Benedict Anderson

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Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (born August 26, 1936 in Kunming , Republic of China , † December 13, 2015 in Batu , Indonesia ) was an American political scientist of British - Irish descent and professor of international studies at Cornell University , who mainly through coined by him concept of nation as "imagined community " (imagined community) became known.

Life

Anderson was born in 1936 in Kunming, China, where his father was stationed as a British naval officer. In 1941, the family moved to California , where Anderson attended school before he attended the University of Cambridge to BA in Classics ( Classical Studies acquired). Due to an interest in East Asia aroused, possibly by his sinophile father, Anderson began to study Indonesian studies at Cornell University after his return to the USA .

In 1961 he went to Indonesia to prepare a dissertation on the Indonesian revolution in 1945 . In 1965, the so-called “September 30th Movement” attempted to overthrow there, followed by a counter-coup led by General Hadji Mohamed Suharto . Between 1965 and 1967, Suharto drove President Sukarno out of power and established the authoritarian regime of the “new order”. In 1966, Anderson published the article A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia , in which he denied Suharto's alleged involvement of the Indonesian communists in the coup and interpreted the coup attempt as an internal army affair : an action by younger officers of the Indonesian army against an alleged Council of Generals made up of right-wing military officials. This thesis is one of several interpretations of the events of October 1, 1965 discussed in the research literature. Anderson was subsequently expelled from Indonesia and given a life-long entry ban. He returned to his home university via Thailand , where he received his Ph.D. in political science and has taught continuously since 1965 with a focus on Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines ), most recently as Aaron L. Binorben Professor of International Studies .

Anderson became known around the world in the 80s with the book Imagined Communities (German title: The invention of the nation - see below), which has been translated into numerous languages . In 1994 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He received the Fukuoka Prize for Asian Culture in 2000 and was accepted into the American Philosophical Society in 2009 .

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Looks like the section is just based on my own analysis and interpretation of Anderson's work. Secondary literature is needed and there is enough of it.

Anderson actively researched and published in the 1960s and 70s on the political situation in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. At the end of the 1970s he was considered the most prominent American specialist in Indonesia. As his conflict with the Indonesian regime (see above) shows, he did not shy away from critical political statements. He reported several times to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives on the human rights situation in Indonesia. In 1978 he declared that an alleged US arms embargo against Indonesia after the invasion of East Timor was purely fictitious and that the US government was supporting Indonesia with arms deliveries. In addition to his own publications, Anderson also worked as a translator of Indonesian political literature.

Anderson became known far beyond the boundaries of his subject from 1983 with the publication of a book on nation and nationalism , the title of which quickly became a catchphrase both in the original - Imagined Communities - and in the German version - The Invention of the Nation found in the general political discourse. It appeared around the same time as Ernest Gellner's Nationalism and Modernism and Eric Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition , which pursue similar approaches; all three were harbingers of a “constructivist turn” in nationalism research in the 1980s and 1990s, which radiated into historical studies (cf. here , above all, Eric Hobsbawm) and literary studies . Anderson's thoughts were also taken up by Zygmunt Bauman in his work on the genesis of the Holocaust from the modern world of states organized according to national criteria.

Science-historical context

In Imagined Communities , Anderson applies the constructivist approach of sociology , according to which the perception of reality is fundamentally the result of an intersubjective social construction process, to the historical interpretation of the phenomenon “nation”. The constructivist or knowledge-sociological approach had long been established in sociological theory, namely by Alfred Schütz and Peter L. Bergers and Thomas Luckmann's classic The Social Construction of Reality . The nation-state as an ideologue in sociology as well as in political and historical studies had already been treated critically, but not as effectively as it was criticized now. Reasons for this were u. a.,

  • that the emergence of sociology as an independent discipline in the 19th century was historically closely linked to the emergence of the nation state, particularly in France and Germany , so that modern society organized as a nation state initially remained a natural frame of reference for it;
  • that international sociology had long been dominated by Anglo-Saxon authors (including Talcott Parsons ), in whose lifeworld nationalist movements and ideologies appeared less relevant than in "belated nations" ( Helmuth Plessner ), such as in Germany or in the postcolonial Third Party World . So it is no accident that Anderson approached the subject from the perspective of a Southeast Asia expert.

According to Anderson, there is a “formal universality of nationality” in the legal-political sense as well as in everyday language usage. that is, “in the modern world everyone can, should and will 'have' a nationality just as one 'has' a gender”. While nationalisms consider the division of the world and people into nations or nationalities, and in particular their own nation, as "eternal" or at least very old, Anderson shows that the concept of the nation in the current sense was only used relatively recently the late 18th century).

The four characteristics of the nation

According to Anderson, the "nation" has four essential characteristics:

  • It is “ introduced [...] because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of the others [...], but the idea of ​​their community exists in everyone's head. […] In fact, all communities that are larger than the village ones with their face-to-face contacts are imagined communities. "
  • It is " limited [...] because even the greatest of them [...] lives within precisely defined, albeit variable, limits, beyond which other nations lie. [...] Even the most ardent nationalists do not dream of the day when all members of the human race will belong to their nation ”- in contrast to religious communities with a conversion mission such as Christianity.
  • It is “ sovereign because its concept was born at a time when the Enlightenment and revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the hierarchical-dynastic [sic] empires thought of by God's grace. [...] The yardstick and symbol of this freedom is the sovereign state ”.
  • It is a " community [...] because, regardless of real inequality and exploitation, it is understood as a 'comradely' association of equals."

Historical development factors

To “imagine” such communities became historically possible “where (and as) three basic cultural models had lost their long axiomatic grip on people's thinking” :

  • The decline of religious communities overarching ethnic differences , in which a “Holy Scripture” in a “dead language” contained an absolute truth, which cosmopolitan “initiates”, ie. H. a strategically important layer in a hierarchically ordered cosmos with a divine peak, “had a monopoly. The dissolution of this hierarchical, vertical cosmology into a “segmentary”, horizontal world order, according to Anderson, was connected with the expansion of the intellectual horizon beyond Europe since the 16th century , and the decline of Latin as the universal language of the elites. This was "the expression of a more comprehensive process in which the holy communities with their ancient holy languages ​​were gradually fragmented, pluralized and territorialized" .
  • The decline of religiously legitimized monarchical dynasties over ethnically and culturally heterogeneous “ subjects ”. “According to modern ideas, state sovereignty is exercised completely, comprehensively and evenly over every square meter of a legally delimited territory. In the past, however, when states were defined by centers, the borders were porous and unclear [...]. The kingship receives its legitimacy from a deity, not from the people who are only subjects but not citizens […]. Hence […] the ease with which premodern empires and kingdoms could maintain their rule over extremely heterogeneous and often not even neighboring peoples for a very long time ” . It was only in the 19th and early 20th centuries that the remaining dynasties (above all the Hohenzollern , Habsburg and Romanovs ) “reached for a national 'signet', as the old principle of legitimacy slowly faded” .
  • The transformation of the medieval concept of time with a fundamental predetermination and an approaching "end of time" into an open, future-oriented concept of time. According to Anderson, the emergence of novels and newspapers , each with their typical way of presenting simultaneously-unconnected, but occurring in the same society, played a key role in this change in the consciousness of time. “The idea of ​​a social organism that moves determinably through homogeneous and empty time is an exact analogy to the nation, which is also understood as a permanent community that moves steadily up (or down) history. An American will never get to know more than a handful of his perhaps 240 million compatriots [...]. But he has full confidence in their constant, anonymous, simultaneous action ” . This creates “that remarkable trust in an anonymous community that is the unmistakable mark of modern nations”.

The role of "secular" languages ​​and capitalist printing

The invention of the printing press, along with the rise of capitalism, played a crucial role in smashing the pre-national world ruled by ethnically indifferent clerics and dynastic autocrats . Since publishers were interested in selling their products in as large quantities as possible, they increasingly opted for publication in the respective vernacular instead of the universal Latin that was only understandable to the elite . In addition, absolutist rulers tried to centralize the administration of their empires using the respective vernacular. Thus “the connection between capitalism and printing made a new form of imagined community possible, the basic features of which already prepared the stage for the nation to appear. The extensibility of these communities had their inherent limits [...] ” , also because of historical coincidences the “ concrete shape of today's nation states [...] never exactly coincides with the range of individual written languages ​​” .

Anderson interprets here in the sense of the linguistic turn exactly the opposite of traditional nationalisms - it is “a mistake to treat languages ​​as certain nationalist ideologies do: as symbols of 'being a nation' […]. By far the most important property of language is rather to produce imagined communities [...] ” . Anderson thus relates the idea, which has been established in sociology at least since George Herbert Meads and in linguistics since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , that language originally precedes consciousness, only to the political phenomenon of the nation. The fact that this had not been attempted before, at least in this consistent form, is probably due to the fact that the “nation” “is firmly interwoven in practically all written languages, and the“ being a nation ”[…] is practically no longer of political consciousness to separate [is] ” . Only in a second step was the ethnic-genetic concept of the nation abstracted from its linguistic basis and became independent, so that linguistically heterogeneous political structures (e.g. Switzerland , the USA , Israel ) can now also regard themselves as a nation. This abstraction also made it possible for nationalist movements to articulate themselves in the languages ​​of "other" nations: "If the radical Mozambique speaks Portuguese, it means that Portuguese is the medium through which Mozambique is presented" . (The same applies, for example, to Zionism , whose central works are written in German and other non-Jewish languages.) Anderson describes in an extensive empirical part the concrete development of such “imagined” communities in Europe and Asia using numerous examples.

The problem of “naturalness”: there are no “non-invented” communities

An important part of the conception of a nation is its supposed "naturalness", its "element of the 'unconsciously chosen'. So it happens that being a nation is close to skin color, gender, origin and the time in which one is born - that is, everything that cannot be changed. […] Precisely because such ties are not consciously entered into, they get the noble appearance that there were no interests behind them ” . Because of this imagined selflessness “she can ask for sacrifice. […] Death for one's own country, which one […] does not choose, is crowned by a moral majesty that dying for the Labor Party, for the American Medical Association and also for Amnesty International does not come close to, because you may join these associations and can leave it again. " . At best one could be “invited” to an original national community; It is no coincidence that the act of naturalization is also referred to as naturalization in English and numerous other languages .

Although the age and the supposed "naturalness" of nations are based solely on an "invention of traditions" (cf. Eric Hobsbawm's catchphrase The Invention of Tradition ), Anderson expressly warns against the misunderstanding that nations as "imagined" communities are somehow "spurious" or be “wrong” and therefore have to be “deconstructed” in favor of “real” communities. Although Anderson himself speaks pointedly of "poor imaginations of recent history (of little more than two centuries)" , he criticizes z. B. Ernest Gellner - because he tries “so hard to prove that nationalism reflects false facts that he associates that“ invention ”with the“ production ”of“ wrong ”instead of“ imagining ”and“ creating ”. In this way he suggests that there are 'true' communities that set themselves apart from nations in an advantageous manner ” .

In fact, the image of the “invented nation” is now also frequently used by right-wing populists to legitimize subordinate communities (such as the northern Italian “ Padanien ” of the Lega Nord , the Flanders of the Vlaams Blok ) as “authentic” to the nation state. In fact, according to Anderson, not just nations, but all communities larger than village and family associations of personally known people are “imaginary”, “imagined” or “made up”. Communities should therefore “not be distinguished from one another by their authenticity, but by the way in which they are presented” . According to Berger and Luckmann, the entire perceived reality is socially constructed, so in the end the “poor imagination” of collectives. The "nation" is no exception - but neither is z. B. the communities of Kreuzbergers, workers, Muslims, EU citizens, homosexuals, etc. Political- emancipatory criticism of the concept of nation can therefore only start to a limited extent and not exclusively at its constructive character.

Fonts

  • 1965: Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese . Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Publication No. 37 (several new editions, most recently 1996 , ISBN 0-87763-041-0 )
  • 1971 (with Ruth T. McVey & Frederick P. Bunnell): A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965 Coup in Indonesia . Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Publication No. 52.
  • 1972: Java in a Time of Revolution . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • 1983: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . ISBN 0-86091-329-5 , Imagined Communities. ... , Verso, London New York 2006, ISBN 978-1-84467-086-4 , English edition 2006 online, German first 1988 udT The invention of the nation. To the career of a momentous concept . Quoted here from the 1998 edition, Berlin: Ullstein. ISBN 3-548-26529-4 .
  • 1990: Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia . Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-9758-2 .
  • 1992: Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics . Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Center for Asian Studies (= The Wertheim Lecture 1992). ISBN 0-7658-0002-0 .
  • 1998: The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and The World . London: Verso. ISBN 1-85984-184-8 .
  • 2016: A Life Beyond Boundaries. A memoir . London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-78478-456-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Indonesianis Asal Amerika, Ben Anderson, Meninggal di Batu
  2. ↑ 200,000 skeletons in Richard Holbrooke's Closet . members.tripod.com. Retrieved June 2, 2012.
  3. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 14.
  4. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, pp. 14-15.
  5. ↑ a b c Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 15.
  6. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, pp. 15-16.
  7. ↑ a b Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 16.
  8. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 42.
  9. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 22.
  10. ↑ a b Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 25.
  11. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 27.
  12. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 33.
  13. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 46.
  14. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 47.
  15. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 115.
  16. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 116.
  17. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 115.
  18. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 124.
  19. ↑ Anderson: The Invention of the Nation. 1998, p. 125.
  20. ↑ English original text in the second edition: With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that 'Nationalism is not die awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist. 11 The drawback to this formulation , however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to 'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can advantageously be juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Introduction, p. 49
personal data
SURNAME Anderson, Benedict
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Kunming , Republic of China
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 2015
Place of death Batu , Indonesia