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Communities only exist only in the Minds of Europeans

Posted on by Razib Khan

I read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of Nationalism because other people read it. This is a book that is routinely alluded to in discussions by pundits of various stripes. On the back of the 2006 edition, the publisher notes that over 250,000 copies have been printed of this short academic work. Time put this as 48th out of 100 all-time great nonfiction books. It’s one of the most assigned works to undergraduates at universities.

There are two things about Imagined Communities that drove me crazy. First, there’s a tendency to just assert something that is perhaps profound, perhaps inscrutable. Honestly, I just don’t know. I randomly opened to page 23, and found this:

Figuring the Virgin Mary with “Semitic” feature or “first-century” costumes in the restoring spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the medieval [sic] Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separation between past and present.30

But wait, there’s a note! What does it cite? “For us, the idea of ‘modern dress,’ a metaphorical equivalencing of past with present, is a backhanded recognition of their fatal separation.”

This is pretty typical throughout the book. I’m really skeptical of this strong assertion that medieval Christians didn’t understand cause and effect, and the past or present, considering that they periodically went through millenarian enthusiasms about the End of the World. But perhaps I misunderstand Anderson? It wouldn’t surprise me. He’s just not that clear a lot of the time.

About ten years ago Jonathan Gottschall observed that often in literary scholarship all their “experiments” confirm their theories. Imagined Communities follows this model. I’m very confused why pundits with backgrounds in political science are citing a work which is basically a long analysis of literature, with some historical references thrown in. Though there are numbers in the book, there are no graphs or tables. This is a work of literary scholarship.

Second,  Anderson likes to use a lot of words which are very obscure. For example, “the philological-lexicographic revolution and the rise of intra-European nationalist movements, themselves the products, not only of capitalism, but of the elephantiasis of the dynastic states….”

I understood what the author meant by “elephantiasis.” But that’s a really unnecessary word. If it was the exception, I’d shrug it off. But this reliance on overly obscure terminology is pretty common in this book, and again, it makes me wonder what undergrads are getting out of it. Not to brag, but I have a pretty big vocabulary, and the lexical flourishes were obscuring the point of whole passages. If that’s how I feel, what about someone with a smaller vocabulary?

Probably the most intellectually creative thing about Imagined Communities is that the author begins by examining the emergence of nation-states in Latin America, and the role of white Creole communities in the rebellion against the Spaniards. Anderson contends that this model influenced Europeans. The United States as well showed much of Europe that a large continental republic could actually flourish. From here Imagined Communities digs deeply into the various intricate details of how the Empire of the Romanovs began to assert a more clear Russian identity, or the nationalities trapped into the Habsburg polity.

Much of this material is interesting and has clearly percolated to other areas of scholarship, as I was familiar with it. Again, the author has a tendency toward abstruse phraseology or obscure word choices, but the portion on Europe was relatively coherent and familiar, though there was a strong bias to present nationalism as novel and new, rather than primordial.

But when the story moves to Asia it lost me. This is strange insofar as Anderson has a background in Asian scholarship, with a focus on Indonesia. He devotes a fair amount of time to Southeast Asia for these reason. And perhaps it wasn’t intended, but Imagined Communities depicts the emergence of Southeast Asian nation-states as an outcome of the agency of Europeans. The British created Burma. The French created Vietnam (Anderson makes much of the name changes that “Vietnam” has undergone over the past few centuries). China was a diverse motley of dialects before being dragged into the modern world by European-influenced intellectuals. Japan was given form with the Meiji revolution. Thailand created itself due to its engagement with colonial powers. Indonesia was stitched together by the Dutch.

Non-Europeans have no agency or originality in creating their own national identities. They were blank slates upon which European colonials drew something.

Luckily for me, I don’t come into reading Imagined Communities totally ignorant of other viewpoints. I’ve read Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, which makes the case that mainland Southeast Asia resembled Europe in the coalescence of distinct proto-national identities one to two thousand years ago.

The same is true to the north. China was arguably a nation-empire long before Europeans arrived. Though the Chinese peasantry spoke different dialects, it was united by a ruling class with a sense of coherency. The modern Japanese nation-state state is modeled on Western nation-states, in particular, Prussia. It strikes as bizarre to hold that this unique and isolated nation didn’t exist in the imagination of Japanese when the Europeans first arrived.

Anderson, like many scholars of his ilk, gets carried away with the novelty and power of European rationalism. For example, he focuses on European censuses with the clear implication that they somehow created many ethnicities. Not to sidetrack, but modern genetics shows that this is just false. It’s false in India. It’s false in Southeast Asia. It’s probably false more or less everywhere.

Western science and the bureaucratic machinery of the Western nation-state, were novel and revolutionary. But peoples existed with a self-identity long before Europeans arrived. To be honest I found Anderson’s treatment of the Vietnamese almost insulting. The first edition of Imagined Communities was written in the early 1980s, and the work is pervaded by Cold War concerns. Though Vietnam has been a catspaw in the game of great power, the fact that they began adjuncts to, but did not become absorbed into, the Chinese system highlights that their national identity in some inchoate way is very old.

Overall it is worth reading Imagined Communities because of its purported cultural significance. But much of it is so garbled and unclear I’m not sure what people are taking from it, aside from the proposition that the modern nation-state was invented in the last few centuries due to modernity. In the end the book is kind of a long tautology.

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12 thoughts on “Communities only exist only in the Minds of Europeans”

  1. ‘Doba returned to [Poland] to a hero’s welcome and 14 months later flew to Washington to receive an award from the National Geographic Society as the 2015 People’s Choice Adventurer of the Year. Event producers asked him to just walk onstage and say, in English, “Thank you very much.” Doba, who wore jeans to the June ceremony, walked onstage and said, “Polacy nie gesi i swoj jezyk maja.” Polish people are not geese and have their own language.’

  3. “Though there are numbers in the book, there are no graphs or tables. This is a work of literary scholarship.”

    That is not necessarily damning. Literature is important and can reveal a lot about a period or society. Not that I am arguing for this particular study of it.

  4. Razib. Thank you for taking this bullet for us. I can now skip this book safe in the knowledge I have missed nothing worthwhile.

    It seems to me that the intellectual work here shares a bit of the structure of the lumper vs splitter debates in biological species classification, or the continuity vs change approaches in historiography. In this case the author is an extreme splitter, who deconstructs every species into individuals.

    It is certainly the case that national sentiments are reflected in the literature of Classical Greece. They distinguished very sharply between Hellenes and Barbarians, and united to fight the Shah of Persia.

    We certainly see national sentiments in Early Modern Europe before Westphalia and the French Revolution. In England, Shakespeare was almost jingoistic in works like the Richard II, Henry IV (1&2), Henry V sequence. And I think there is a lot of national feeling in the story of Jeanne d’Arc. The Holy Roman Empire name was officially renamed the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” after the Diet of Cologne in 1512. And, Machiavelli called on Italians to unite around that time.

    The history of France is instructive. Nation building did not begin de novo with the 1789 Revolution. It was project that the Bourbons had worked on for a very long time before that. Example, Louis XIII founded the Academie Francaise to standardize the language in 1635. Back then Parisian French was not spoken outside Ile des France, and may not have been intelligible more than a hundred miles away. France may be a creation of will, and policy. But, it is just as real as the Eiffel Tower.

    Final thought. human beings need connections. The alternative to nations is not “Imagine there’s no countries”, it is tribes. And tribes engage in bloody incessant combat.

  5. the lumper-splitter analogy is apropos.

    also, the idea that the west invented love in the medieval period in provence.

    actually, it was a specific type of courtly love.

    the same with nations. the modern nation-state was invented btwn westphalia and the congress of vienna.

  6. I’d say Shakespeare’s jingoism was more about a conscious attempt to create an English nation where one did not exist, soon after 1588 the time might have seemed ripe, than about it actually being there when his history plays were first performed. Francis Bacon, in his ‘On Unity in Religion’ slightly later, considers the possibility of the nation state, and declares that tribal feeling can only come from religion, and the nation state was impossible. It’s not that he was right, but if a high royal official like Bacon didn’t believe in the possibility of the nation state, even if wrong, one can be sure that England in the reign of James I was not a nation state, so it wasn’t in the 1590’s either.

    Reading the reviews of this guy, he really says that the idea of the nation state come from latin america? The thing that he’s doing, and the professors who assign this book, is lowering the prestige of history professors. The one thing that he definitely ended the argument about is as to what is on the list of deal breakers for being appointed to a tenured position in the history department at Cornell University, being a clueless nincompoop about history is obviously not on the list.

    If anyone wants to point to one of the causes of the ‘devaluation of expertise’, which seems to be mostly the devaluation of credentials issued by universities, at least outside STEM, guys like this guy, who from the outside looking in do not seem uncommon in academia, would seem to be the reason why. Guys like him make it seem foolish to not to discount any claim to expertise that’s based solely on having an academic credential.

  7. Am delighted to see someone saying these things.

    The great weakness of “post-colonial studies” is its ignorance of, and lack of interest in, the pre-colonial.

  8. the philological-lexicographic revolution and the rise of intra-European nationalist movements, themselves the products, not only of capitalism, but of the elephantiasis of the dynastic states….

    This is erudition for the sake of sounding like a high intellect, and I always found it – pardon the rough language – repulsive (for the same reason I find much of legal writing obfuscating rather than illuminating). This is the kind of exasperating lingo that the high priests of academia use as a signal to their colleagues rather than as a means of – gee, I don’t know – communication?

    Imagined Communities depicts the emergence of Southeast Asian nation-states as an outcome of the agency of Europeans. The British created Burma. The French created Vietnam (Anderson makes much of the name changes that “Vietnam” has undergone over the past few centuries). China was a diverse motley of dialects before being dragged into the modern world by European-influenced intellectuals. Japan was given form with the Meiji revolution. Thailand created itself due to its engagement with colonial powers. Indonesia was stitched together by the Dutch.

    That’s almost hilarious given that East Asian polities had defined statehood and related bureaucracies long before Western Europeans did (even the Romans, after creating an empire, had something of revolving capitals and bureaucracies that accompanied the emperors).

    One can certainly make a more convincing case that the European colonial powers imposed their concept of statehood on tribal societies in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America (the ill effects of which we still see today), but that argument fails utterly in much of metropolitan Asia.

  9. A few years ago, I read a review of a book about France. The author claimed that France was invented and imposed on the peoples outside the Paris region for political reasons. Sadly I never noted the review or the book.

    If any of you have a clue, could you please reply to this comment?

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