Benedict Anderson Information

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (born August 26, 1936) is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University, and is best known for his celebrated book Imagined Communities, first published in 1983. Anderson was born in Kunming, China to James O'Gorman and Veronica Beatrice Mary Anderson, and in 1941 the family moved to California.^[1] In 1957, Anderson received a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from Cambridge University, and he later earned a Ph.D. from Cornell's Department of Government, where he numbered among the cadre of talented students from around the world drawn to Ithaca, New York, during the 1950s and early 1960s to study modern Indonesia under the guidance of George Kahin. He is the brother of historian Perry Anderson.

Biography

Anderson was born in 1936 in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and English mother. He was brought up mainly in California, and after moving to Ireland, studied at Eton College and at the University of Cambridge. His graduate work in politics at Cornell resulted in a paper (the "Cornell Paper") detailing the political situation in Indonesia for which he was barred from the country.

He is best known for his book Imagined Communities, in which he systematically describes, using an historical materialist or Marxist approach, the major factors contributing to the emergence of nationalism in the world during the past three centuries. Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign".^[2]

Anderson is currently professor emeritus of International Studies at Cornell University, and head of its Indonesian program. He is also widely regarded as an authority on twentieth-century Indonesian history and politics. He has published widely on Thailand and the Philippines. As in the case of his work on Indonesia, his work on those countries is grounded in his formidable linguistic competence. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.^[3]

Imagined Communities

Anderson argues that the main causes of nationalism and the creation of an imagined community are the reduction of privileged access to particular script languages (e.g. Latin), the movement to abolish the ideas of divine rule and monarchy, as well as the emergence of the printing press under a system of capitalism (or, as Anderson calls it, 'print-capitalism').

Anderson's view of nationalism places the roots of the notion of 'nation' at the end of the 18th century. While Ernest Gellner considers the spread of nationalism in connection with industrialism in Western Europe (and thus not explaining sufficiently nationalism in the eastern non-industrialised European regions), Elie Kedourie connects nationalism with ideas of the Enlightenment, with the French revolution and the birth of the centralised French state, Anderson contends that the European nation-state came into being as a response to nationalism in the European diaspora beyond the ocean, in colonies, namely in both Americas. He considers nation state building as ‘imitative’ action, in which new political entities were ‘pirating’ the model of the nation state. As Anderson sees it, the large cluster of political entities that sprang up in North and South America between 1778 and 1838, almost all of which self-consciously defined themselves as nations, were historically the first such states to emerge and therefore inevitably provided the first real model of what such states should look like. If for the more elite-centric theorizing of Kedourie it was the Enlightenment and Kant who produced the ‘nation’, Anderson holds that nationalism, as an instrument of nation-state building, began in the Americas and France. He calls this first wave nationalism, and ascribes to it a civic nationalist character, differentiating it from the ethnic nationalism of the second wave.

Nationalism and Print

Of particular importance to Anderson’s theory is his stress on the role of printed literature and its dissemination. The rise of nationalism is in Anderson's mind closely connected with the growth of printed books and with the technical development of print as a whole.

According to Anderson, a new emerging nation imagines itself to be antique. In this he somewhat takes the point of Anthony D. Smith, who considers the nation-building mythology and national myths of the ‘origin‘ in rather functionalist terms—they are more invented narratives than real stories. Anderson supposes that ’antiquity’ was, at a certain historical juncture, the necessary consequence of ‘novelty’. Though after the 1820s, atavistic fantasizing characteristics of most nationalists appear an epiphenomenon: what is really important is the structural alignment of post 1820s nationalist ‘memory’ with the inner premises and conventions of modern biography and autobiography.

Multi-ethnic Empires

Anderson, more than other theoreticians, focuses his attention on the official nationalism in multiethnic empires. He introduces an important concept: “naturalization” of Europe's dynasties that represented retention of power over huge polyglot domains. Some of them, e.g. Romanov empire, successfully transformed into “national” empires. According to Anderson, in the course of the 19th century, the philological-lexicographic revolution and the rise of nationalist movements, themselves the products not only of capitalism, but of the hypertrophy of the dynastic states, created increasing cultural and therefore political difficulties for many “dynasts”. Until that time the legitimacy of these dynasties had nothing to do with nationalness. Yet these dynasties, for exclusively administrative purposes, tried to settle on certain print-vernaculars before the nationalist big-bang. Simultaneously with the rise of nationalism in Europe, there were tendencies among Central and Eastern Europe and Balkan monarchies to re-identify themselves, to re-legitimise themselves on nationalist grounds. This will for re-identification caused, in fact, well-known crises of legitimacy of multiethnic empires. Dynasties and monarchies, re-identifying themselves as members of the particular ethno-linguistic group, lost their universalistic legitimacy and became only the most privileged members of the one large family.

Anderson's historical materialist approach may be contrasted with Liah Greenfeld's methodological individualist or Weberian approach in "Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity".

Indonesia

Anderson was banned from Indonesia during the Suharto era because of his treatment of materials relevant to the overthrow of Sukarno. Wrote the Jakarta Post: "Anderson... was banned from entering Indonesia in 1973 after he and colleague Ruth McVey at Cornell produced a paper, known as the Cornell Paper disputing Indonesia's claim that the Sept. 30, 1965 Movement was the work of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI)." He returned to the country in 1999.^[4]

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Benedict Anderson, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 100+ works in 400+ publications in 20+ languages and 7,500+ library holdings.^[5]

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

• Some Aspects of Indonesian Politics under the Japanese Occupation: 1944-1945 (1961)
• Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (1965)
• A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia (1966)
• Java in a Time of Revolution; Occupation and Resistance, 1944-1946 (1972)
• Interpreting Indonesian Politics: Thirteen Contributions to the Debate (1982)
• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983)
• In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (1985)
• Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990)
• The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (1998)
• Debating World Literature (2004)
• Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005)

Honors

• Association for Asian Studies (AAS), 1998 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies^[6]

See also

• Cornell Paper

Notes

1. ^ Lo, Elaine. "Benedict Anderson,"
2. ^ Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, p. 6. ISBN 0-86091-329-5
3. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter A". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterA.pdf. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
4. ^ "Indonesia Needs to Own Up to Past Sins,"] Jakarta Post (Indonesia). 5 March 1999.
5. ^ WorldCat Identities: Anderson, Benedict R. O'G (Benedict Richard O'Gorman) 1936-
6. ^ Association for Asian Studies (AAS), 1998 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies; retrieved 2011-06-06

References

• Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. pp. 224. ISBN 9780860915461. http://books.google.co.in/books?id=4mmoZFtCpuoC. Retrieved 5 September 2010.
• ___________ and Tsuyoshi Kato. (2009). ヤシガラ椀の外へ (Yashigarawan no soto e). Tokyo: NTT Shuppan. 13-ISBN 9784757142138/10-ISBN 4757142137; OCLC 427329177

Interviews

• "When the virtual becomes real", National Institute for Research Advancement (Japan), 1996
• "I like nationalism's utopian elements," University of Oslo (Norway), 2005

External links

• A short biography
• "The Nation as Imagined Community" An excerpt from Imagined Communities
• "When the Virtual Becomes the Real": A Talk with Benedict Anderson, (Spring 1996).
• "Democratic Fatalism in South East Asia Today" by Anderson, (May 11, 2001).
• "The Current Crisis in Indonesia" Interview with Benedict Anderson by William Seaman.
• "Sam's Club" Anderson on Anti-Americanisms, a book review in BOOKFORUM, (December/January 2005).
• Archive of articles written by Anderson in the New Left Review, (requires subscription).
• Interview with Anderson: "I like nationalism's utopian elements" (University of Oslo)
• Review of Under Three Flags by Meredith L. Weiss.
• "Petruk Dadi Ratu" New Left Review Article on Indonesia G30S Coup D'État

Categories: American academics | British academics | American political scientists | 1936 births | Living people | Cornell University alumni | Cornell University faculty | Scholars of nationalism | Javanists | Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences | Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize winners

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See Also:

• Joseph Anderson