according
to Anderson, the origins of nationalism lay in the process of secularization.
Nationalism, as Anderson conceives it, displaced religion in a number of critical ways.
[T]he very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where,
three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on
men’s minds . . . the idea that a particular script language offered privileged access to
ontological truth . . . the belief that society was naturally organized around and under
high centres . . . [and] a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were
indistinguishable, the origin of the world and of men [being] essentially identical. (p. 36)
Rather than any political economy of uneven and combined development, ‘print-
capitalism’ and the new secular pilgrimages of the functionaries of the new centralized absolutist
and colonial states determined the ‘shape’ and ‘kind’ of the new consciousness and community,
making it national. Print-capitalism denoted ‘a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between
a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications
(print), and the fatality of human and linguistic diversity’ (p. 43). Under its impact, while Latin
itself became ‘more Ciceronian . . . increasingly removed from ecclesiastical and everyday life’,
vernacular print languages rose to displace Latin both in the religious and political spheres (pp.
39–41), serving as the basis of new, smaller but much more centralized entities in the latter. The
new vernacular print languages laid the basis for national consciousness by unifying ‘fields of
language and communication below Latin and above spoken vernaculars’. They gave ‘a new
fixity to language’. And they made out of dialects which were closer to the print languages
privileged ‘languages of power’ (pp. 44–5). The first widened the community as print made
mutually incomprehensible dialects mutually intelligible, the second laid the basis for the
antiquity which would so often be claimed for nations and the third marginalized more distant
dialects in ways which occasionally led to ‘sub-nationalisms’. The rise of modern centralized
absolutist and colonial states on the other hand gave rise to ‘journeys’ which defined the extent
and limits of the units which would come to be conceived as national. Just as pilgrims of the past
marked the ever-expanding limits of the sacred world of religion by undertaking pilgrimages to
distant sacred centres, so state officials now undertook journeys to and from provincial centres,
creating the experiential basis on which the extent and limits of the new national community
would come to be imagined.
Rich as the discussion of print
capitalism and official pilgrimages is,
and suggestive of how cultural
phenomena such as secularization,
Protestantism, vernacularization,
literacy and others contributed to the
nationalisms of Europe, it is hardly
surprising. One can expect cultural
phenomena contemporaneous with the
rise of nationalism in any part of the
world to have been connected with the
shaping of the national culture: much
as, e.g., emerging religious movements
in India structured the participation of many communities in the Congress in the 1920s and
1930s (Hardiman 1977) or, to take another example, radio became a carrier of nationalist
messages beginning in the 1930s and TV frames new forms of nationalism today – whether in
Thailand, India or the former Soviet Republics.
Although they were originally ‘unselfconscious processes’, Anderson suggested, these
Euroamerican developments soon crystallized into ‘formal models to be imitated, and, where
expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit’ (p. 45). American nationalists
pioneered a model which, by the second decade of the 19th century at the latest (p. 81), was
available for imitation and ‘piracy’. Later nationalisms were able to work from visible models
provided by their distant, and after the convulsions of the French Revolution, not too distant,
predecessors. The ‘nation’ thus became something capable of being consciously aspired to from
early on, rather than a slowly sharpening frame of vision. Indeed, as we shall see, the ‘nation’
proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent. It became available for
pirating by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands. (p. 67)
The ‘last wave’ of decolonized nations which would have been critical to any project of ‘de-
Europeanizing’ theories of nationalism became, in
IC ‘incomprehensible
except in terms of the
succession of models we have been considering’. Their retention of European languages of state
resembled the American model, their populism, the European and their ‘Russifying’ policy
orientation, the official Model (p. 113). The bilingualism of its elites ‘meant access, through the
European language-of state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular,
to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of
the 19th century (p. 116). How Anderson’s largely Eurocentric discussion, not to mention the
idea that non-European nationalisms were modelled on Western models served to ‘de-
Europeanize’ the study of nationalism is hard to fathom. Rather than de-Europeanising the study
of nationalism, this was surely adding an extra, hefty, layer of Eurocentrism.
The implication of Anderson’s argument is that while there is
a sociology of nationalism for Europe, there need not be one for the
Third World because countries in it were merely imitating, nay
‘pirating’, pre-fabricated models. This would certainly seem
insulting if one considered it to be true. Partha Chatterjee, for one,
decided to take offence at Anderson’s implication that Third World
nationalism was merely ‘derivative’ (Chatterjee 1986). He needn’t
have: Anderson’s argument would only work if Third World
societies were clean slates onto which Westernized nationalist intellectuals could write Western
stories of nationalism, if they had no sociologies of their own which might resist and complicate
such attempts.
The second edition seemed to abandon the idea of the imitation and piracy of ‘models’
altogether, because, ‘a brilliant doctoral thesis by Thongchai Winichakul, a young Thai
historian’, stimulated Anderson to think about space, mapping and the role of the colonial state
in both (p. xiv). The addition of a new chapter on the ‘census, map and museum’ corrected
Anderson’s ‘short-sighted assumption . . . that official nationalism in the colonized worlds of
Asia and Africa was modelled directly on that of the dynastic state of nineteenth-century