Summary of Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

(Chapter 1, 7 and 10)

Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism is the book authored
by Benedict Andersons who coined imagined community for the analysis of nationalism. The
author in this book had analyzed the cultural, political and technological settings for the rise of
nationalism in eighteenth century Europe that have shifted to the rest of the world and persisted
till date. Nations, nationality and nationalism lack precise scientific definitions and defy analysis.
The author had disdained the fact to link the nationalism with political but rather exclusively
allied it with cultural artifacts or phenomenon like religion and kinship formed due to particular
historical forces which was later merged with political and ideological spheres and aroused deep
attachments.

The author has shown three paradoxes of nationalism namely:

1. Objective modernity of nations vs. their subjective antiquity
2. Formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept vs. irremediable particularity of
concrete manifestations of nationality
3. Political power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and incoherence

Anderson defined the nation as an imagined political community and imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign. He further elucidated that nation is imagined because members
cannot all know each other; nation is limited because no nation encompasses all of mankind, nor
even aspires to; nation is sovereign because nations came into being during Enlightenment and
strive for freedom and finally nation is a community because a nation is conceived of as a
horizontal comradeship of equals.

Thus the author in the first chapter of introduction had concluded that nationalism have a cultural
roots and its emergence should be examined historically.

In the chapter 7 The Last Wave, he traces the rise of post-WWII postcolonial nation-states, and
their genesis in the leadership of lonely, bilingual intelligentsias unattached to sturdy local
bourgeoisies that were educated in the Russified educational systems meant to produce large
cadres of bilingual folks to administer the growing colonial state. As always, the author notes
that the territories of these future imagined communities are coterminous with the administrative
centers of the colonial map that marked the apex of travel for these metropole-educated natives.
So, the very education meant to produce willing servants of colonial empire also gave folks
access to nationalist ideologies and histories that they would ultimately seek to exercise against
their oppressors.

In Chapter 10, Census, Map, and Museum, the author put forward his argument about the rise
of post-colonial nationalisms as direct progenies from European official nationalisms. He
augments a sense of the local colonial states contribution through the interweaving technologies
of census, map, and museum, both technologizing space and history in service of the officially
imagined nation. Thus, these three institutions shaped the way in which states imagined their
dominion: the nature of the human beings they ruled, the geography of their domain, and the
legitimacy of their ancestry. Census reifies identities into singular, mutually-exclusive categories
and suggests a quantity of identical units. Map focuses on borders rather than on centers and
views each as a country from above, filling the space of the planet. The shape of a country
becomes a logo that penetrates national imagination as an emblem of the country. Museum
suggests a political inheritance of historical connections and restored monuments that serve as
ceremonial objects for the modern state. Thus, the author concluded that census, map and
museum served as a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be appliedto anything under
the states real or contemplated control and assumed that the world was made up of replicable
plurals, that everything had a serial number.