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Book Review: Imagined Communities
by Tobias Basuki
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Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson 224 Pages. New York: Verso, 1991 Category: Social Science and History |
Benedict Anderson is a Professor emeritus of International Studies from Cornell University and also prominent scholar and writer whose many ideas had been inspired from observations, interactions and work in Indonesia. Anderson’s doctoral dissertation brought him to Indonesia where one of his works regarding the “Communist Coup” caused his deportation from Indonesia by the Soeharto regime.
“Imagined Communities” is his most notable work regarding the development of Nationalism, a major topic in the social sciences that had been and still is considered as a mystifying subject of inquiry. Nationalism is a strong intense feeling that can not be easily described and explained. It had been the source of unity or discord, peace or conflict within and between the nations. How does a sense of nationalism originate within a group of people? What is it actually? Is it developed when a group of people who share common ancestry, ethnicity, or identity come together for a purpose?
Anderson’s take on identity can be categorized as Mobilizationist or Situationalist in which identity or even ethnicity is not necessarily an innate and natural component of individuals and their society but rather something malleable and changing. His ideas and concepts regarding identity and Nationalism seemed to emerge out of an ingeniously informed imagination. His extensive knowledge of history through time and space allowed him to come up with these original theories expounded in the book.
These creative inspirations of ideas in explaining the formation of identity and sources of Nationalism are definitely strong points of the book. It made it a fascinating read that lights up new perspectives to history as we know it. It showed how events and inventions of times gone by have shaped our understandings of who we are as individuals and a community. The strengths that made this book so captivating however, also became its weakness. Much of the concepts illustrated by Anderson relied on historical anecdotes and his creative new perspective on certain things. His arguments were not supported by empirical evidence, statistics, and nor did it build on earlier theories regarding the subject. Although it made an exciting book to read by not bogging down the reader with numbers and reviews of other theories, the ideas felt like it came out of thin air. Nevertheless it is one of the most important readings among many views of Nationalism and identity.
Nationalism is commonly viewed or at least portrayed as a ‘reawakening of a sleeping nation’. Anderson argued differently and finds that nationalism “invents a nation where they do not exist”. Anderson suggested that the concept of the nation and nationalism are ideas imagined in the minds of the people. Imagined, however, does not mean it is imaginary.
Anderson explained that Nationalism can be understood by looking at cultural systems that preceded it. Nationalism according to Anderson found its roots in two important cultural systems, the religious community and the dynastic realm. These cultural systems formed the basis of a society. The religious community held the traditional society through the sacred languages (Latin-Christianity, Chinese, and Arabic) and sacred texts (Bible, Qur’an) and the dynastic realm organized the society around the high center (King) deriving its authority from divinity. Society’s life was configured and organized solely around a divine center represented by the king or the religious literati. It was the transformation of basically three ways of thinking that Anderson argued historically made possible the imagining of the nation. The first two were the decline of the traditional hierarchical and centripetal perception of the organization of the society. These older traditional communities were the basis of the social grouping that formed the nation, the shift of focus from the monarch and the priest however allowed people to think of themselves as citizens of a nation instead of serfs to their feudal lord.
The third factor was the apprehension of time and space in which during the development of print-capitalism people were enabled to think of themselves as a “sociological organism moving calendrically through space and time.” In other words the development of print media was the first time an individual when reading about other individuals or their writing was able to imagine a fellow citizen toiling at the other end of the nation progressing through time together.
These changes in the mindset of the traditional society began in periods such as the Enlightenment and the Reformation. It was the development of print-capitalism in vernacular languages during this period that brought widespread new understandings and ideas. People were connected through print and paper that allowed for ideas and thoughts to be communicated widely in words and languages that were broadly understood by everyone, commoners and elites alike. Anderson thought of this combination of capitalism and print technology as creating “a new form of imagined community.”
In his update to the original version of the book from 1983, Anderson added a chapter that further described the formation of nations of the fourth wave in the colonized world of Asia and Africa. He described how three institutions or rather instruments; the census, the map, and the museum were used by the colonials in imagining their dominion. Census systematically structured a variety of ethnicities within the larger group, the map formed the geography of the territory and its mass production imprinted this area in the minds of people, and finally the museum served as a source of historical continuity of the colonial state’s domain. The three tools used to define the dominion of the colonials in turn became the foundation of the nations we now know as Indonesia, Burma, and Papua New Guinea, among many others.
Anderson expounded remarkably how the role of ideas, technology, and imagination can form a nation such as Indonesia that we know today and often take for granted. History may form a context of how we perceive things, but far from a fixed definition of what Indonesia is and consists of; we see that it is malleable. For us Christians and minorities that perhaps often feel as alien and treated as such in the country we call home, we learn from this book it is possible to form a new definition in which we are not outsiders but a part of Indonesia.
Those of us who are privileged to study abroad and can consider ourselves as intellectuals can find resonance with the early educated and administrative ‘pilgrims’ as significant actors in forming and building the nation. The instruments and technologies available to us now such as the internet, transportation, machines at our fingertips trumps over what the map, census, and museums had been able to do half a century ago.
There are perhaps no obvious lines that can be drawn from the book to a Christian perspective. The ideas proposed did not contradict teachings in the Bible and to a certain extent reminded us about our identity, that first and foremost we are followers of Christ. Our worldly identity is unstable as it is shaped by race, geographic boundary, culture, politics, and a variety of boundless other factors. In turn our identity may shape how we think, act, and feel. However, having the realization that identity is shifting and changing, allows us to transcend beyond racial, class, and ethnic barriers. We as Christians and minorities find that the only enduring identity is our identity in Christ. Regardless of how politics, culture, and even weather shapes us, we are followers of Christ placed as Indonesians with the potential to make a difference and influence.
This book had showed how a group of intellectuals mobilized with certain technological tools in their hands formed Nations and our understandings of it. How much more can we as students and intellectuals with much greater access to higher technology undertake the task of changing a Nation? Indonesia may have overwhelming challenges, problems, and corruption to overcome, but if identity can change, so can a Nation. If a Nation is ‘imagined’, it can transform. In short this book may inspire us to take on new perspectives and ideas and recognize our significance as intellectual Christians in a variety of fields in transforming Indonesia.
Tobias Basuki had his bachelor degree in Computer Science from Goshen College and is working on his Master in Political Science from Northern Illinois University
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