Scholar of Nationalism and South East Asia Benedict Anderson has diedPretty much anyone who has done sort of research on the issue of nationalism or identity in the past 30 years or so has come across Benedict Anderson's work
Imagined Communities. Anderson's work tried to establish the origins of modern nationalism seeing it as originating with the rise of literacy and states in Early Modern Europe and then spreading over the world due to the impact of imperialism and 'the enlightenment' (Personally I think this is wrong, but that's for another time). Anderson was writing against long standing materialist and marxist-inspired assumptions in the social science which gave little credence to the importance of ideology and even less to ethnicity or identity. Therefore Anderson's work can be seen as part of a transition in the social sciences from the Materialist cum Marxism of the 60s and 70s to the more 'Postmodernist' analysis more focused on identity and more historicist than in the past. He also invented a phrase, the title of his book, that become ubiquitous in scholarship and ended up being more cited than read. He was also a major figure in South East Asian studies (the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam in 1979 was what inspired him to write
Imagined Communities). He will be missed.
