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
In this chapter, the first of the two added in the revised edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson begins by throwing out his previous argument that African and Asian official nationalisms were “modelled directly on that of the dynastic states of nineteenth-century Europe.” Instead, he thinks “the imaginings of the colonial state” are more responsible, even if these were the same colonial states that rejected nationalism. The three institutions from the chapter’s title—the census, the map, and the museum—are key indicators of the continuity between empires and postcolonial states. Anderson closes his introduction by noting that in this chapter he will “confine [his] attention to Southeast Asia,” his area of expertise.
It is important to note that this chapter, added in the second edition of Imagined Communities, is disconnected from the argumentative structure and temporal organization of the rest of the book, and it is largely independent of Anderson’s central points. Nevertheless, it is an important attempt to correct his theory and provides valuable insight into the mechanisms by which states—specifically, but not exclusively, postcolonial “official nationalist” states in Southeast Asia—consolidate their sovereignty concretely. As Anderson goes on to explain, states do this by bringing land, people, and history under their rule as the territory, the population, and the story of the nation. Anderson’s central revision is therefore that he thinks the “third wave” of postcolonial nationalism was based more on colonialism itself than on the somewhat temporally and geographically distant “second wave.”
Themes
The first of the three institutions is the Census. Anderson cites a recent study that shows how colonial census-makers in Malaysia transformed “identity categories.” The study argues that these categories grew “more and exclusively racial,” rather than religious. Over time, the census-makers eliminated most complexity, reducing a wide variety of identities to just four: “‘Malaysian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Indian,’ and ‘Other.’” Anderson notes that the category “Malay” came to include various other ethnic groups in Malaysia, but in Indonesia, it stands alongside those other groups as an equal category.
Anderson looks at the census because it shows how states made their populations legible and understood the people under their control. The gradual consolidation of categories in Malaysia indicates that the Malaysian government began thinking that race was the most important dividing line among its people and imagining a narrow, schematic view of what “race” meant in its country. The “Malay” group includes many of the nation’s indigenous peoples, and therefore collapses ethnic distinctions within the country’s boundaries, as though to promote the nation itself as the correct or proper basis for identity.
Themes
Anderson takes up two more examples of colonial censuses to compare. First is the Spanish census in the Philippines, which “imagined” into being a unified society where there were really just independent landowners “mostly unaware of one another’s existence in the huge, scattered, and sparsely populated archipelago.” And second is an interesting court case in 17th century Indonesia, which reveals that “the [native] Cirebonese court classified people by rank and status, while the Company did so by something like ‘race.’” Unaware that China was an incredibly diverse place, the Dutch decided all its people were “Chinese” and “began to insist that those under its control whom it categorized as Chinezen [Chinese people] dress, reside, marry, be buried, and bequeath property according to” this racial category.
The Spanish census is important because it shows how the colonial government began conceiving of a territory as unified, even when, in reality, it was not this way at all. Again, this shows that the consolidating energy of imagination precedes and makes possible the actual consolidation of territory under sovereign power. And the Indonesian example shows what happens when different understandings of identity come into conflict. The Dutch won out and began consolidating their rule around the racial schema of identity, which eventually became dominant in the Indonesian context.
Themes
For Anderson, these colonial censuses were novel because of “their systematic quantification.” Earlier native censuses counted potential draftees and taxpayers, but now, for the first time, everyone was counted and the whole bureaucracy was organized around “ethno-racial hierarchies.” Colonial administrators ignored religion, about which they could do nothing. Places of worship became “zones of freedom” and were important sites of nationalist resistance to colonialism, as they continued to grow despite the colonial government’s best attempts to limit religious freedom.
The quantification of colonial censuses shows how governments attempted to encompass a totality, which points to important transitions in concepts and modes of sovereignty during this period. Rather than using force where and when it deemed necessary, the state began trying to develop the tools to (at least theoretically) control everything within its borders. At the same time, the absolute attention to “ethno-racial” identity at the expense of religion meant that colonial administrators and the people who lived under them thought according to two very different frameworks, with “zones of freedom” in places of worship representing the disconnect between the two: colonized people could continue freely doing what was most important to them (worship) only because the colonizers did not understand (or care about) the colonized enough to try and control this vital aspect of their lives.
Themes
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The second important institution discussed in this chapter is the Map. When introduced in its European form to Southeast Asia, it changed the way locals were able to imagine places near and far. Anderson cites Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul, who showed how Thai maps before 1851 did not include borders or represent “a larger, stable geographic context” outside Thailand. While borders were marked physically in some places, they were really just rocks that showed the end of a Thai territorial claim, and borders were not considered as falling on “a continuous map-line” that separated one zone of sovereignty from another. Around the turn of the 20th century, a massive investment in geography education completely overhauled this, and indeed even changed the language used in the political sphere, introducing the rise of the word for “country,” which quickly became dominant.
The transition in thinking about borders shows how states gradually filled blank space, extending their sovereignty as far as they possibly could before inviting conflict. After states became imagined through maps, no zones were left that did not have a ruler, at least in theory. So drawing the lines on the map was, for the state, both an exercise of power and a way of preparing for possible future exercises of power. Crucially, Anderson focuses on the way maps shaped their readers’ imaginative capacities: rather than thinking of Thailand as a kingdom whose cultural, economic, and political influence spread a certain distance from Bangkok, Thais began thinking of their country as a territorial totality, defined by its limits rather than its center. In short, this shows how nations become imagined as at once sovereign and limited in their citizens’ eyes.
Themes
“Totalizing classification” is the key link between the census and the European map, which forced the whole planet into “a geometrical grid” of “measured boxes.” Although theoretically maps are supposed to represent a preexisting geographical reality, in Thailand they became, in historian Winichakul’s words, “a model for, rather than a model of, what [they] purported to represent.” Construction projects, military movements, and administrative divisions were decided on a map before they were created in reality, and the map even became the basis for census ethnic categories that were now defined as having strict geographical origins.
Maps performed a similar function for territory as censuses did for people: the map’s “geometrical grid” is just like the grid of ethnic groups and other identity markers from which a citizen is forced to choose when being counted in the census. And just as censuses became the basis for ethnically-oriented policies in the future, maps became the basis for shaping real territory after an imagined ideal—much like nations are first imagined and then, with more or less success, put into practice.
Themes
Anderson sees “two final avatars of the map” as crucial precursors to post-independence official nationalisms. First is the way Europeans used maps to justify their rule, claiming to have legally taken over “the putative sovereignties of [defeated] native rulers.” They in turn began reconstructing historical maps of their empires, and post-colonial states adopted this practice and the “political-biographical narrative of the realm” it created in order to justify their own territorial claims and write their own national myths.
Here, Anderson is specifically talking about the maps many young students see in school, in which the size of a country or empire can be seen as expanding and contracting over time. He notes that these maps naturalize and sanitize colonialism: they usually do not make any distinctions about how territory is won or governed but merely show what places belong to whom, which makes conquest look justifiable and lands seized by force look like equal, homogeneous parts of an empire. When not highlighted as part of an (almost always European) empire, these territories are usually blank, portrayed as “empty” or “lawless” rather than full of the people and leaders who actually lived and ruled in them.
Themes
The second crucial form is “the map-as-logo,” the transformation of a country’s boundaries into a symbol of its nationhood, with its internal geography and relationship to bordering states erased. The map became “an infinitely reproducible,” “instantly recognizable, [and] everywhere visible” symbol of a country. For instance, the half of New Guinea nominally occupied by the Dutch was “utterly remote,” irrelevant to the nationalist struggle, and completely unfamiliar to the movement’s leaders. But it became an important symbol of nationalism when revolutionaries were imprisoned there, and “logo-maps” of Indonesia began to show the island oddly cut in half, “with nothing to its East.”
“The map-as-logo” is now so common as to be the most direct and self-evident symbol of any nation: to many people, a country is intuitively seen as being identical to the sum of its territory, or its shape on a map. (Cyprus and Kosovo, for instance, even have maps of themselves on their flags.) Indonesia’s map is worth a critical look: although the country is entirely comprised of islands, it ends in an abrupt vertical line in New Guinea (and also has both the islands of Borneo and Timor split in the middle, where Indonesian sovereignty ends).
Themes
West New Guinea has transformed into a symbol of Indonesia’s independence and an integral part of the nation as an imagined community, even though its local residents are reluctant to identify with Indonesia, a country that badly oppresses them. Anderson notes that West New Guineans, a stunningly diverse group only able to communicate after the government forced them all to learn Indonesian, turned Indonesian into the language of a revolutionary nationalist struggle—against Indonesia. Indeed, this diverse group only became an imagined community capable of a unified national struggle because a map lumped them into the same province, helping them see a shared cause and leading most Indonesians from elsewhere to assume that all West New Guineans share the same culture.
The story of West New Guinea is clearly ironic for a number of reasons. First, it shows how imagined dimensions of national identity are often more important than real ones; the government turned the region into a rallying cry for Indonesians on other islands, while completely ignoring the wishes or interests of New Guineans themselves. In turn, these New Guineans used Indonesia’s own techniques against it: they used the shared language it forced on them to strategize against its colonial rule. Although many New Guineans have very little in common with one another, then, the tools of nationalism—a map that united them in the same region, as well as linguistic and ethnic schemas that ignore their diversity—ended up giving New Guineans the one political purpose that actually brought them together. Just as European colonialism created imagined communities in colonies, then, the Indonesian occupation of New Guinea created a kind of nascent national consciousness there.
Themes
Finally, Anderson turns to the Museum, which—like “the museumizing imagination” that makes it possible—is “profoundly political,” and in Southeast Asia shows how postcolonial states inherit the political mindset of their former colonizers.
Although it seems very different from the map and census, according to Anderson the museum is actually analogous because it represents the government’s sovereign control over national history.
Themes
During a short span of time in the mid-19th century, Europeans went from not at all caring about Southeast Asia’s monuments to obsessively cataloguing, studying, and displaying them. Anderson sees three principal reasons for this. First was the push for education in colonies, during which conservatives saw education about monuments and history as a way for “the natives to stay native.” Second was that the monuments served Europeans’ continual quest to prove the natives’ cultural inferiority: by attributing monuments to nonnative invaders or a past golden age, colonizers suggested that natives had always been ruled by “greater” peoples, or that their time had come and gone. Third is that protecting monuments let colonial governments position themselves as the protectors of tradition, which they did by transforming religiously important sites into reproducible logos, “regalia for a secular colonial state.”
After a few centuries of colonialism, Europeans realized that they could further control colonized people’s sense of identity by shaping and seizing the symbols of their history. In other words, monuments were turned into the plot points of a colony’s history, and since Europeans controlled these monuments (both physically and narratively), they ensured that the stories told about colonized places favored European interests. This is like official nationalism in reverse: colonizers positioned themselves as the “true” patriots for their colonies—the only ones capable of saving, civilizing, or preserving a class of barbarians who could not take care of themselves.
Themes
Independent postcolonial states only continued this tendency. For instance, the Indonesian government hung identical paintings in schools throughout the country, including one that erased absolutely everything distinctive about Borobudur, the famous Buddhist temple, replacing its unique sculptures with a “completely white” outline and its usual crowds with “not a single human being.” This is a depiction of Borobudur “as a sign for national identity,” not of the temple itself.
Unsurprisingly, the colonial regime’s determination of history easily gave way to a more conventional “official nationalism” after independence, which seized on the same narratives of national identity that were already available to it. When Borobudur was turned into a symbol of Indonesia, Anderson notes, everything about it was erased and hollowed out (much like the outline version of a country’s map). This again proves that nationalism relies on erasing complexity and fixing the meaning of signifiers, all in order to take control of the way things are narrated or imagined (for the imagination is the level on which the nation primarily exists).
Themes
In conclusion, Anderson turns to the significance of the census, map, and museum, which all “illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain.” This thinking hinged on the creation of a “totalizing classificatory grid” that could be used to control any people, living anywhere, speaking any language, and possessed of any history. This meant making everything countable—including the “Other[s]” who did not fit into the available categories. The census, map, and museum let the colonial government fit people, places, and history (respectively) into these absolute, black-and-white systems of classification. Maps and monuments were emptied of their specific history to become logos for colonies. And after independence, they in turn became logos for nations that inherited their colonizers’ totalizing projects, which reduced history to an archaeological “album of its [national] ancestors.”
Anderson’s conclusion emphasizes that late-colonial and early-postcolonial governments were unified in their attempts to extend sovereignty by developing a set of tools (the “totalizing classificatory grid”) for controlling people, places, and historical narratives. This is, of course, a good explanation for why so many governments function through bureaucracy: everyone and everything has to be subject to the same system of classification and regulation, which often leads to maddeningly elaborate and inefficient structures that ironically fail to impose the absolute sovereignty they are designed to make possible.
Themes
