"IMAGINED COMMUNITIES" (BENEDECT ANDERSON).   Term Paper ID:20209 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Reviews work on development of nationalism & its role in international relations.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Reviews work on development of nationalism & its role in international relations. Paper Introduction: Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities examines the issue of nationalism and how it developed, as well as how it operates in international relations to this day. This is a revision of an earlier edition, and the author notes how he has changed his approach and what he wants to accomplish with this book in the light of certain international events as well as after the application of certain new and developing ideas from historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, feminist, and other studies linking the objects of these fields of inquiry to nationalism and nation. He finds that it is beyond his means to adapt the work to these changes, so what he has tried to do instead is correct errors of fact and interpretation from the earlier edition. Anderson is trained as a specialist on Southeast Asia, which Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. This is a statement not only of thenature of nationalism but of the course of all history. The author takes as his starting point the anomaly of nationalism, aproblem for Marxists and critics of Marxism alike. It is clear that nationalism did develop as he says and thatit was transplanted to different regions. Once they were created, they became modular, or capable oftransplantation to different social terrains. The essential theme of the author is that nationalism and itsconcomitant elements (nation and nationality) are cultural artifacts of aparticular kind. He offers a particular view of the Americas as being madeup of Creole states, by which he means people of pure European descent bornin the Americas. Taylor's The State inBurma, and Richard Storry's The Double Patriots: A Study of JapaneseNationalism. The number of influences involvedmakes Anderson's argument complex and sometimes contradictory. He also states that his knowledge of Western Europeand the New World is superficial, though he has placed his focus therebecause nationalism had its origins in that part of the world. An interestingelement in his hypothesis is a comparison he makes between the life cycleof the human being and the life cycle of the idea of nationalism. He proposes two relevant cultural systems--the religions andthe dynastic--and shows how they support the idea of nation and the largerconception of nationalism. Anderson instead sees the impetus fornationalism as deriving from the fear of lower-class mobilizations (48). The author takes certain cues from these other works, but he is notarguing against ideas from these other books so much as he is using them tosupport his historical analysis of the origin and development of the ideaof nationalism. His title indicates his view of nations asimagined communities, or communities created in the minds of the people andimposed on the world as if there were something more than an idea binding anation together. A nation may be considered new, and indeed the idea of nationalismand nationhood itself may be new. Thisadmission, however, should lead the reader to beware of some of Anderson'sanalysis in a book that is tantalizing because of ideas that are not fullydeveloped, perhaps because the author cannot shake his roots in SoutheastAsia as he tries to examine an idea originating from Western Europe. He notesthat, for the individual, profound changes in consciousness bring with themcharacteristic amnesias--we forget the consciousness of childhood once wehave passed through puberty. He raises Nairn's view that nationalism in the Americaswas tied to the political baptism of the lower classes and rejects itbecause the class distinctions noted by Nairn did not exist in sufficientdegree when nationalism arrived. He also cites books that can be considered in the samecommunity of works addressing nationalism as an anomaly to be explained--Hugh Seton-Watson's Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins ofNations and the Politics of Nationalism and Hayden White's Metahistory:The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. This is a revision of an earlieredition, and the author notes how he has changed his approach and what hewants to accomplish with this book in the light of certain internationalevents as well as after the application of certain new and developing ideasfrom historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, feminist, andother studies linking the objects of these fields of inquiry to nationalismand nation. They could then be mergedwith a wide variety of political and ideological movements and constructs.In spite of what the author says, though, this is more descriptive thanexplanatory. He finds that it is beyond his means to adapt the work tothese changes, so what he has tried to do instead is correct errors of factand interpretation from the earlier edition. To understand them, we must know how they came intobeing, how they have changed over time, and why they command today suchprofound emotional legitimacy. Anderson is trained as a specialist on Southeast Asia, which he saysmay explain some of the biases in the book and some of the choices he hasmade in his material. New York: Verso, 1991.----------------------- 6 Still, there is behind every nation asense of something larger and longer-lasting with which the nation isaligned: What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which--as well as against which--it came into being (12).To the degree that the author develops this idea, he has offered aninteresting and fruitful framework within which to consider the issue ofnationalism. Anderson'sargument carries the reader through the history of nationalistic thinking,but often Anderson does not make his point clear or does not makerelationships among different parts of the world as clear as he seems tobelieve they are. It includes international rivalries, wars, anddissensions. He creates a strong framework for discussion ofthe issue in this way. It is also clear that it mixedwith different political and ideological constructs. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. He relates the idea of a nation to the idea of asociological organism (26), and he points out that there is always acultural component to the idea of a nation. Thereis a continuity which is part of the forgetting, and yet always what existscomes out of what went before (2 4-5). Anderson cites a number of other books that also address the issue ofnationalism and the development of and application of the concept ofnationhood in different parts of the world, and a number of these booksconsider the development of nationalism outside the Western Europeancontext--William R. By the 19th century, he finds, it has becomerepresented in a new consciousness, a consciousness that developednaturally once the idea of nation was no longer new. One aspect of theproblem has been a difficulty in defining nation, national, andnationalism. Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities examines the issueof nationalism and how it developed, as well as how it operates ininternational relations to this day. The legacy of nationalism is broad-based and is indicated inAnderson's narrative. Anderson examines the way nationalism as an idea developed and findsthat it evolved over time. BibliographyAnderson, Benedict. He does create different models for the development ofnationalism and then applies them as indicated to different countries,though it is not always clear why one model has prevailed in a given regionover other possibilities. So it is with nations, he notes, and nationshave forgotten their origins or the thinking of that earlier time. Knowing these things, the author says, wecan see that the creation of these artifacts at the end of the 18th centurywas a matter of the spontaneous distillation of certain discrete historicalforces. It includes colonialism and the revolutionarybattles that have followed. Roff's The Origins of Malay Nationalism, William G.Skinner's Chinese Society in Thailand, Robert H. It includes as well the development of a nationalconsciousness that may serve a people well in giving them a centralauthority to respect and a central idea for which to fight. The issue is why thishappened and what forces were at work to make it happen, and here theauthor is less able to offer an answer. The analysis is complex and geared to those who have aknowledge of the issues involved in the question of nationalism both inhistory and in recent events and who also have a knowledge of thehistorical roots that the author often no more than hints about or makesreference to in his argument. The book is addressed to an audience that might include professionalsand interested academics in history, political science, and relateddisciplines. For Anderson, it seems that nationalism is anidea that can always be traced back to the same antecedents, though it ismanifested in different historical contexts and different social ordersthat themselves hark back to some earlier religious or dynastic structurespeculiar to the specific situation. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.