As the one before, this entry is meant to serve my students as a launching pad to an enriching reading experience. Here I will comment on Anderson’s chapter 5, Old Languages, New Models, and will offer a set of questions that would hopefully help my students arrive at the classroom prepared for discussion. Reading this entry, however, will not suffice. You will need to carefully read the chapter in order to make sense of this entry and to engage others in the classroom.
My initial caveats first.
1) The historian may find Anderson frustrating because, even though for the most part he focused on the 19th Century as the historical period that gave birth to the modern notion of a nation, he moved through time without the same painstaking concern that historians commonly have. Historians prefer to attend matters in chronological order because we are anxious about historical details, and want to learn how earlier events had an impact on what followed.
That is not to say that Anderson did not acknowledge the power of sequenced events; he did in fact, by recognizing that the unpopularity of the ancient Latin in Europe opened the door to vernaculars, and that the realization that Europe and Western Culture was not that unique set the stage to notions of equality. But he still came across as a scholar who is more concerned in proving his thesis than in allowing the historical data to shape the theory. An example of this was when he assumed that modernity came to all Europe at once, or when he moved from American nationalisms in the 19th Century back to European Proto-nationalisms of the 16 to 18th Centuries.
2) For someone, like me, who have worked hard to overcome the damaging effect of Eurocentric thinking and have come to realize, in its own skin, the destructive results of the ideology of progress, I find Anderson’s liberal use of the terms “backward” and “advanced” really irritating. It seems to be a malaise with him. In the previous chapter (Creole Pioneers) he made subtle condescending remarks about Spanish-America when repeatedly he referred to the region as a-historical: nothing really happened there, and everything was calm and in stupor.
In this chapter (5th) he referred to groups of people like Bulgarians, and Celts (i.e., Irish and Scottish), in other words, those who were not French and English, as backward. This implies as if the developments that were happening in Britain and France (i.e., increasing pollution, labor abuses, increasing dependence on mechanization and a love affair with imperialism) were actually encouraging signs of advancement. Writing “history” in this way has a violent effect on the minds of the readers because it “normalizes” and “reifies” those forms of categorization. It requires a healthy dose of energy and critical thinking to come out of Anderson’s book without looking at those people as lesser than, or as greater than.
Remember that other structural criticism of Anderson’s thesis will come at the end of the book.
The thrust of Anderson’s argument
This chapter argues for a concept of a nation formed around the development of an increasingly wider readership and the expansion of middle classes, or bourgeoisies throughout Europe (In the previous chapter he already have argued for a different type of nation-ness among the American Creole, which happened in the US between 1776 and 1782, and in most of Colonial Spanish America from 1808 to 1820s).
The bourgeoisie radically transformed the map of Europe from the 1820s to the 1920s.
From one perspective, Anderson’s argument is very tight. After the 1500s, the rise of the vernacular came hand in hand with the proliferation of for-profit presses. Secular as well as religious books, pamphlets and journals (similar to what today would be “newsletters”) rushed into the markets. And who consumed these publications? First, it was the educated elite, but then an increasing number of people began reading more. And who were they?
It was the bourgeoisies, who had the money, the interest and the need to read. Can you imagine an illiterate bourgeoisie? Asked Anderson. Impossible. Indeed, this was the first vernacular imagined community, according to Anderson. Middling groups within a specific vernacular territory, who would have no other form of connection among themselves (as opposed to the nobility, which would be linked to each other through marriages and interest in government), learned of each other existence through the print-media, and thus, imagined itself as part of a community that went beyond their local village or burg (city).
But the practice of community-imagining did not produce a global bourgeoisie’s nationalism. It became national because the presses were not multi-lingual. They published in the vernacular, and thus, the English bourgeoisies came to see itself differently from the French one (they lacked the links that often connected the English to the French nobility). Additionally, new state apparatuses began establishing state-languages out of the vernacular, and this completed the formation of an imagined community: one that read and was ruled by the same vernacular.
Essential to Anderson’s argument is the astonishing growth of the middle class (a sign of the spread of capitalism). Its members became “missionaries of nationalism” (spreading the model), and forced the nobility to new governing terms, namely, the nation, with its quasi-religious symbolism and rituals.
Therefore, Anderson’s argument is inseparable from Eric Hobsbawm’s claim that the bourgeoisies dethroned the old nobility (ancient-regime) and forced the arrival of the industrial and capitalist modernity in the 19th Century. Anderson, however, added to Hobsbawm’s thesis the notion of an imagined community linked through reading vernacular and through education.
With education came not simply the ability to read the vernacular, and thus, the connection to an imagined community of vernacular-speakers, but an “awakening” of everything local and national. Anderson provided examples of the Ukrainians, Finish, and others “awakening” to their nationalities through the reading of vernacular literature and the “realization” of a “national” history.
But, what role would the lower classes, workers and illiterate peasants have in this nation created by the well-read bourgeoisie? They were mostly not readers, so their loyalty to the bourgeoisie’s nation could be seriously doubted. This is where the promotion of education and public schools come to play such an important role in the creation of these new nations. The more that a people reads, particularly myth-laden nationalistic literature, the more they become a nation.
There is no space in Anderson’s hermetic argument for a nation without a common language and a large literate population. So, the nationalist-missionaries more successful were those who could find ways to convey the message to the illiterate masses and could spark among them enthusiasm for education. He gave examples of ineffectual nationalists who failed to convince the masses to assail the power of the nobles. The masses, then, preferred to support the status quo and “killed gentlemen.”
Questions:
Why is the rise of the vernacular so important in the appearance of the nation?
What are the roles (more than one) of capitalism in the production of the modern nation?
How did Anderson’s arguments fit within Hobsbawm’s Marxist historicism?
What roles did the education of the masses played in the creation of nations?
Considering the factors Anderson gave in this chapter for the creation of nations in the 19th Century, what types of nations could you picture in your mind? How are these nations that Anderson has been trying to describe?
Do you sense some sort of classism and paternalism toward the non-elite and non- bourgeoisie in Anderson argument? If so, how and why?
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