Benedict Anderson (1936-2015)

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Scholar of Nationalism and South East Asia Benedict Anderson has died

Pretty 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.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

We've lost way too many notable historians this year haven't we? RIP.

[Sol]

RIP. I read Imagined Communities earlier this year, and it was one of my first really serious, thoughtful history books.

[The Mikado]

Imagined Communities is a much better book than people assume, and its case is far more nuanced than commonly assumed. (Latin America pioneered nationalism decades before Eastern Europe? Anderson makes many claims usually skipped over)

RIP

[Famous Mortimer]

Along with Muarry Bookchin, someone very influential on the Rojava situation.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I only briefly came into contact with Anderson's work last year--the literature on Japanese nationalism specifically doesn't really have much truck with him for whatever reason--but I liked what I read of it. RIP.

[Sol]

In any case, I suppose if you don't buy Anderson's arguments wrt:the emergence of nationalism, his arguments can be pretty easily retrofitted to explain why nationalism has been more popular since the late 1700s.