Report this comment

Report this comment

Report this comment

To reiterate, my point is that the culture you acquired when growing up cannot be undone because it is woven into your habitus for the rest of your life. You can reject your Bugis or Minangkabau or Dayak or Melayu upbringing and ‘become’ Javanese as an adult (e.g. when marrying into a traditionalist Javanese family), adopt a Javanese name and learn as best you can the difficult Javanese language, even go as far as rewriting your biography and inventing a Javanese upbringing, but that doesn’t undo your personal cultural history as a non-Javanese. Your cultural competence (Bourdieu) will still be that of a non-Javanese working hard at becoming Javanese.

Report this comment

I like your point that ‘national’ and ‘nationalism’ are not synonyms. Somewhat related, I think, is what I see as a common shortcoming in the application of the Imagined Communities concept, that of a failure to consider unit of analysis.

I would disagree somewhat with your suggestion that there is no opting out of your cultural upbringing or habitus. I think there is some cultural variability on that count. (To paraphrase an Indonesian friend, “The Javanese work hard on making foreigners Javanese.”) Irving Hallowell published an excellent article pertinent to the issue: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1086/200422

Report this comment

Report this comment

I think we should acknowledge that, just as it is easier to live in a post-racial America if you’re white, some individuals have more choice to exercise in your post-nationalist scenario. Being a Swedish citizen is not equivalent to being a Nicaraguan citizen, for example.

Report this comment

Report this comment

Since we’re on the subject of Spain – what is Spain? Well, the conventional received wisdom in anthropology has told us since the 1980s that Spain (or France, the US, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, etc.) is an ‘imagined community’. OK, that may be the case, I will not dispute it here. But surely there is far more to say and to research on this matter? At the very least, we can also agree that Spain is also:

(1) a sovereign state with a territory of over 500,000 sq. km. and a population of roughly 45 million
(2) a multiplex network of road, railways, ports, airports, telecommunications, finance, etc. with a few hubs (Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao)
(3) a cultural space with a widely shared lingua franca (Spanish) to run the multiplex network and a number of other weaker languages (their more committed speaker struggling to resist the formidable strength of Spanish)
and dialects
(4)a country with a material culture, fashion, cuisine, nightlife, etc, that is distinctive from that of neighbouring countries: Morocco, Portugal and France.

Report this comment

1) Anderson says that one of the paradoxes of nationalism is its real power despite its theoretical poverty. Whatever nationalism is, it isn’t rational, and yet it’s incredibly powerful and…

2) the “post-nationalist” difference comes from the fact that nationalism is no longer a priveliged choice, but one among many. Some people are condemned to only be Italian or Malaysian, but more an more people are malaysian in some contexts, doctors in another, level 70 clerics online, and amateur biologists on the weekend–all of which are facilitated by the multiple forms of “internet capitalism” (on the analogy with “print capitalism”) which are a common feaure of the contemporary.

Report this comment

- the Malaysian government telling employers yesterday to sack foreigners not Malaysians if they have to sack anyone during the downturn

- the other day, the Basque soccer team refusing to play an ‘international’ match unless they are renamed Euskal Herria (the federation wants to retain the name Euskadi)

- Barack Obama’s inaugural address to the United States of America and ROW (Rest of the World)

etc etc

I think too much attention is paid to Anderson’s imagined communities and too little to the empirical actualities of living in states with markedly different universes of cultural practice. I consider states (e.g. Spain, France Malaysia, Turkey) to be the preeminent culture areas of our era. Cross the border from Spain into France – or the other way round – and you’ll see what I mean.

As we can see clearly in the Spanish case, cultural autonomy is very difficult without political autonomy – or even better, political independence (=territorial sovereignty) which is the aim of many Catalan and Basque nationalists.

Report this comment

A newspaper directs us to other ways of ‘being together’ besides newspapers. Those ways of being together, perhaps, don’t have to be definable as ‘media.’ With the internet, they kind of do: roughly put, watching the demonstration on youtube still means in the end that you failed to show up for it and be counted. (Think of the fact, for example, that we still don’t vote online.)

Report this comment

In contrast, what’s creepy about RSS feeds is not that you can pick your news, but that each person is picking their news individually. You can have more than one version of the same ‘newspaper’ per person, and no person is reading quite the same original text. I suppose that the number of texts isn’t mathematically infinite, but it is incalculable. This doesn’t imagine community-it imagines the dissolution of community.

Part of why that’s frightening, I think, is that newspapers also encourage us to ‘go out and do things’-the movie section would be a simple example. (I’m reminded of the phrase ‘the revolution will not be televised’-nobody ever says anything like this about the web.)

In contrast, the internet threatens to privatize us by providing a whole new definition of linkage between newspapers and media. For one thing, we can just download the thing online, but it seems like there’s little reason to read a movie review off an RSS feed, because there are whole websites dedicated to movie reviews.

Report this comment

television doesn’t sell out of copies, for one thing :)

Report this comment

Report this comment