Benedict Anderson
Benedict Anderson <参见Wikipedia free encyclopedia>
>>Biography:
Anderson 全称Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson；是美国Cornell大学全球研究学的学者，他出生于1936年，中国，昆明。父亲是爱尔兰人，母亲是英格兰人。他年少时候大部分时间都在美国加利福尼亚州，曾经在英国剑桥大学求学。他的代表作有《Imagined Community》；大部分资料来自于早年的历史研究，比较系统地解释分析了过去三个世纪世界各地的民族主义。他将“民族主义”定义为“一个虚构的政治团体意识”；“一种本身存在局限性但同时具备独立自主的追求”。Anderson同时对现代印度尼西亚历史学有一定研究。早年曾因为书中涉及推翻SUKARNO统治政权而禁止入境.
>>Imagined Community
在他的《Imagined Community》一书中争论道:民族主义的出现,主要由于个别语种的使用特权衰亡所导致的；拉丁文是个很好的事例。废除神学和君主制的运动出现在资本主义体系下的印刷传播。
Anderson’s theory belongs among those that have come to be known as a ‘modernist’ view of nationalism. Anderson similarly 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 the response to nationalism in the European Diaspora beyond the ocean, in colonies, namely in both Americas. He considers nation state building as somehow ‘imitative’ action, in which new political entities somehow were ‘pirating’ the model of nation state according to its models (mostly USA but also South America). The large cluster of political entities that sprang up in the west between 1778 and 1838, 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 elitist theorizing of Kedourie it was the Enlightenment and Kant who produced the ‘nation’, Anderson holds that nationalism, as an instrument of nation-state building was an American invention.
>>Nationalism and Print
What is of importance in Anderson’s theory, is his stress on the role of printed literature and its dissemination. It is a similar idea, to that which Gellner takes on, although Anderson is much more particular about it. The rise of nationalism is thus connected with the growth of printed books and with technical development of print on the whole.
According to Anderson a new emerging nation, imagines itself antique. In this he somewhat takes the point of Anthony D. Smith, who considers the nation-building mythology, national myths of the ‘origin‘; in rather functionalist terms - they are more invented narratives than real stories. Anderson supposes that ’antiquity’ were, 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 elephantiasis 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-know 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.