Benedict Anderson > Quotes

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.”
― Benedict Anderson

“the fellow members of even the smallese nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion...Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined.”
― Benedict R.O'G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of Normans (Plantagenets), Welsh (Tudors), Scots (Stuarts), Dutch (House of Orange) and Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne. No one much cared until the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I. House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schönbrunn or House of Versailes.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“What the eye is to the lover — that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue — is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.”
― Benedict Anderson

“No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ashamed if his or her state or government commits crimes including those against their fellow citizens”
― Benedict Anderson

“In the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“The ideal way to start interesting research, at least in my view, is to depart from a problem or question to which you do not know the answer.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“Already in the 1550s, 10% of Lisbon’s population were slaves; by 1800 there were close to a million slaves among the 2,500,000 or so inhabitants of Portugal’s Brazil.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, 'Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“I began to realize something fundamental about field-work: that it is useless to concentrate exclusively on one's 'research project.' One has to be endlessly curious about everything, sharpen one's eyes and ears, and take notes about everything. The experience of strangeness makes all your senses more sensitive than normal, and your attachment to comparison grows deeper. This is why fieldwork is also so useful when you return home. You will have developed habits of observation and comparison that encourage or force you to start noticing that your own culture is just as strange.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“One can thus trace this lexicographic revolution as one might the ascending roar in an arsenal alight, as each small explosion ignites others, till the final blaze turns night into day.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“English, like any other language, is always open to new speakers, listeners, and readers.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“On his coronation in 1802, Gia-long wished to call his realm ‘Nam Viêt’ and sent envoys to gain Peking’s assent. The Manchu Son of Heaven, however, insisted that it be ‘Viêt Nam.’ The reason for this inversion is as follows: ‘Viêt Nam’ (or in Chinese Yüeh-nan) means, roughly, ‘to the south of Viêt (Yüeh),’ a realm conquered by the Han seventeen centuries earlier and reputed to cover today’s Chinese provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, as well as the Red River valley. Gia-long’s ‘Nam Viêt,’ however, meant ‘Southern Viêt/Yüeh,’ in effect a claim to the old realm. In the words of Alexander Woodside, ‘the name “Vietnam” as a whole was hardly so well esteemed by Vietnamese rulers a century ago, emanating as it had from Peking, as it is in this century. An artificial appellation then, it was used extensively neither by the Chinese nor by the Vietnamese. The Chinese clung to the offensive T’ang word “Annam” . . . The Vietnamese court, on the other hand, privately invented another name for its kingdom in 1838–39 and did not bother to inform the Chinese. Its new name, Dai Nam, the “Great South” or “Imperial South,” appeared with regularity on court documents and official historical compilations. But it has not survived to the present.’3 This new name is interesting in two respects. First, it contains no ‘Viet’-namese element. Second, its territorial reference seems purely relational – ‘south’ (of the Middle Kingdom).4 That today’s Vietnamese proudly defend a Viêet Nam scornfully invented by a nineteenth-century Manchu dynast reminds us of Renan’s dictum that nations must have ‘oublié bien des choses,’ but also, paradoxically, of the imaginative power of nationalism. If”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“The nation is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“As noted earlier, the great wars of this century are extraordinary not so much in the unprecedented scale on which they permitted people to kill, as in the colossal numbers persuaded to lay down their lives. Is it not certain that the numbers of those killed vastly exceeded those who killed? The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of purity, through fatality.

Dying for one’s country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International can not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will. Dying for the revolution also draws its grandeur from the degree to which it is felt to be something fundamentally pure.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. (This is why so many different nations have such tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans, Argentinians . . .?)

The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings. As this affinity is by no means fortuitous, it may be useful to begin a consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death, as the last of a whole gamut of fatalities.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“aprender una lengua no es simplemente aprender un medio lingüístico de comunicación. Es también aprender la manera de pensar y sentir de un pueblo que habla y escribe en un idioma diferente del nuestro. Es aprender la historia y la cultura subyacentes a sus pensamientos y sus emociones, y, así, aprender a empatizar con ellos.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“Power is that intangible, mysterious, and divine energy which animates the universe.”
― Benedict Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia

“Many people have complained that Imagined Communities is a difficult book and especially difficult to translate. The accusation is partly true. But a great deal of the difficulty lies not in the realm of ideas, but in its original polemical stance and its intended audience: the UK intelligentsia. This is why the book contains so many quotations from and allusions to, English poetry, essays, histories, legends, etc., that do not have to be explained to English readers, but which are likely to be unfamiliar to others.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“What I am proposing is that Nationalism has
to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which — as well as against which — it came into being.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“el azar no golpea a nuestra puerta sino hacemos otra cosa que esperar pacientemente en la tienda. A menudo, llega a nosotros bajo la forma de oportunidades inesperadas, que debemos ser lo bastante valientes o intrépidos para aprovechar cuando pasan como una flecha. Este espíritu de aventura es, creo, decisivo para una vida académica realmente productiva.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“es inútil concentrarse en exclusivamente en nuestro propio "proyecto de investigación". Es preciso tener una curiosidad incesante por todo, aguzar ojos y oídos y tomar notas sin excluir nada. Esa es la gran bendición de este tipo de trabajo. La experiencia de extrañeza hace que todos nuestros sentidos sean mucho más sensibles que lo habitual, y nuestra afición a la comparación se profundiza. Por eso, el trabajo de campo es también tan útil cuando volvemos a casa. En el ínterin, hemos desarrollado hábitos de observación y comparación que nos instan u obligan a comenzar a advertir que nuestra propia cultura es igualmente extraña, siempre que observemos con cuidado, comparemos sin cesar y mantengamos nuestra distancia antropolóogica.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“What the eye is to the lover – that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with – language – whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue – is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“当你开始在一个你只懂一点点或者完全不懂其语言的国家生活的时候，你显然没有能力去比较地思考，因为你几乎无法接触当地文化。你感觉到语言上被剥夺了，孤独甚至孤立，因此你四处寻找一些同胞伙伴来保持联系。你不可避免要作比较，但它们很可能是表面的、幼稚的。不过，倘若你走运，你会越过语言之墙，发现自己置身于另外的世界。你就像一个探险家那样，试图以一种你在家的时候绝对不会采用的方式，观察和思考一切，因为你在家里很多东西都是理所当然的。你无法再认为你的阶级立场、你的教育，甚至你的性别理所当然。假如你竖起你的耳朵睁开你的眼睛，你会开始注意到你无法看到或者听到的东西。换言之，你会开始同时注意到那里有的和那里没有的东西，就像你会同时意识到被写下的和没有被写下的东西那样。无论是对你现在生活于其间的国家，还是对你出生于期间的国家，这一点都是起作用的。”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism