Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson

Author:Benedict Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
ISBN: 9781844674848
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2011-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

1. Not only, of course by functionaries, though they were the main group. Consider, for example, the geography of Noli Me Tangere (and many other nationalist novels). Though some of the most important characters in Rizal’s text are Spanish, and some of the Filipino characters have been to Spain (off the novel’s stage), the circumambience of travel by any of the characters is confined to what, eleven years after its publication and two years after its author’s execution, would become the Republic of the Philippines.

2. To give only one example: by 1928, there were almost 250,000 indigenes on the payroll of the Netherlands East Indies, and these formed 90% of all state functionaries. (Symptomatically, the widely discrepant salaries and pensions of Dutch and native officials, when combined, ate up 50% of state expenditures!). See Amry Vandenbosch, The Dutch East Indies, pp. 171–73. Yet Dutchmen were proportionately nine times as thick on the bureaucratic ground as were Englishmen in British (non-‘native state’) India.

3. Even in the ultra-conservative Netherlands Indies, the number of natives receiving a primary Western-style education shot up from an average of 2,987 in the years 1900–04 to 74,697 in 1928; while those receiving a Western-style secondary education increased in the same span of time from 25 to 6,468. Kahin, Nationalism, p.31.

4. To borrow from Anthony Barnett, it also ‘allowed the intellectuals to say to their fellow-speakers [of the indigenous vernaculars] that “we” can be like “them” ’.

5. It appeared originally in De Expres on July 13, 1913, but was quickly translated into ‘Indonesian’ and published in the native press. Suwardi was then 24 years old. An unusually well-educated and progressive aristocrat, he had in 1912 joined with a Javanese commoner, Dr. Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, and a Eurasian, Eduard Douwes Dekker, to from the Indische Partij, the colony’s first political party. For a brief, but useful, study of Suwardi, see Savitri Scherer, ‘Harmony and Dissonance: Early Nationalist Thought in Java’, chapter 2. Her Appendix I gives an English translation of the famous article, from which this passage is drawn.

6. Notice the educational linkage here between ‘imagined’ and ‘imaginary’ communities.

7. The celebrations of 1913 were agreeably emblematic of official nationalism in another sense. The ‘national liberation’ commemorated was in fact the restoration of the House of Orange by the victorious armies of the Holy Alliance (not the establishment of the Batavian Republic in 1795); and half the liberated nation soon seceded to form the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830. But the ‘national liberation’ gloss was certainly what Suwardi imbibed in his colonial classroom.

8. ‘Marxism and the National Question,’ p. 41.

9. Our focus here will be on civilian schools. But their military counterparts were often important too. The professionally officered standing army pioneered by Prussia early in the nineteenth century has required an educational pyramid in some ways more elaborate, if not more specialized, than its civilian analogue. Young officers (‘Turks’) produced by new military academies have often played significant roles in the development of nationalism. Emblematic is the case of Major Chukuma Nzeogwu, who masterminded the January 15, 1966 coup in Nigeria.

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