Anderson - Imagined Communities [47ef592a]

Print capitalism has helped shape imagined communities

• Fall of Latin, and the subsequent accessibility of knowledge allowed citizens to feel in touch with their fellow country members

  • "Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a subsitute for morning prayer" - Page 35

Loosening of 3 axioms allowed for the rise of imagined communities:

• Language was more accessible
• Homo sacer type soveriegnty, where society was organized around more than elites
• Unification of the conception of the temporal - We all even agree to see the same history, although with different interpretations

Capitalism fueled this expansion

• Print, once it became capitalized, sought to move to greater consumers

  • Inital educated elites were too small
  • Expanded to working professionals
  • In the two decades 1520-1540 three times as many books were published compared to 1500-1520

"Official Nationalism" - Nationalisms sponsered by the state

• Egypt Iron and Steel Company ?
• Created directly in response to the European nationalisms of the 1820's

• Can be constructed "states in which the ruling classes or leading elements in them felt threatened by the world wide spread of nationally imagined community"

  • Sati' Al husri?

    • Makdisi - The Ecumenical Frame
  • Core of the nations in the case of Hungarian, English, and Japanese emerged as instincitvely resistant to foreign rule

Bilingualism made the intellgensia powerful in colonized nations

• "Educational policies pursued by the indochina colonial government gave birth to an indochinese consciousness" - page 124

Languages should not be treated as emblems of nationalism like flags or anthems, but rather sources of nationalism

• Variety of Kurdish languages
• Differences in Arabic dialects

Official nationalism often co-opts levers of power - p 160

• Kemalism