Previous
Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Imagined Communities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nation as Imagined Community
Language, Publishing, and Identity
Centralization, Technology, and Power
Piracy and the Uses of History
Summary
Analysis
“Tombs of Unknown Soldiers” are a prime symbol of nationalism: they are meaningful only because the identity of the deceased is unknown, and because they stand for the efforts of a community. This shows that nationalism takes an obsessive interest in “death and immortality”—much like religion and completely unlike Marxism and Liberalism. Everyone dies, but religion gives meaning to people’s death and suffering—it “transform[s] fatality into continuity” by, for instance, linking death to rebirth. So it is no coincidence that nationalism emerged around the same time as the Enlightenment overturned the dominance of religion in Europe. Anderson does not mean to say that the decline of religion caused nationalism, or that nationalism is a superior form of religion, but merely that nationalism should be thought of as not a “self-consciously held political ideolog[y],” but as a “large cultural system[]” like “the religious community and the dynastic realm.”
The “Tombs of Unknown Soldiers” are quite literally monuments to nothing, the graves of no one in particular. This shows the sense in which nationalism is fundamentally hollow and based on the abstract idea of the citizen, which the concrete community of citizens are then supposed to believe in and model themselves after. The unknown soldiers can only stand in for the nation because they have no particular individual identity, and therefore represent the epitome of martyrdom: negating one’s own existence for the sake of the larger (national) community. Nationalism’s status as a “large cultural system[],” which provides people with a sense of meaning just like religion does, suggests that it is in some sense a defining ideology of the contemporary world, the paradigm through which almost everyone defines themselves and their place in relation to others (much like empires and religions in many cases in the past).
Themes
In the section “The Religious Community,” Anderson suggests that religions could create a sense of community across the globe through “a sacred language and written script”—Latin, Chinese, and Classical Arabic allowed people from different language communities to communicate through writing. Each community considered its language sacred, such that outsiders could become more “civilized” by learning it, and each believed its own language offered a privileged door into the truths of being and the divine, which made “conversion [of outsiders] through the sacred language” an important goal. People in these communities believed in a strict hierarchy, with the literate minority “mediat[ing] between earth and heaven.”
Anderson’s analysis of religion offers a more familiar example of how shared values, symbols, communicative mechanisms, and institutions help bind people together into communities. He introduces the relationship between language and identity, showing here how communities coalesced around and defined themselves by particular dialects. The prestige of each sacred language became the vehicle for each religion to coalesce a community around itself, and scholars used their languages’ prestige to centralize power and authority in their own hands. Whereas Anderson later argues that language helps consolidate “horizontal,” at least theoretically egalitarian communities in nations, then, here he shows how language helped religious communities form and sustain “vertical” hierarchies.
Themes
But Anderson argues that “the great religiously imagined communities” declined from the end of the Middle Ages onward. He mentions two of the most important reasons for this. First, intercontinental travel put people with different beliefs into contact—Anderson uses Marco Polo and an 18th-century “Persian traveler” as examples of the increasing association of religion with territory. And secondly, “the sacred language” became less important and the vernacular gradually became the primary language of publishing.
Both of these transformations made it increasingly difficult for religious communities to remain self-contained bubbles. First, seeing others revere their own leaders, books, and gods made it more difficult for members of any given religious community to continue believing that their system transmitted the singular, absolute truth. And secondly, when “sacred language[s]” lost their prestige, it became possible for common people to rise to the positions of power and participate in public deliberations, both of which were previously monopolized by a scholarly elite.
Themes
In the section “The Dynastic Realm,” Anderson outlines how drastically foreign a dynastic or purely monarchical government would be to contemporary people. The monarch’s power comes from divinity, those who live under the crown are subjects, not citizens, and there are no clear borders. To consolidate rule over different peoples, ruling families married into one another, or kings kept concubines.
Dynastic rule would seem completely alien to the modern reader, even though it was an accepted—even unquestionable—structure at the time. Anderson implies that nationalism creates a parallel situation: although it is essentially taken as the normal and natural order of things in the contemporary world, to people living in other eras it would be strange and alien. This shows that, fundamentally, the nation is a contingent, historically particular political formation that could be superseded under the right conditions.
Themes
Get the entire Imagined Communities LitChart as a printable PDF.
This “sacral monarchy” started waning in the mid-1600s, and by the late 1700s it was no longer the default paradigm for state power, but merely “a semi-standardized model.” While in the early 1900s many governments remained formally dynastic (and some even do today), these have mostly sought to justify themselves in the terms of nationalism.
Anderson emphasizes that there is a difference between what states call themselves and how they act—even supposed monarchies (like the U.K., Malaysia, and Bhutan, just to name a few) in the modern day largely operate as republics and encourage their populations to think of themselves as citizens of a nation (rather than subjects of a king or queen).
Themes
Anderson begins the long section titled “Apprehensions of Time” by arguing that there is one more “fundamental change”—a change in how people understood time—that “made it possible to ‘think’ the nation.” For example, Medieval Christian painters often depicted Jesus and the Virgin Mary as people from their own place or culture because, in that era, people lacked a “conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or a [sense] of radical separations between past and present.” Rather, they believed that Judgment Day could come at any moment, and that the past, present, and future were all predetermined by God’s will (and therefore existed simultaneously). This understanding of time was replaced by the current one, “homogeneous, empty time,” which sees time as a linear, measurable, empty container, with one thing causing another and the future remaining uncertain.
Anderson’s complex analysis of the change in people’s conception of time also plays a central role in his argument about the role of history in nationalism (as well as that of nationalism in history). “Homogeneous, empty time” is the basis of the discipline of history, which tracks people, places, institutions, etc. as they have changed throughout time as the result of circumstances both inside and outside human control. In other words, historians and nationalists see the future as uncertain and changeable, whereas the previous understanding of time took it as fixed by God’s will. The notion that people could make their own histories and control their own destinies was an important impetus for nationalist revolutions, therefore, but also for scholars’ very attempt to document and understand history.
Themes
Anderson next argues that this transformation in concepts of time can be well understood through “the novel and the newspaper,” which became important vehicles for “‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.” In novels, readers can see different characters doing different things at the same time, and understand the connections among different characters who may never actually meet in the book. The characters comprise “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time,” just like a nation. To illustrate this complex argument, Anderson uses four examples from different contexts.
Anderson uses the cultural forms of the novel and newspaper not only to show how representations of time enabled the formation of nations but also to emphasize the sense in which nations are fundamentally cultural constructs. Novels jump around in time in order to illustrate relations of cause and effect, and they portray all the characters as a community even if they never meet. By highlighting these aspects of the novel form, Anderson shows that the novel contains the ingredients of the imagined community, which is likely what makes it such a powerful vehicle for the formation of nationalist movements.
Themes
Anderson’s first example is the opening passage of Filipino writer José Rizal’s 1887 novel Noli Me Tangere, written in Spanish (the colonial language), in which anonymous people around the capital Manila (an imagined community) share gossip and the narrator directly addresses future Filipinos. In contrast, a similarly illustrious work written in the indigenous Filipino language, Tagalog, a few decades before is distinctly oral in character, proceeds through “spoken flashback[s],” and never addresses the reader.
The anonymous collective of Manila residents in Rizal’s novel represents a microcosm of the Philippine nation—despite never having met one another, they clearly have common interests and are even imagined as creating a new generation that will share those interests. The other, contrasting work is written from a first-person perspective that is more concerned with people’s individuality and their specific relations to one another, rather than using an omniscient narrative voice that treats people as a collective that persists through history.
Themes
Anderson’s third example is Mexican writer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s 1816 novel El Periquillo Sarniento, which criticizes the Spanish colonial government by following a Mexican the government fails to educate as he visits “hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries,” and more. The Mexican nation “is clearly bounded” geographically, and the implication is that the colonial government has failed this nation as a whole. His final example is the Indonesian nationalist Marco Kartodikromo’s Semarang Hitam, which opens with scenes of the city Semarang all narrated as “a world of plurals” and then turns to an unnamed young man—nameless because he might stand for any Indonesian—who reads a newspaper about the death of a similarly anonymous vagrant and grows angry at the colonial government.
Fernández de Lizardi’s novel adds an explicitly geographical dimension to the imagination of communities—he portrays Mexico as a territorial entity, made of various places and the diverse ways of life within them. Kartodikromo’s picture of Semarang, like the “Tombs of Unknown Soldiers,” points out the dependence of nationalism on an abstract ideal of citizenship by putting anonymous figures of colonial suffering and resistance at its center. And both show how formerly colonized nations imagined themselves as unified in part through a collective response to the empires that ruled them.
Themes
Anderson asks what makes “the newspaper as cultural product” distinctive. There is something strange in putting news from all around the world on the same page. These stories end up there because of two “imagined linkage[s].” First, the stories have happened at the same time, and secondly, the newspaper will be read by people all around the same city, at roughly the same time, on the same day when it is published. (Anderson suggests that the book, and newspapers as “an ‘extreme form’ of the book,” was the first truly self-contained commodity popularized under industrial capitalism.) The newspaper therefore “creat[es] that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.”
Anderson’s analysis of the newspaper—which, again, looks at familiar, taken-for-granted objects through an anthropological lens—shows how the publications simultaneously rely on and create the idea of a unified readership with common interests—in other words, an imagined community of the reading classes. It also suggests, of course, that the spread of newspapers and similar print forms might have played an important role in encouraging national identities to leap off the page and into people’s personal senses of identity (an argument he takes up in more depth in the next two chapters).
Themes
In closing, Anderson summarizes the findings of this chapter. According to him, “the very possibility of imagining the nation” required three ideas to move from paradigmatic to obsolete: the sacred written language, dynastic rule by a divine monarch, and the religious view of time that made “the origins of the world and of [humans] essentially identical.” Together, the shifts away from these three ideas separated “cosmology and history,” erasing the sense that “the everyday fatalities of existence” had some greater meaning. This opened the door for nationalism to take religion’s place. Anderson notes that this successfully happened most of all because of “print-capitalism,” which is the subject of his next chapter.
In his conclusion to this chapter, Anderson reemphasizes the sense in which nations serve a cultural and narrative function for their citizens, helping them identify themselves within the broader world and in relation to others. Nations both rely on and facilitate new concepts that fill in for all three of the ones that were lost: sacred written languages were replaced by popular vernacular ones; dynastic rulers were replaced with elected ones; and the old view of time and history was replaced with one that emphasized human agency and possibility.
Themes
