Study Guides: Anderson
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 9-46
Chapter 2: “Cultural Roots”
Nationalism replaced two key formations:
Religious Community
Sacred languages like Examination Chinese, Latin, and Arabic were understood to be the language of God, of reality. Vernacular languages like English, French were corrupt and fallen. The literate were adepts, literally portals through which one reached God (15). Status of sacred language decayed through exploration (16-18) and print (18-19).
Dynastic Realm
19-22: sovereignty was understood to be centripetal and hierarchical. Today, it is flat, evenly operative over every square inch.
Apprehensions of Time
The decay of religious and dynastic understandings of the universe are manifestations of a changing understanding of time. In older forms, events are linked through time. Abraham’s sacrifice of his son is linked to God’s own sacrifice of Jesus by cosmological time. This is why “modern” dress in medieval paintings wasn’t a problem for their first viewers. There was no difference between Biblical and contemporary time.
Today, events are linked because they share the “same” time. People are linked into a society because they all are busy within the “same” moment. Novels and newspapers manifest, enact, and teach this new understanding of relations between people and events.
Newspapers are one-day best sellers. Simple novelistic plot as an example (25). People are linked by their shared places in a generalized and abstracted society; they are members of an imagined community. Summary of the argument on 36.
Chapter 3: “Origins of National Consciousness”
Saturation of the Latin-reading market took 150 years (38). Status of Latin declining because of classicism, Reformation, and rise of administrative vernaculars.
These print-languages laid the basis for national consciousness by
(44) Creating unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above spoken languages;
(44) Giving language a new fixity, creating new images of antiquity;
(45) Creating languages-of-power within particular linguistic communities: dialect spoken in London became “The King’s English,” etc.
Summary of chapter’s argument in penultimate paragraph on 46.