once the
elite Latin market was saturated, according to the logic of capitalism.

 While this was happening, a severe financial crisis in Europe led printers to consider
selling inexpensive vernacular editions more and more.

 The thrust of capitalism's revolutionary vernacularization was given three unrelated

factors—two of which played a part in the rise of national consciousness—provided
additional impetus. The first, and ultimately least significant, was a change in
Latin's personality. The Reformation's influence came in second, and it also owed a
lot of its success to print-capitalism at the time. Rome easily defeated its opponents
in every Western European heresy war before the invention of print because it
always had more effective internal communication than its rivals.

 Others quickly followed Luther's example, starting the massive religious propaganda
conflict that raged throughout Europe for the following century. By utilizing
inexpensive popular editions, the Protestantism and print capitalism connection
quickly created large new reading publics—not least among merchants and women,
who typically knew little to no Latin—and simultaneously mobilized them for politico-
 religious goals. Third, some well-positioned would-be absolutist monarchs gradually
and unevenly spread specific vernaculars as tools of administrative centralization.

 The invention of administrative vernaculars must therefore be regarded (at least

initially) as an independent factor in the destruction of the sacred imagined
community since it occurred before both print and the religious upheaval of the
sixteenth century. However, nothing points to any underlying ideologies or even
proto-national impulses driving this vernacularization in the areas where it took
place. Early English was created in the interim as a result of the slow blending of
this language of a foreign ruling class and the Anglo-Saxon of the subject populace.

 It is important to keep in mind that this order was a group of "state," not "national,"
languages, and the state in question at various points included not only modern-day
England and Wales, but also parts of Ireland, Scotland, and France. It is obvious
that a sizable portion of the subject population knew little to nothing about Latin,
Norman French, or Early English. No, not until almost a century after Early English.

 Latin lasted a lot longer in other dynastic spheres. In each case, the "choice" of
language appears to have been made gradually, unconsciously, pragmatically, and
even randomly. As such, it was completely different from the self-conscious
language policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts faced with the rise of
hostile popular linguistic nationalisms. The fact that the old administrative languages
were used only by and for officialdoms for their own internal convenience is one
obvious indication of the difference.

 It is necessary to have a fatality element. Whatever superhuman feats capitalism

was capable of, it found two tenacious foes in death and languages. There is no
longer any chance for the unification of the languages used by all of humanity.
Individual languages can perish or be wiped out. The interaction of fate, technology,
and capitalism is what is important most.

 Under Latin and above the spoken vernaculars, they first and foremost established
unified fields of exchange and communication. Second, print capitalism gave
the language a fresh sense of fixity, which eventually contributed to the creation of
the subjective notion of the nation that is so strongly rooted in the idea of antiquity.

 Then, print capitalism produced power languages that were distinct from the earlier
administrative vernaculars. The fixing of print languages and the differentiation of
status between them were historically largely unconscious processes brought about
by the explosive interaction of capitalism, technology, and linguistic diversity in
humans.
 The convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human
language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its
basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation, is how we can summarize
the conclusions to be drawn from the argument so far.

 Since they were historically the first such states to appear on the global stage, they
inevitably provided the first accurate representations of what such states should
"look like," and their numbers and recent births provide an excellent basis for
comparative enquiry.

III. Creole Pioneers

 The political initiation of the lower classes was connected to the rise of nationalism
in a distinctly modern sense. One important factor initially igniting the drive for
independence from Madrid, in such significant cases as Venezuela, Mexico, and
Peru, was the fear of "lower-class" political mobilizations, which was far from an
attempt to "induct the lower classes into political life."

 Additionally, the expansion of Creole communities, particularly in the Eurasians,

Eurafricans, and Euramericans inevitably emerged as distinct social groups, not just
in the Americas but also in some regions of Asia and Africa. Their emergence
allowed for the flourishing of a way of thinking that prefigures modern racism.

 The tightening of Madrid's control and the spread of the liberalizing Enlightenment
ideas in the second half of the eighteenth century are the two factors that are most
frequently cited as causes.

 We've seen that the very idea of a newspaper implies the reflection of even "world
events" into a particular imagined world of vernacular readers, and we've also seen
how important an idea of steady, solid simultaneity through time is to that imagined
community.

 The Protestant, English-speaking Creoles to the north were much better positioned
to realize the idea of "America" and eventually succeeded in claiming the common
name of "Americans." It goes without saying that the economic interests at stake
are fundamentally important and well-known.

 Neither economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in

themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community to be defended from these
regimes' depredations; to put it another way, none provided the framework of a new
consciousness — the scarcely-seen periphery of its vision - as opposed to centre-
field objects of its admiration or disgust. In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim
Creole functionaries and provincial Creole printmen played the decisive historic role.