1 Benedict Anderson Following formal publication of the alle- gations (Anderson et al., 1971), Indone- BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND sian authorities barred Anderson from THEORETICAL CONTEXT Indonesia for what became the duration of Suharto’s regime (though Anderson returned to Indonesia in 1999 following the dictator’s death). Author of one of the most important con- Anderson completed his PhD, The cepts in political geography, that of nations Pemuda Revolution: Indonesian Politics, being ‘imagined communities’, Benedict 1945–46 in 1967 and taught in the Richard O’Gorman Anderson was born in Department of Government at Cornell Kunming, China in 1936. Brother of polit- University until retirement in 2002. Edi- ical theorist Perry Anderson and an Irish tor of the interdisciplinary journal Indo- citizen whose father was an official with nesia between 1966 and 1984, Anderson Imperial Maritime Customs, he grew up studied topics as diverse as Indonesia’s in California and Ireland before attending government, politics and international Cambridge University. Studying briefly relations (e.g., 1964), human rights (e.g., under Eric Hobsbawm, Anderson gradu- 1976) and role in East Timor (e.g., 1980). ated with a First Class degree in Classics An expert on South East Asia, military in 1957. He moved to Cornell Univer- conflicts between Cambodia, Vietnam sity in 1958 to pursue PhD research on and China in the late-1970s stimulated Indonesia where he was influenced by Anderson to analyse the importance of, George Kahin, John Echols and Claire and political attraction to, nationalist Holt (Anderson, 1998; 1999). In 1965 politics. The result was Imagined Commu- Indonesia’s military leader Suharto foiled nities – Reflections on the Origin and Spread an alleged coup attempt by communist of Nationalism (1983; 1991; 2006). soldiers, purged the army, and massa- In this work, Anderson maintained that cred civilians. Working with two other major theoretical approaches had largely graduate students, Anderson analysed ignored nationalism, merely accepting it Suharto’s version of events, questioning as the way things are: their veracity. Their assessment reached the Indonesian military who in 1967 and Nation, nationality, nationalism – all have 1968 invited Anderson to the country to proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyse. In contrast to the immense persuade him of the errors in this mono- influence that nationalism has exerted on graph, then known as the ‘Cornell Paper’. the modern world, plausible theory about Failing to be convinced, Anderson was it is conspicuously meager. (Anderson, denounced by the Indonesian regime. 2006: 3) Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-01.indd 18 30/08/2010 11:41:39 AM Benedict Anderson 19 Particularly culpable in this respect was It is imagined because the members of even Marxism, the relationship between it and the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or nationalism being the subject of debate in even hear of them, yet in the minds of New Left Review in the 1970s (e.g., Nairn, each lives the image of their communion. 1975; Löwy, 1976; Debray, 1977; see (Anderson, 2006: 6; original emphasis) Anderson, 2006: 208–9). In this climate, Anderson (2006: 3; original emphasis) This understanding both shapes and is argued Marxist thought had not ignored shaped by political and cultural insti- nationalism but that ‘nationalism has tutions as people ‘imagine’ they share proved an uncomfortable anomaly for general beliefs, attitudes and recognise Marxist theory and, precisely for that rea- a collective national populace as having son, has been largely elided, rather than similar opinions and sentiments to their confronted’. Imagined Communities was own. Secondly: an effort to reconcile theories of Marx- ism and nationalism, and counter what The nation is imagined as limited because Anderson envisaged as a skewed context even the largest of them, encompassing for the assessment of nationalism, namely perhaps a billion living human beings, an almost wholly European focus, to the has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. detriment of understanding the colonial antecedents of modern nationalist politics. (Anderson, 2006: 7; original emphasis) Drawing on case studies of colonialism in Latin America and Indonesia, Ander- To have one nation means there must be son (2006: 5–6) proposed ‘the following another nation against which self-definition definition of the nation: it is an imagined can be constructed. Anderson is thus argu- political community – and imagined as ing for the social construction of nations both inherently limited and sovereign’. as political entities that have a limited spa- tial and demographic extent, rather than organic, eternal entities. Further: It is imagined as sovereign because the con- cept was born in an age in which Enlight- SPATIAL CONTRIBUTIONS enment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hi- erarchical dynastic realm … nations dream of being free … The gage and emblem of Anderson’s concept of nations being this freedom is the sovereign state. ‘imagined communities’ has become (Anderson, 2006: 7; original emphasis) standard within books reviewing geo- graphical thought (e.g., Crang, 1998; Anderson argues that the concept of the Cloke et al., 2001; Anderson et al., 2003; nation emerged in the late-eighteenth Oakes and Price, 2008). The contention century as a societal structure to replace that a nation is ‘imagined’ does not mean previous monarchical or religious orders. that a nation is false, unreal or to be dis- In this manner, a nation was a new way of tinguished from true (unimagined) com- conceptualising state sovereignty and munities. Rather Anderson is proposing rule. This rule would be limited to a that a nation is constructed from popular defined population and territory over processes through which residents share which the state, in the name of nation- nationality in common: ality, could exercise power: Hubbard_Kitchin-4077-Ch-01.indd 19 30/08/2010 11:41:40 AM 20 Key Thinkers on Space and Place Finally, it is imagined as a community, together as national experiences as peo- because, regardless of the actual inequality ple felt that all national residents were and exploitation that may prevail in each, reading the same publications. Thus, ‘the the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is convergence of capitalism and print tech- this fraternity that makes it possible, over nology ... created the possibility of a new the past two centuries, for so many mil- form of imagined community, which in lions of people, not so much to kill, as will- its basic morphology set the stage for the ingly to die for such limited imaginings. modern nation’ (Anderson, 2006: 46). (Anderson, 2006: 7; original emphasis) The worldwide impact of Imagined Com- munities across academic disciplines led Nations hold such power over imagina- to revised editions in 1991 and 2006. In tions, claims Anderson, that patriotic calls the enlarged 1991 edition Anderson noted to arms are understood as the duty of all that he had ‘[become] uneasily aware national residents. Further, in war, national that what I had believed to be a signifi- citizens are equal and class boundaries cantly new contribution to thinking about are eroded in the communal struggle for nationalism – changing apprehensions of national survival and greatness. time – patently lacked its necessary coor- Anderson’s second key aspect of the dinate: changing apprehensions of space’ development of nationalism is what he (2006: xiii–xiv). Utilising South East Asian identifies as the role of ‘creole pioneers’. examples, Anderson corrected this omis- In both North and South America, those sion by including chapters addressing the who fought for national independence construction of national memories and the in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu- roles of national census, museums, biogra- ries had the same ancestries, languages phies and maps. Drawing on a 1988 PhD and traditions as the colonising pow- dissertation by Thongchai Winichakul ers they opposed. Anderson (2006: 47) about nineteenth-century Siam/Thailand argues these ‘creole pioneers’ developed (published as Winichakul, 1994), Ander- nationalist politics before Europe, because son (2006: xiv) argued that maps contrib- colonies were largely self-administrating ute to the ‘logoization of political space’ territorial units. Thus, residents con- and their myriad reproductions familiar- ceived of their belonging to a common ise people with the limitations of national and potentially sovereign community, sovereignty and community. a sentiment enhanced by provincial Having examined mass communication newspapers raising debate about inter- with his thesis of print-capitalism, Ander- continental political and administrative son subsequently turned to the legacy of relationships. Anderson stakes much migration: of his thesis on ‘print-capitalism’; nov- els and newspapers, he claims, ‘made it The two most significant factors generat- possible for rapidly growing numbers of ing nationalism and ethnicity are both people to think about themselves, and to linked closely to the rise of capitalism. relate themselves to others, in profoundly They can be described summarily as mass communications and mass migrations. new ways’ (Anderson, 2006: 36). In addi- tion, standardised national calendars, (Anderson, 1992: 7) language and clocks generated a sense of simultaneous national experiences and