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This “sparkling” and world-famous work examines what drives people to live, die, and kill in the name of nations—revealing the surprising origins and development of nationalism (The Guardian). The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations. Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe’s recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.
In this lively book, Benedict R. O'G Anderson explores the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen from two critical facts in Indonesian history--that while the Indonesian nation is young, the Indonesian state is ancient, originating in the early seventeenth-century Dutch conquests; and that contemporary politics are conducted in a new language, Bahasa Indonesia, by peoples (especially the Javanese) whose cultures are rooted in medieval times. Analyzing a spectrum of examples from classical poetry to public monuments and cartoons, Anderson deepens our understanding of the interaction between modern and traditional notions of power, the meditation of power by language, and the ...
In honor of Benedict Anderson's many years as a teacher and his profound contributions to the field of Southeast Asian studies, the editors have collected essays from a number of the many scholars who studied with him. These articles deal with the literature, politics, history, and culture of Southeast Asia, addressing Benedict Anderson's broad concerns.
Although numerous accounts have been published of the genesis and character of the attempted October 1965 coup in Indonesia, many important aspects of that affair still remain very unclear. The fact that in most accounts so much of the picture has been painted in black and white, and in language of categorical certainty, has served only to paper over the enormous gaps in established knowledge of the event. In his present introduction to the paper here published, Professor Anderson describes the circumstances surrounding its preparation and the reasons why it was not previously published. Indeed, because of the avowedly tentative and provisional character of this early effort, there would nor...
With remarkable scope and in scrupulous detail, Professor Anderson analyzes the Indonesian revolution of 1945. Against the background of Javanese culture and the Japanese occupation, he explores the origins of the revolutionary youth groups, the military, and the political parties to challenge conventional interpretations of revolutionary movements in Asia. The author emphasizes that the critical role in the outbreak was played not by the dissatisfied intellectuals or by an oppressed working class but by the youth of Indonesia. Perhaps most important are the insights he offers into the conflict between strategies for seeking national revolution and those for attaining social change. By givin...
Benedict Anderson’s 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of “nations” and “nationalism”. A book that helped reshape the field of nationalism studies, Imagined Communities also shows the critical thinking skills of interpretation and analysis working at their highest levels. One crucial aspect of Anderson’s work involves the apparently simple act of defining precisely what we mean when we say ‘nation’ or ‘nationalism’ – an interpretative step that is vital to the analysis he proceeds to carry out. For Anderson, it is clear that nations are not ‘natural;’ as historians and anthropologists are well aware, natio...
In these studies, scholars from the United States and Indonesia identify some of the cultural roots of Indonesian political behavior. The authors, representing the fields of anthropology, history, and political science, explore the ways in which traditional institutions, beliefs, values, and ethnic origins affect notions of power and rebellion, influence political party affiliations, and create new modes of cultural expression. Using two different but contemporary approaches, the authors show what can be learned about Indonesia through use of the Western concepts of "culture" and "politics". Professors Lev, Liddle, and Sartono illustrate how much can be gained from presenting Indonesian life...
The Spectre of Comparisons contains important theoretical and historical considerations about the nature of nationalism & the prospects for the Left in the so-called New World Disorder.
An intellectual memoir by the author of the acclaimed Imagined Communities Born in China, Benedict Anderson spent his childhood in California and Ireland, was educated in England and finally found a home at Cornell University, where he immersed himself in the growing field of Southeast Asian studies. He was expelled from Suharto’s Indonesia after revealing the military to be behind the attempted coup of 1965, an event which prompted reprisals that killed up to a million communists and their supporters. Banned from the country for thirty-five years, he continued his research in Thailand and the Philippines, producing a very fine study of the Filipino novelist and patriot José Rizal in The ...
In this sparkling new work, Benedict Anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siecle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea. A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila's 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist Jose Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo...