Nationalism - Anderson

Question 1

When did Anderson write Imagined Communities?

Answer 1

1991

Question 2

What is the relation between Marxism and Nationalism?

Answer 2

Hobsbawm - ‘Marxist movements have become national not only in form but in substance’

Question 3

What do liberal historiographies of Nationalism say it is?

Answer 3

No scientific definition of the state
Phenomenon that it exists and continues

Question 4

What do Marxist historiographers say about nationalism?

Answer 4

Marxism’s greatest historical failure in not taking account (Tom Nairn)

Uncomfortable anomaly

Concept of confronting national bourgeoisie without justifying why it is relevant

Question 5

What gap in Marxist thought does Anderson attempt to bridge?

Answer 5

Interpretation of the ‘anomaly of nationalism’

Question 6

Define cultural artefact

Answer 6

Nationalism = cultural artefact
Must consider their history and context - how their meanings change overtime

Emotional legitmacy

Question 7

How are cultural artefacts created and what happens?

Answer 7

18th century
Distillation of complex historical forces crossing
Become modular
Transplanted in self-consciousness
Merges with polities and ideologies
Arouse deep attachments

Question 8

What are the 3 paradoxes of the nation?

Answer 8

1. objective modernity of nation vs subjective antiquity for nationalists
2. Universality of nationality (everyone has one) vs impossibility to implement concretely
3. Political power of nationalism vs philosophical poverty

Question 9

Why is nationalism seen as unintelligent?

Answer 9

No grand thinkers of intellectuals

Question 10

Why does Anderson argue nationalism is an ideology?

Answer 10

Belongs in the category alongside ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’ rather than ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’

Question 11

What is the definition of the nation?

Answer 11

Nations are imagined (1) communities (2) that are limited (3) and sovereign (4)

Imagined = do not know each other but imagine communion

Limited = finite boundaries with other nations

Sovereign = enlightenment and revolution destroyed divinely ordained hierarchical dynastic power
Nations want to be free within a sovereign state

Question 12

What issue of nationalism does Anderson attempt to answer?

Answer 12

Why are there colossal sacrifices in the name of nationalism?

Question 13

What view does Anderson take against cosmopolital intellectuals in Europe about nationalism?

Answer 13

Idea that it is rooted in fear and hatred of others vs the idea it inspires love that is self-sacrificing

Question 14

What are examples of cultural products of nationalism?

Answer 14

Poetry

Prose fiction

Music

Arts

Question 15

How does Anderson’s ethnographic study of cultural products present nationalism?

Answer 15

Rarely are there analogous nationalist products expressing fear or loathing

This is even minimal in cultural products by colonised people towards imperialists

Insignificant element of hatred in expressions of national feeling

Question 16

How is political love in cultural products of nationalism described?

Answer 16

Vocab of:
Kinship (motherland)
Home
People being naturally tied
Something unchosen
Skin, gender, parentage, birth (national, unchosen)

Question 17

What is the role of family in nationalism?

Answer 17

Domain of disinterested love
Nation is interest-less = it can ask for sacrifices to be made for it

Question 18

What is purity through fatality?

Answer 18

Ultimate sacrifice

Unprecedented scale in great wars where people are permitted to lay down their lives (rather than people permitted to kill)

Dying for your country = moral grandeur (more than dying for an organisation that one can leave)

Includes dying for revolution

Question 19

How does language link to nationalism? + example

Answer 19

Connection to the dead (as language predates contemporary society and is historical)

Poetry and songs
i.e. national anthems sung on a holiday create a sense of imagined community and the experience of simultaneity
People connected by imagined sound

Question 20

What ethnographic example does Anderson provide for language as a facet of nationalism?

Answer 20

Indigenous populations baptised into Peruvians
= Nations are conceived in language rather than blood/genetics
= People can be invited into the imagined community
Principle of naturalisation

Nation is both open and closed

Question 21

What does Anderson say about epithets?

Answer 21

Characteristically racist

More than just political hostility (racism) - erases nation-ness by reducing adversary to biology

i.e. may jumble many nationalities into one

i.e. Asian slurs contrasted with ‘Charlie’

Question 22

What does Anderson argue is the difference between nationalism and racism?

Answer 22

Racism - eternal contaminations (outside history), ideological rather than national

Nationalism - historical destinies

i.e. Jewish Germans still seen as imposters by Nazis

Question 23

Where does racism stem from according to Anderson?

Answer 23

Class rather than nation

Threatened Aristocrats breeding with ‘impure’ blood

Aristocratic derivation of colonial racism evident in ‘solidarity among whites’ that linked colonial rulers from different nations
- like the class solidarity of Europe’s 19th century aristocrats mediated through brotherhood and wealth

Question 24

Where did racism develop from outside of Europe?

Answer 24

19th century - European domination and colonialism
Colonial racism conceived empire as legitimate

If english lords were naturally superior to other englishmen, these englishmen are superior to subjected natives

Empires and their bureaucratic apparatuc permitted many bourgeois to play aristocrat

Question 25

Why does Anderson call Empire 'capitalism in feudal-aristocratic drag'?

Answer 25

First Army – citizen, metropolitan Second Army – local religious and ethnic minorities, internal police force, obsolete industrial weapons or swords This was not meant to show engineering or strategy (like the First Army) but rather glory, personal heroism and courtliness among officers

Question 26

What does racism coming from within national boundaries rather than across them lead to?

Answer 26

Justifies domestic repression and domination rather than foreign wars

Question 27

what is Amor patriae and what does Anderson say about it?

Answer 27

Love of one's country Not different from other loves Fond imagining Through the language of nationalism (mother tongue), pasts are restored and fellowships imagined

Question 28

What does Anderson say about reverse racism?

Answer 28

Reverse racism thus did not manifest in anticolonial movements as the language used rarely had derogatory secondary distinctions, whereas Europeans expressed anger and hatred by demeaning non-whites through slurs that implied they were less than civilized (biological)