Cambridge, November 1956. Students from India and Ceylon marched through the streets to protest the Anglo-French attack on Egypt. A crowd of English undergraduates, big men from the boat clubs and rugby fields, fell on them and started swinging. Benedict Anderson, twenty years old, a scholarship boy reading classics at King’s College, came upon the scene and tried to pull the attackers off. Someone knocked his glasses from his face. When it was over, the men who had done the beating stood in the street and sang “God Save the Queen.”
Anderson wrote in his memoir that nothing before had made him so angry. The scene held everything he later spent a career trying to understand: empire in its dying years, the racial line running through a university town, and the power of a national song to sanctify violence in the minds of comfortable young men. He had watched an anthem turn a mob into a congregation.
Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson (1936-2015) became the most influential theorist of nationalism of the late twentieth century. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) gave the social sciences a phrase that escaped its author and now circulates everywhere, applied to fan bases, diasporas, and online forums. The phrase traveled because the insight underneath it answered a question most political theory had dodged. Why do millions of strangers who will never meet feel themselves to be one people, and why will they kill and die for that feeling?
Anderson’s answer came out of a life that never sat still inside one country. He was born on August 26, 1936, in Kunming, China, where his Irish father worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, a hybrid institution staffed by Europeans collecting duties for the Chinese state. His mother was English. The Japanese war drove the family out of China in 1941. They meant to reach Ireland, but German submarines made the Atlantic crossing too dangerous, so they waited out the war in California. After 1945 the family settled in Ireland. Anderson kept Irish citizenship all his life.
The itinerary produced a boy who belonged nowhere in particular and could see everywhere from a slight angle. He later described himself as an English boy in California, a Protestant in Catholic Ireland, and a scholarship student among the sons of wealth at Eton. Each move taught the same lesson. Customs that feel like nature from inside a society look like costume from outside it. His comparative method began as a childhood condition before it became a scholarly practice.
At Eton he lived among boys being groomed to run what remained of the empire, and he beat them at their own curriculum. He had started Latin at nine and Greek at twelve. He added French, German, Russian, and Spanish, and later taught himself Dutch, Indonesian, Javanese, Thai, and Tagalog. The classical training left permanent marks. It taught him that words carry histories, that translation loses and distorts, and that grammar can encode rank. Decades later, when he analyzed the speech levels of Javanese, in which a speaker must place himself above or below his listener with nearly every sentence, he worked with habits of philological attention first drilled into him over Greek particles.
He took a first in classics at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1957, with no plan for what came next. A school friend headed into the Foreign Service had accepted a post as a teaching assistant in the government department at Cornell University and could not take it. He offered Anderson the slot. Anderson crossed the Atlantic to fill a job arranged over a personal connection, knowing nothing about American political science and less about Southeast Asia.
At Cornell he met George McTurnan Kahin (1918-2000), who changed the direction of his life. Kahin had written Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (1952), the founding American study of the Indonesian independence struggle, and had paid for his sympathies during the McCarthy years, when the State Department pulled his passport. He ran Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program on a demanding creed. A scholar earned the right to write about a country by learning its languages, reading its newspapers and novels, and listening to people who held no office. Kahin pointed Anderson toward Indonesia, a republic barely a decade out from under Dutch rule, crowded with parties, sects, generals, and revolutionary expectations.
Anderson went to Jakarta at the end of 1961 and stayed through 1964, the high years of Sukarno (1901-1970) and his politics of permanent mobilization. He learned Indonesian well enough to pass, then went deeper into Javanese. His dissertation, finished in 1967 and published as Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944-1946 (1972), told the story of the Indonesian revolution through the pemuda, the politicized young men whose formation under the Japanese occupation shaped the fight against the returning Dutch. The book moved between ministries and street fighters, between official speeches and shifts in slang. Anderson treated changes in vocabulary and forms of address as political events, evidence of a generation remaking authority in its own image.
He also went where political scientists did not go. He sat through night-long performances of wayang, the Javanese shadow-puppet theater that stages local adaptations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. His early monograph Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (1965) read the puppet stage as a political education. Wayang refuses the Western sorting of heroes from villains. Refined princes commit crimes. Clowns speak truth. Power and virtue travel separately. Anderson argued that Javanese audiences brought these expectations to living politicians, and that a figure like Sukarno performed within a repertoire his audiences already knew, the way an American politician might work within the conventions of the sermon or the sales pitch.
The essay that grew from this immersion, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” later collected in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990), reconstructed a conception of power foreign to Western political science. In this tradition power is a substance rather than a relation, finite in quantity, concentrated in persons, and legible through signs: composure, fertility of the land, order in the realm, a ruler’s command of himself. Anderson did not claim every Javanese peasant held this metaphysics. He claimed the grammar survived beneath the vocabulary of the modern republic, shaping what audiences expected power to look like.
Then came the catastrophe that split his life in two. On the night of September 30, 1965, junior officers kidnapped and killed six senior Indonesian generals. Major General Suharto (1921-2008) crushed the movement within days, then used it to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party and push Sukarno aside. The army and its civilian allies killed on the order of half a million people, perhaps more. It stands among the great massacres of the century, and for decades it went nearly unexamined in the West because the victims were communists and the killers were allies.
Through the winter that followed, Anderson, Ruth McVey (b. 1930), and Frederick Bunnell worked in Ithaca from radio monitoring transcripts, Indonesian newspapers, and army publications, trying to reconstruct what had happened. The analysis they finished in January 1966 argued that the September 30 movement grew out of conflicts inside the army, and that the Communist Party had been made a scapegoat. They circulated the study in confidence, afraid publication might get Indonesian friends killed. It leaked anyway, reaching The Washington Post within months, and entered history as the Cornell Paper. Anderson and McVey published it in 1971 without substantial revision as A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia.
The paper attacked the founding myth of Suharto’s New Order, which rested on the army as savior of the nation from a communist plot. Anderson compounded the offense in person. He attended the show trial of Sudisman, the general secretary of the destroyed Communist Party, and later translated the condemned man’s final address to the court. In 1972 the regime barred him from Indonesia. The ban lasted twenty-seven years.
Exile made the book that made his name. Shut out of Indonesian fieldwork, Anderson learned Thai and turned to Thailand after its dictatorship fell in 1973, and he began thinking comparatively about the force that had organized his whole field of study without ever being explained by it. The late 1970s sharpened the question. Vietnam invaded Cambodia. China invaded Vietnam. Three states claiming Marxist internationalism went to war along national lines. The socialist tradition had treated nationalism as a mask for class interest or a residue awaiting dissolution, and the wars in Indochina exposed the poverty of that account. Anderson liked to say he had Suharto to thank for Imagined Communities.
The book defines the nation as an imagined political community, imagined as limited and sovereign. Imagined, because no member of even the smallest nation will ever know more than a fraction of his fellow members, yet each carries an image of their communion. Limited, because every nation ends at a border beyond which other nations live; no nation dreams of enrolling all mankind. Sovereign, because nations were born as dynastic and divine legitimacy decayed, and the sovereign state became the emblem of their freedom. A community, because whatever the inequalities within it, the nation presents itself as a horizontal comradeship, and it is this fraternity that makes it possible for millions to die for it.
Readers seized on “imagined” and heard “fake.” Anderson meant the opposite. All communities larger than a village of face-to-face acquaintance are imagined, including churches, classes, and civilizations. Money is imagined. Law is imagined. The question is never whether a community is invented but how. Communities are to be distinguished, he wrote, “by the style in which they are imagined.”
The engine of the national style, in his account, was print capitalism. Printing alone changed little; printing married to the market changed everything. Publishers hunting larger audiences exhausted the thin Latin-reading elite and turned to the vernaculars. Commerce, without any nationalist intention, began standardizing languages, elevating some dialects and burying others. Readers of the new print languages became aware of hundreds of thousands of others reading as they read, invisible and unknown, yet somehow together. The languages that later felt like the eternal voice of the nation were the residue of sales strategies, administrative convenience, and accident.
Two print commodities taught readers a new experience of time. The newspaper juxtaposes an election, a murder, a shipping notice, and a distant war on one dated page, connected by nothing except the calendar, and so trains its reader to imagine a society of simultaneous events moving together through what Walter Benjamin called homogeneous, empty time. Anderson, borrowing an image from Hegel, described the morning paper as modern man’s substitute for morning prayers, each reader performing the rite in private while certain that unknown thousands perform it with him. The novel does the same work by other means. It follows characters who never meet but who share one social world and one clock, and so rehearses the reader in imagining the life of a nation.
Anderson also broke with the assumption that nationalism was born in Europe and shipped outward. He gave priority to the Americas. Creole elites in the Spanish colonies and British North America, men of European descent born in the New World, found their careers blocked at the top by peninsular officials and their imaginations bounded by the administrative units they served. Colonial newspapers and the pilgrimages of colonial careers taught them to imagine Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, and the thirteen colonies as communities. The republics they founded became models. The nation proved modular, available for piracy, adapted in turn by European linguistic movements, by dynasts practicing official nationalism from above, and by the anticolonial movements of Asia and Africa.
The revised 1991 edition added a chapter that has shaped colonial studies ever since, on the census, the map, and the museum. The census sorted fluid populations into hard boxes of race and religion, and the boxes outlived the counters. The map turned frontier zones and layered sovereignties into colored shapes with sharp edges, and the shape, reprinted on schoolroom walls and stamps, became a logo a child could recognize and love. The museum arranged ruins into a lineage, letting the colonial state pose as guardian of an ancient civilization and letting the nationalists who followed claim the same stones as ancestors. The state did not merely count, chart, and curate what existed. It manufactured the categories through which its subjects came to see themselves.
The chapter of Imagined Communities that Anderson himself thought most misunderstood concerns love. Theorists comfortable explaining national hatred stumble over national love, yet the love is the harder fact. People experience nationality as fate rather than choice, like family, and fatality purifies attachment; there is no merit in loving what one could not have refused, and so no suspicion of interest. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, void of any nameable person yet saturated with national meaning, marks the place where nationalism does the work religion once did, turning anonymous death into continuity. Liberalism and Marxism speak of progress and interest and fall silent before mortality. The nation speaks of the dead and the unborn. That, Anderson argued, is why men die for it.
The theory drew serious fire, and Anderson engaged it. Partha Chatterjee (b. 1947) asked the sharpest question: if Europe and the Americas had already scripted the nation as a modular form, what was left for the colonized to imagine except a derivative? Chatterjee argued that anticolonial nationalists in Bengal and elsewhere built an inner spiritual domain, in family, religion, and language, before they ever captured the outer machinery of the state, and that this inner sovereignty was their own creation, not a European loan. Ethnosymbolists such as Anthony Smith argued that nations are built from older ethnic myths and memories that constrain the invention, and that Anderson underweighted the inheritance. Others noted that print cannot conscript armies or explain why reading publics should demand sovereignty, and that schools, railways, and barracks deserve more of the story. Feminist scholars observed that the horizontal fraternity was a fraternity, with women cast as the nation’s mothers and emblems rather than its comrades. Anderson conceded ground on some fronts and held it on others. The criticisms narrowed the theory’s claims without displacing its vocabulary. Forty years on, the argument over nations is still conducted in his terms.
His brother sharpened him from the other side of the Atlantic. Perry Anderson (b. 1938), two years younger, became the commanding intellect of New Left Review and the historian of European absolutism and Western Marxism. The brothers shared politics and a contempt for national complacency, and diverged in everything else. Perry built systems from the European archive. Benedict collected jokes, stamps, cemetery inscriptions, cartoons, and grammar books from the tropics, and distrusted any theory that had never left its own language. The division of labor served them both. Perry read and argued over drafts of Benedict’s work on nationalism, and readers of the two can watch one family conduct a forty-year seminar on power.
Students at Cornell knew a different Anderson from the one in the footnotes. He taught by interrogation, pressed his students into hard languages, and turned his seminar into a place where a first-year graduate student was expected to attack Imagined Communities to its author’s face and defend the attack. He helped sustain the journal Indonesia, which published the young and the heterodox alongside the established. In his memoir he passed on an Indonesian proverb as a warning to the profession: the frog under the coconut shell, who sits in the dark and takes the shell for the sky. Area studies, he thought, saved him from the shell, and monolingual theory built shells by the thousand.
The ban had one more effect. It pushed him toward the Philippines, and the Philippines pushed his theory outward. He learned Tagalog and Spanish well enough to live inside the world of José Rizal (1861-1896), the novelist the Spanish shot and the Filipinos made a national saint. From Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere he took the phrase that named his 1998 collection, The Spectre of Comparisons. Rizal’s hero, looking at the botanical gardens of Manila, cannot stop seeing the gardens of Europe behind them, and the doubled vision poisons the innocence of home. Anderson knew the demon personally. China, California, Ireland, England, Java, Bangkok, and Manila had left him unable to see any country as simply itself, and he turned the affliction into a method.
Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005) completed the turn. The book follows Rizal, the folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, and the propagandist Mariano Ponce through a late nineteenth century wired together by telegraph cables, steamships, and the international press, where Filipino exiles in Madrid and Paris read anarchist papers, corresponded with Cuban rebels, and coordinated sedition by post. The nation, the book showed, was born global. The men who invented Filipino nationalism did it abroad, in other people’s languages, inside international networks of radicals and readers. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism, supposed opposites, arrived on the same boats.
Translation ran through all of it as practice and as principle. Anderson translated Indonesian, Thai, and Tagalog writers, championed Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006) while Suharto held him in the Buru prison camp, recovered the multilingual Indonesian Chinese journalist Kwee Thiam Tjing from oblivion, and in his last years promoted the novelist Eka Kurniawan (b. 1975) to Anglophone readers. Translation kept him honest. A man who has fought a Javanese sentence into English does not assume that “power” or “freedom” mean the same thing everywhere, and Anderson held that the struggle was the best inoculation against bad theory.
Suharto fell in May 1998. The following year Anderson came back. In a packed hall in Jakarta he stood before an audience of students and activists, most of them born after his expulsion, many of them raised on smuggled photocopies of his banned work, and addressed them in fluent Indonesian on the future of Indonesian nationalism. He did not flatter them. He told them their nationalism had been stolen by the state and dared them to take it back on behalf of the poor. The lecture circulated across the archipelago. The country that had locked him out for twenty-seven years now claimed him.
He retired from Cornell in 2002 as Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies Emeritus and split his years between upstate New York and Southeast Asia, keeping an apartment life in Bangkok, writing on Thai politics and Buddhist asceticism, Filipino novels, and the fate of the left. The memoir he wrote first for Japanese readers, A Life Beyond Boundaries (2016), defends the slow disciplines, language above all, against an academy that rewards fast theory produced at a distance.
On December 10, 2015, he lectured on anarchism and nationalism at the University of Indonesia outside Jakarta, then traveled east through Java with Indonesian friends, revisiting the landscapes of his fieldwork half a century before. On the night of December 12 he went to sleep in a hotel in Batu, in the highlands of East Java, and did not wake. He was seventy-nine. His friends carried his ashes out onto the Java Sea and scattered them, at his wish, in the waters off the country that had formed him, banished him, and taken him back.
The obituaries called him the theorist of the imagined community, and the phrase will outlive every correction filed against it. His deeper legacy is a stance. Anderson refused both available pieties about nations, the nationalist’s claim that they are ancient organisms and the debunker’s claim that they are elite frauds. Nations are constructions that became real, he argued, because people live, remember, love, and die inside them, and a construction people die for demands understanding, not a sneer. He gave the study of nationalism its method as well: learn the language, read the newspapers and the novels, sit through the puppet play, distrust any theory that has never been homesick. Once another country has made your own look strange, no nation can ever again seem self-evident. Anderson lived that condition from Kunming onward and turned it into the sharpest eye his field has had.
Notes
The Suez scene comes from A Life Beyond Boundaries (Verso, 2016), where Anderson describes trying to stop English “hearties” from attacking Indian and Ceylonese demonstrators, having his glasses knocked off, and hearing the attackers sing the national anthem. He says the incident angered him as nothing had before. Verify his wording: Verso. Several obituaries retell the incident, including The Guardian’s obituary of December 15, 2015: Benedict Anderson obituary.
The “frogs under the coconut shell” proverb also comes from the memoir, where Anderson applies it to parochial scholars.
For the Sudisman material, Anderson attended the trial in Jakarta and translated the final speech, which Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project published as Sudisman’s Analysis of Responsibility, translated by Anderson, in 1975. The trial took place in 1967, and the formal ban on Anderson’s return to Indonesia came in 1972. I kept the sequence loose in the text, but confirm the dates through Cornell eCommons and the Cornell Chronicle obituary: “Benedict Anderson, ‘Imagined Communities’ author, dies”.
The 1999 Jakarta lecture was “Indonesian Nationalism Today and in the Future,” delivered after his return and published in Indonesia No. 67 in April 1999. My characterization that he told the audience their nationalism had been captured by the state and challenged them to reclaim it on behalf of the poor tracks the published text, but read it before retaining the sentence that he “dared them”: Cornell’s Indonesia archive. Search for “Indonesian Nationalism Today and in the Future.” The detail that audience members had grown up reading photocopies of his banned work appears in Indonesian press coverage of the visit and in tributes after his death.
The death sequence is as follows. Anderson delivered his final lecture at the University of Indonesia in Depok on December 10, 2015, speaking about anarchism and nationalism. He died in his sleep in Batu, East Java, during the night of December 12–13. His ashes were later scattered in the Java Sea. The lecture and his death are covered in The New York Times obituary of December 14, 2015: “Benedict Anderson, Scholar Who Saw Nations as ‘Imagined,’ Dies at 79”. The scattering of his ashes at sea appears in later tributes, including Perry Anderson’s memorial in New Left Review 97 (2016) and an essay in Jacobin. Confirm the evidence before retaining the claim that this was done “at his wish.”
The detail that the State Department withdrew George McTurnan Kahin’s passport during the McCarthy years appears in Kahin’s obituaries and Cornell records: “George McTurnan Kahin dies at 82”.
The quoted fragment “by the style in which they are imagined” comes from Chapter 1 of Imagined Communities. The Hegel-derived image of newspaper reading as a modern morning prayer and Walter Benjamin’s phrase “homogeneous, empty time” appear in Chapters 1 and 2. The quip that Anderson had Suharto “to thank” appears in the memoir and in interviews. I paraphrased it rather than quoting it.
The extrapolations for which I did not supply links, but which I judge safe, concern the character of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, the social texture of Eton and Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, the description of wayang performance, and the reading of José Rizal’s botanical-garden passage, which appears in Chapter 1 of The Spectre of Comparisons.
The Exile’s Hero System: Benedict Anderson and the Denial of Death
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) lay in a Vancouver hospital ward in February 1974 with cancer through his body and a tape recorder running. Sam Keen (b. 1931) had flown up for Psychology Today to conduct the last interview. Becker told him the timing had a certain rightness to it. Keen had caught him, he said, “in extremis,” at the moment when everything he had written about death faced its test. He talked for hours, lucid, wry, dying in character. Two months after his death The Denial of Death won the Pulitzer Prize. The committee handed a dead man the reward his book said all men chase: a name that outlasts the body.
Becker’s argument fits in a paragraph and takes a lifetime to absorb. Man is the animal that knows it will die and cannot live with the knowledge. Culture exists to manage the terror. Every society is a shared drama of significance, a structure of roles and ranks through which a man can feel himself an object of primary value in a universe of meaning, a contributor to something that does not rot. Becker called this structure a hero system. “Society itself is a codified hero system,” he wrote. The businessman building a firm, the mother raising sons, the monk mortifying his flesh, the professor compiling footnotes: each performs heroism as his culture defines it, and each performance is a bid for immortality by other means. The systems differ. The hunger under them does not.
Nine years after Becker died, a political scientist banned from Indonesia published a book whose emotional center is a tomb. Benedict Anderson never cites Becker in Imagined Communities, and there is no evidence he needed him. He had reached the same nerve from the other side of the world. His question was the one that had embarrassed liberal and Marxist theory alike: why do men die for nations, communities of strangers they will never meet? His answer was that the nation had inherited religion’s oldest job. Where liberalism speaks of interests and Marxism of classes, the nation speaks of the dead and the unborn. It converts the accident of birth into destiny and the fatality of death into continuity. Its purest shrine is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, empty of any nameable man and saturated with immortal meaning. Anderson found Becker’s engine in the archive, without the psychoanalysis, and described its national model more concretely than Becker ever managed.
Becker’s rule admits no exemptions. The analyst of hero systems has one. The man who explains why others chase immortality is chasing it in the explanation. So the question this essay asks is the one Anderson’s admirers skip. What was his?
Start with what he counted as heroism. In Anderson’s cosmology a man earned significance by crossing. He began Latin at nine and Greek at twelve, added French, German, Russian, and Spanish as a schoolboy, taught himself Dutch for the colonial archive, mastered Indonesian in his twenties, Javanese after that, Thai in his forties when Indonesia locked him out, Tagalog and Spanish past fifty for the sake of a novelist executed in 1896. Each language was an entry fee paid to another world, and the payment had to hurt. Quick acquisition earned nothing in his system. The years of humiliation, the misplaced honorific in Javanese that insults a host, the joke that dies in translation, these were the ordeals that certified the crossing, the way lost toes certify the mountaineer.
The system had its saints. José Rizal, who wrote the Philippines into existence in Spanish and took a firing squad for it. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who composed novels aloud to fellow prisoners on Buru island when the camp denied him paper. Kwee Thiam Tjing, the Indonesian Chinese journalist who wrote in a mongrel prose of Malay, Javanese, Dutch, and Hokkien, and whom the national canon forgot because he fit no national box. Anderson translated the dead and the silenced back into circulation, and here his hero system shows its distinctive engineering. Becker says every man seeks a self that persists beyond the body. Anderson’s heroic act was to confer that persistence on others. Translation, in his drama, was a raising of the dead.
The system had its coward. Anderson passed on an Indonesian proverb as a professional curse: the frog under the coconut shell, who sits in the dark and takes the shell for the sky. The monoglot theorist, the desk Orientalist, the professor who processes the world through English and calls the residue universal, this figure held the place in Anderson’s moral universe that the coward holds in a warrior’s and the apostate holds in a believer’s. The judgment looks like method. Underneath, it is theology. The frog is damned because he refused the ordeal on which the whole economy of significance runs.
And the system had its wound. In 1972 Suharto’s regime barred Anderson from Indonesia, and the ban ran twenty-seven years. Measure the same event inside two hero systems and watch the meaning change. Inside the academic career system, the one that counts grants, access, and cited work, the ban was a catastrophe: a fieldwork scholar severed from his field at thirty-five. Inside Anderson’s system it was a decoration. The regime that murdered half a million people had certified that his sentences told the truth at a price. He wore the ban the way an old soldier wears a scar, and he liked to say he had Suharto to thank for Imagined Communities. The joke carried the system’s accounting: exile was the tuition, the book was the degree.
Hold that word, exile, up to the light and turn it. Becker’s framework predicts what happens: the word will refuse to mean one thing, because meaning is minted inside a hero system and the coin does not convert at par.
To the old man on Calle Ocho in Miami, exile means vigil. He left Cuba in 1961 with a law degree that became a parking receipt, and his heroism consists of refusal. He has not gone back, he will not go back while they hold it, and the deferral is the badge. His drama assigns significance to waiting, and a man who returned to Havana for a beach holiday would be, inside that drama, a small traitor to the dead.
To the Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, exile means custody. The civilization lives in his memory and his ritual hands, and his heroic task is to carry it uncorrupted until the mountains open. Time works differently in his system; a half century is an episode.
To the oil-company manager in a Singapore tower, exile is a word he uses at dinner parties for a posting that came with a housing allowance and school fees. His hero system is the corporation’s, heroism is the number at year’s end, and the distance from home is hardship pay, already priced.
Anderson’s exile matched none of these. It was consecration. The banished witness outranks the accredited insider, and the twenty-seven years were the proof of witness. Four men, one word, four currencies.
Run the same experiment on language, the most sacred term in his lexicon. In the spring of any year, at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, a nineteen-year-old from Idaho sits in a fluorescent classroom learning Tagalog, the same tongue Anderson took up in his fifties. The boy gets nine weeks. His teachers are returned missionaries barely older than he is, the vocabulary lists run to baptism and repentance, and the pace is brutal because the language is an instrument of salvation, to be spent like ammunition over two years in Manila and then, mostly, let go. Inside his hero system, the Church’s, the language has served its purpose if a family enters the water. Fluency for its own sake would be a vanity.
Anderson’s Tagalog obeyed opposite laws. Slow, literary, historical, acquired to read a dead novelist in the original and to hear what Spanish had done to the islands, it was an end and a sacrament. Neither man is confused. The missionary is right inside his drama and Anderson inside his. The word language names two different heroic acts.
Add the grandmother in Astoria whose grandchildren answer her Greek in English. For her the language is blood, and each English answer is a small funeral, because her hero system is the family line and the line is losing its tongue. Add the strategy consultant for whom languages are a line on slide forty, dead weight next to English, an interpreter a cost center; his heroism lives in the closed deal, and Anderson’s decades over Javanese would strike him, if he thought about it at all, as a hobby that got out of hand. Add the Hebrew revivalist, heir of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), for whom the heroic act was forcing a liturgical language to carry groceries and quarrels, resurrection performed on the tongue of an entire people. Five hero systems, five languages called language.
The word death splits the same way, and here the stakes rise, because death is what every hero system exists to manage. Anderson’s account says men die for the nation because the nation promises that dying joins them to the unbroken procession of the dead and the unborn. The combat literature complicates him from below. Interviewers have worked over soldiers since the 1940s, from the Wehrmacht studies of 1948 through every American war since, and the sentence that keeps coming back is some version of the same one: I didn’t do it for the flag, I did it for the guys next to me. At the moment of fire the immortality vehicle shrinks to the squad. The nation supplies the war, the training, the tomb afterward; the dying gets done inside a brotherhood of eight. Becker might reply that the squad is a hero system in miniature, the smallest community a man can disappear into, and that the flag and the fire team are nested vessels for the same terror.
Set beside the rifleman the software engineer in San Francisco who has signed the cryonics paperwork and gives ten percent to longevity research. Inside his hero system death has no dignity to exchange. It is a bug, an engineering failure his generation might be the last to suffer, and the idea of dying for something reads to him as a category error, the way burning money honors no one. And set beside him the Confucian eldest son in Taipei, sweeping the family graves at Qingming, for whom death is a change of address within the lineage. He will be fed and remembered as he feeds and remembers, and his immortality runs through sons performing rites, an arrangement Anderson’s nation partly copied and scaled to millions. The soldier, the engineer, the son, and Anderson’s citizen at the Tomb are strangers to one another across the same six letters.
This is the point the hero-system essays keep circling and this one should land on directly. There is no neutral floor under these words. Sacrifice, exile, language, death, each takes its meaning from the drama a man is starring in, and the dramas are plural, simultaneous, and mutually illegible at the core. Anderson knew this better than almost anyone alive, because his life’s work was a study of how one drama, the national one, builds its meanings and gets strangers to die inside them. What he could not do, because no one can, was resign from drama as such.
Watch his final act with Becker’s eyes. In 1999, Suharto gone, the visa granted, Anderson walked into a packed Jakarta hall and lectured in Indonesian to students who had grown up on photocopies of his banned pages. Hero systems rarely pay out while the hero lives; his did. The occasion has a name in older vocabularies: the return of the exile, the vindication scene, the beatification. He told the students their nationalism had been stolen by the state and challenged them to take it back for the poor, which is to say he performed his heroism one more time, the outsider telling the inside its truth.
Sixteen years later he lectured on anarchism and nationalism outside Jakarta, traveled east through Java past the landscapes of his fieldwork, went to sleep in a hill town called Batu, and did not wake. Indonesians mourned him as Om Ben, Uncle Ben, a kinship term extended to a foreigner, and his friends carried his ashes onto the Java Sea and gave them to the water. Consider what the machinery did with him. The country that expelled him absorbed him. Strangers grieved in a language he had crossed into by decades of labor. The theorist of imagined communities finished as a minor immortal inside one, his death assigned a place in another nation’s story, mourned by thousands who felt they knew a man they had never met. The process he had anatomized, the one that turns anonymous death into collective continuity, processed him without irony and without asking.
Becker held that a hero system works only while it stays invisible to the man inside it, a vital lie the psyche protects. Anderson stands as a partial exception, which is the most anyone gets. Exile handed him the outside view of every national drama including the ones that raised him, and he built comparison into a discipline for catching communities in the act of imagining. He saw further into the machinery than the machinery usually permits. Then he chose his seat in it anyway, played the crossing hero for sixty years, took the wound, banked the vindication, and let the sea off Java close over what was left. The choice was not a failure of his theory. It was the theory’s last demonstration. A man can learn what the dramas are made of. He still has to be in one to die well.
Bodies in Rooms: Benedict Anderson, Randall Collins, and the Ritual Theory Hidden Inside Print
Go back to the Cambridge street in November 1956 and watch it again, this time counting ingredients. Bodies assembled in one place: the marchers from India and Ceylon, the English athletes who fell on them, the bystanders pulled in. A boundary marking who belongs: drawn in the oldest way, by skin, and enforced with fists. A single focus of attention: the beating, which no one on that street could look away from. A shared mood: rage on one side, fear on the other, each feeding the other. Then, when the marchers were down and the work was done, the men who did it stood together and sang the national anthem, voices finding one rhythm, and walked away taller than they came.
A sociologist in California later spent a career explaining what happened in that street. Randall Collins (b. 1941) built his theory of interaction ritual chains from Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) by way of Erving Goffman (1922-1982), and its core claims fit in a page. When human bodies gather with a barrier against outsiders, a mutual focus of attention, and a shared mood, the participants entrain, rhythm catching rhythm in voice and gesture and glance, and the entrainment generates what Durkheim called collective effervescence. The effervescence pays out in four currencies: solidarity in the group, emotional energy in the individual, moral standards that make violation of the group feel like sacrilege, and sacred objects. A flag, a phrase, a face, a book absorbs the charge of the assembly and holds it, a battery for group feeling. The battery drains. Symbols keep their power only as long as fresh assemblies recharge them, and social life is a chain of such assemblies, each person carrying charge from the last gathering into the next. After September 11, Collins counted flags on American houses and watched national solidarity spike and then decay over roughly three months as the assemblies thinned. For Collins the macro world of nations and institutions has no separate existence. It is chains of situations, bodies in rooms, all the way up.
The men in the Cambridge street ran a complete interaction ritual. The beating gave the focus, the anthem gave the entrainment, the singing charged the flag inside each singer, and every man left with more emotional energy than he brought. Collins would add one refinement Anderson might have appreciated: rituals also forge their victims. The twenty-year-old with the smashed glasses walked away charged in the opposite direction, loaded with an anger he said exceeded anything he had felt, and that counter-charge ran a sixty-year chain of its own.
Here is the friction, and it is real. Imagined Communities stands as the great anti-Collins theory of nationalism. Anderson’s nation is sustained by print: by novels and newspapers consumed alone, by millions of readers imagining one another rather than meeting. His famous image makes the solitude explicit. The newspaper reader performs his morning ceremony, Anderson writes, “in the lair of the skull,” aware of unseen thousands performing it with him but sharing a room with none of them. Simultaneity in the theory is imagined, calendrical, a matter of shared clock time rather than shared breath. Collins’s framework issues a blunt verdict on this picture. Solitary media consumption is a weak ritual at best. No co-presence, no feedback, no entrainment, minimal charge. A community sustained only by private reading might resemble a mailing list. It might not field an army. If Anderson is right about how nations live, Collins’s micro-sociology has a hole in it. If Collins is right about where solidarity comes from, the print theory of nationalism explains the wrong layer.
The argument of this essay is that Anderson’s own evidence sides with Collins, and that Anderson half knew it. A ritual theory runs through his work from the first monograph to the last lecture, unnamed, doing the load-bearing work while print gets the credit. Read his best scenes with Collins’s checklist in hand and the pattern comes up page after page.
Start where Anderson started, in the dark in Java. Wayang is not reading. A performance begins in the evening and runs to dawn, a village or a neighborhood gathered on both sides of a lit screen, the dalang working the puppets and voicing every character for nine hours while the gamelan keeps the pulse underneath. Every Collins ingredient sits in the scene at maximum strength. Bodies packed together through the night. A boundary of language and repertoire that no outsider can cross, as Anderson the fieldworker learned by the years it cost him to cross it. One glowing focus of attention. A mood that the dalang tunes for hours, comedy against dread, and a rhythmic engine underneath entraining hundreds of nervous systems at once. Anderson read wayang as a political vocabulary, a stock of characters through which Javanese audiences judged refinement, power, and rule, and the reading holds. But a vocabulary is a set of symbols, and Collins’s question is where symbols get their voltage. Arjuna could serve Sukarno as a template because ten thousand nights of gamelan and shared darkness had charged Arjuna in Javanese bodies. Sukarno drew on a battery that assemblies had been filling for centuries. Anderson described the battery and skipped the charging.
Take the newspaper next, on Anderson’s own terms. His metaphor for the morning paper was already ritual: a mass ceremony, the secular heir of morning prayer, an image he borrowed from Hegel. Collins would point out what the borrowing conceals. Prayer, in the world the image comes from, was collective. The congregation stood and knelt and responded in one rhythm, and that rhythm, on Durkheim’s account, was where God’s felt reality came from. A man reading alone performs a ceremony from which the congregation has been subtracted, and Collins’s theory says the subtraction costs almost everything. But watch what newspapers did in the world rather than in the theory. They were read aloud in cafés to the illiterate. They were argued over in barbershops, warung, union halls, officers’ messes. Every edition scheduled ten thousand small assemblies by giving scattered talkers the same object of attention on the same morning. Print did not replace the gathering. Print synchronized the gatherings and stocked them. The genius of print capitalism, restated in Collins’s terms, was the mass production of mutual focus, the one ritual ingredient that had never scaled before. The other ingredients, bodies and barriers and mood, remained as local as they had been in the village, and there the charging went on.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier makes the cleanest test. Anderson placed it at the emotional center of nationalism, the empty tomb saturated with national meaning, and asked what kind of community could make such an object. Collins would ask a prior question: on which days does the tomb work? Stand at a cenotaph on an ordinary Tuesday and it is stone traffic passes. Stand there on the November morning when the crowd assembles, the veterans hold their line, the bugle sounds, and an entire country goes silent for two minutes, millions of bodies synchronized in the one act a nation can perform in perfect unison, doing nothing together at the same instant. That is the recharge. The tomb holds meaning between Novembers the way a flag holds it between wars, on charge banked by assembled bodies. Anderson explained what the tomb means. Collins explains when.
Then there is the passage where Anderson catches the engine in his hands and sets it down. Late in Imagined Communities, discussing patriotism, he pauses over the experience of singing national anthems, strangers voicing the same words to the same melody at the same moment, and coins a word for it: unisonance. The experience struck him as the physical realization of the imagined community, the one occasion when the community of strangers stops being imagined and becomes audible, each singer hearing the others inside his own voice. The passage runs a paragraph and leads nowhere in the book’s architecture. It is a stray observation in a theory of print. In Collins’s architecture it is the whole building. Entrainment of voices in co-presence is the paradigm interaction ritual, the strongest known generator of solidarity, the thing the Cambridge mob reached for the moment its violence needed sanctifying. Anderson touched the mechanism his own theory lacked, named it, marveled at it, and returned to his newspapers. The smuggled ritual theory surfaces in that paragraph and nowhere gets its name.
The pattern extends past the books into the life, which offers a private laboratory for Collins’s claims. The Cornell Paper was not produced by print circulation. Three scholars worked for months in closed rooms in an Ithaca winter, radio transcripts and clippings spread between them, sworn to confidentiality because Indonesian lives hung on it. Collins’s checklist again, at high intensity: co-presence, a hard barrier against outsiders, ferocious mutual focus, a shared mood of urgency and dread. Secrecy, in ritual terms, is barrier raised to maximum, and it charges whatever sits inside the circle. The document that emerged carried that charge for decades, a sacred object of the field, photocopied and passed hand to hand in Indonesia like contraband scripture, which in Collins’s terms is what it was. And the Cornell seminar around Anderson ran as a textbook ritual chain. The weekly assembly, the master presiding, the initiates required to attack the master’s book to his face, the charge each student carried out of the room into a career. Ask his students what they took from him and they describe an energy, which is Collins’s own unit of account.
The Jakarta hall in 1999 closes the chain. For twenty-seven years the banned pages had circulated in Indonesia as photocopies, symbols holding charge between rituals, batteries passed among students who gathered in private to read them, and the gathering, ritually speaking, did as much as the reading. Then the exile walked onto the stage, the hall packed past capacity, every eye on one man, one mood in the room, and spoke to them in their language. Print had carried his name across the ban. Only the assembly could do what happened next, and everyone who was there talks about the room, the crowd, the feeling, before they talk about the argument. The lecture then went out in print and seeded the next round of gatherings. Ritual charges the symbol, print carries the symbol, the next assembly recharges it. That circuit, run for two centuries at the scale of millions, is a nation.
Honesty requires the concession that saves Anderson. Collins explains voltage and cannot explain perimeter. Rituals generate intense solidarity in rooms, and nothing in the micro-sociology says why the chain of rooms stops at the Rhine or the Timor Sea, why the strangers a Frenchman is prepared to die among number sixty million and speak French. Anderson explains the perimeter. Print capitalism drew the outer boundary of who could share a focus object, which dialects got welded into one reading public, which populations came to see themselves inside one calendar and one map. Print set the size of the congregation. Assembly supplied the heat. Extension without intensity gives a postal district. Intensity without extension gives a village. The nation required both, and each theorist held one half while writing as if he held the whole.
So the correction to Imagined Communities is friendly and structural. The nation is an interaction ritual chain running on mass-produced focus objects, imagined in the intervals and embodied at the nodes, and the imagining draws down charge that only bodies in rooms put in. Anderson’s material knew this even where his theory declined to. His career began in a street where singing sanctified a beating, passed through nine-hour nights in front of a lit screen, and ended in front of assembled Indonesians who had waited twenty-seven years to be in a room with him. When he died among them, the mourning was not conducted by newspaper. People gathered, in Jakarta and Ithaca and Bangkok, and did what gathered people do for their dead. The man who taught everyone that nations are imagined spent his life, scene by scene, demonstrating where the imagination gets its power. You have to stand together to sing.
The Scholarship Boy’s Portfolio: Benedict Anderson in Bourdieu’s Mirror
Two boys, born six years apart at opposite ends of the world, learned the same trick. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), son of a postman turned café keeper in a Béarn village where people spoke Gascon, won his way to the École Normale Supérieure and mastered the language of the Parisian elite more completely than the elite’s own children. Benedict Anderson, son of a customs official, born in China, parked in California, raised partly in Ireland, took a scholarship to Eton and beat the sons of the empire at Latin and Greek, the code their class had invented to mark itself. Bourdieu turned his double vision into a sociology: the outsider inside sees the game as a game, because nothing in his body lets him mistake it for nature. He called his condition a cleft habitus and said it hurt and paid. Anderson never used the term. He lived it, and he spent a career doing to nations what Bourdieu did to French taste, showing the natural to be built. What neither man could fully do is the thing this essay attempts: turn the instrument on Anderson.
The toolkit in brief. Bourdieu pictures social life as a set of fields, each a game with its own stakes, its own currency, its own rules for who counts. Players hold capital in several forms: money, credentials, languages, manners, connections, reputation. Capital converts across fields at varying exchange rates, and the deepest strategies are conversions, moving holdings from a market where they are cheap to one where they are dear. Every field euphemizes its interests; the academic field runs on the belief, sincere and useful at once, that its players seek truth rather than position, and Bourdieu’s wager was that the two pursuits are the same actions described at different altitudes. In the fields of art and scholarship, he added, the ordinary economy runs backward. He described the artistic field as “the economic world reversed”: short-run sacrifice buys long-run standing, and he who loses wins.
Now run Anderson’s career through the machine.
His first holding was classical philology, the purest form of incorporated capital the British elite could issue: begun at nine, compounded daily for a decade, impossible to buy late or fast. By 1957 that asset was depreciating in its home market. The empire that had used Greek verse composition to sort its administrators was liquidating, and a classics first from King’s pointed toward schoolmastering or the civil service of a shrinking state. Anderson executed, half by accident, the conversion of his life. He carried the philological habitus, the trained ear for register and rank inside a sentence, the patience for grammars, across the Atlantic into a field that was almost brand new.
American area studies in 1958 was a bull market. The Cold War state and the Ford Foundation were pouring money into knowledge of Asia; the National Defense Education Act had just made exotic languages a national security expenditure; and the field was so young that a talented entrant faced no incumbents. George Kahin’s Cornell program held near-monopoly authority over the study of Indonesia and needed exactly what Anderson carried: a linguistic engine that could be pointed at Indonesian and Javanese and run for years without seizing. The Eton and Cambridge titles paid a premium on arrival, since mid-century American academia priced British polish above par. Within a decade the depreciating classical portfolio had been converted into commanding stock in a growth field. None of this was cynical, and that is Bourdieu’s point, the one his readers keep missing. The player’s investment in the game, the illusio, is sincere. Anderson loved the languages. The love and the strategy were one motion.
The Cornell Paper is where the reversed economy shows its logic. In January 1966 Anderson held a junior scholar’s standard ambitions and a field site that his career required. The paper he wrote with Ruth McVey attacked the founding narrative of the regime that controlled access to that site, and it crossed a second orthodoxy at home, the Cold War political science that served the American state and had little appetite for hearing that Washington’s new ally had built its throne on scapegoats and mass graves. The heresy was priced quickly. Indonesia banned him in 1972, severing a fieldwork scholar from his field at thirty-five, a sanction that in the normal economy reads as ruin.
In the reversed economy it was the purchase of a lifetime. The ban certified the one quality the scholarly field values above productivity: disinterestedness. Here was proof, stamped by a dictatorship, that Anderson’s sentences obeyed no career logic, since they had cost him the dearest asset he held. Symbolic capital, in Bourdieu’s account, is capital whose origin in interest has been successfully forgotten, and nothing launders interest like visible sacrifice. For twenty-seven years Anderson held a credential no rival could acquire without matching the payment: the banished witness, the man Suharto feared. When Imagined Communities appeared, its authority arrived pre-charged. Losing Indonesia won him the world.
The family completes the portfolio. Perry Anderson had built, at New Left Review and its imprint Verso, one of the few consecrating apparatuses the Anglophone left possessed, a machine for deciding which books counted. The brothers had divided the intellectual field between them with the neatness of a cartel that never needed a meeting: Perry took Europe, theory, the long structural view; Benedict took Asia, the vernacular, the archive of the particular. Proximate positions compete and adjacent ones reinforce, and the Anderson brothers were adjacent everywhere and proximate nowhere. Imagined Communities grew out of arguments inside the family firm, above all the debate with Tom Nairn (1932-2023) over nationalism running through the Review, and it was published by Verso, refereed and amplified by the very apparatus his brother had spent two decades building. The book’s ideas earned their standing. The distribution network that carried them was social capital of the oldest kind, a brother.
The book’s timing was a market read of genius, conscious or not. It appeared in 1983, as Marxism’s intellectual credit collapsed, offering the post-Marxist left a way to keep its subject and change its tools: nationalism explained through print, time, and imagination rather than class, materialist enough to feel continuous, culturalist enough to feel new. Fields reward the position-taking that resolves the field’s current crisis, and Anderson’s resolved the biggest one on the left’s board.
So far the analysis flatters its subject; sacrifice, conversion, timing, all can be read as virtue rewarded. The frame earns its keep at the next turn.
Consider the entry fee Anderson set for his field. A scholar earned the right to speak about a country, in his repeated formulation, by years inside its languages, and the man who theorized from English alone was the frog under the coconut shell. Read as morality, the demand is austere and self-denying. Read as field strategy, it is a barrier to entry, and a nearly perfect one. Language capital of the kind Anderson held cannot be bought, delegated, or acquired in less than years; it shelters early investors absolutely; and every rise in the requirement raised the value of his own holdings while thinning future competition. The fast-moving rivals it excluded, the rational-choice modelers and grand theorists colonizing political science, were exactly the players whose capital threatened his. Bourdieu’s rule holds without exception: the qualities a field’s incumbents praise as virtue are the qualities the incumbents happen to possess, and the praise is sincere, which is what makes it work. Anderson moralized his moat. The stamps, the puppets, the cemetery inscriptions did parallel work as distinction, marking a sensibility that theory-fashion could neither anticipate nor imitate, the connoisseur’s refusal of the game that scores inside the game.
And then the field played its joke on him. Of everything Anderson produced, the item that conquered the academy was the one commodity in his shop that required no languages at all. “Imagined community” travels friction-free. A sociologist of online fandom, a marketing scholar, a literary theorist who has never opened a grammar can cite it, apply it, build a career on it, and tens of thousands have. The concept he minted from decades of Javanese and Thai and Tagalog became the monoglot’s favorite tool, the coconut shell’s best-loved decoration. His last decades read, in this light, as boundary-work by a man watching his product circulate stripped of its entry fee: the corrections, the complaints about promiscuous use of the phrase, the memoir written to re-attach the price tag, to insist that the book had come from somewhere, from languages and years and a ban. The field consecrated him on terms opposite to his teaching, and he spent his emeritus years contesting the terms of his own consecration.
Bourdieu would recognize every move, having made most of them himself, the provincial who conquered Paris and then wrote Homo Academicus to expose the game he had won. And Bourdieu supplies the caution the essay owes its subject. Field analysis explains positions and cannot price stakes. The Cornell Paper was heresy that purchased consecration, and it was also three people in a room trying to establish who organized a massacre, weighing publication against the lives of named friends. The half million dead were not chips. Nor was the moat merely a moat. The era’s most consequential monoglots sat in the Pentagon, quantifying a country none of them could speak to, and Vietnam is what their expertise built. The language requirement protected Anderson’s position, and it also guarded a truth with a body count: knowledge of other people’s countries produced without their languages tends to be wrong, and wrong at scale kills. Bourdieu never claimed that interest falsifies belief. His claim was harder, that the two are inseparable, that a man defends the truth and his position in one gesture and cannot, from inside, tell the gestures apart. Anderson’s whole method rested on the same insight applied to nations. It applies to scholarship boys, both of them, all the way down.
The Tribe and the Newspaper: Anderson, Mearsheimer, and the Question of What Nations Are Made Of
In the winter of 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and in February 1979 China invaded Vietnam to punish it. Three states ruled by communist parties, three governments professing an ideology that named the workers of the world as the real community, went to war along national lines, and Benedict Anderson opened Imagined Communities with the spectacle. The wars were the prompt for the book. Marxism had predicted nationalism’s death for a century and now Marxist armies were killing each other under national flags, and Anderson drew the conclusion his tradition had refused: nationalism was the strongest political force alive, and the left had built its house without studying the ground.
Twenty-five years later an American realist watched a different universalism repeat the experiment. The United States after 1989 set out to remake the world in liberalism’s image, wars included, on the premise that people everywhere were rights-bearing individuals waiting for delivery from their circumstances. John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947), West Point graduate, Air Force officer, then for four decades the University of Chicago’s resident scourge of liberal foreign policy, watched the project break on Iraq and Afghanistan, where the deliverees turned out to be members of nations, sects, and tribes that fought the deliverance. The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018) is his autopsy, and its deepest chapter is anthropology rather than strategy. “We are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives,” he writes. Individualism is secondary. People are born into groups that shape their identities before reason wakes, they develop fierce attachments to those groups, and they sometimes die for them. Of the three sources of human preferences, innate sentiment, socialization, and reason, reason ranks last. Survival drives the arrangement: the individual lives through the group that protects him, so loyalty to the group is not a sentiment layered over self-interest. It is self-interest, in the only form the species has ever reliably practiced. Nationalism, on this account, is the political expression of standing human equipment, and liberalism keeps losing to it because a theory of atoms keeps meeting a world of tribes.
So the two men agree on the phenomenon and its power, and each earned the agreement the same way, watching a universalist creed he knew from inside get its teeth broken. They even agree on the boundary. Anderson’s definition builds it in: the nation is imagined as limited, and no nation dreams of becoming “coterminous with mankind.” The boundedness that liberal universalism treats as a defect to be overcome, both men treat as constitutive. Almost nobody has put them in one room, because the disciplines keep them apart, constructivist Southeast Asianists in one wing, realists in another. Put them in the room and the fight starts immediately, and it is a fight worth having, because the question under it is what nations are made of.
Mearsheimer’s nation is old. The tribe scaled up. Humans have lived in survival groups since before they were fully human, the disposition to bond with insiders and fear outsiders is written in the body, and the nation is the form the disposition takes when the group grows to millions and acquires a state. Anderson’s nation is young. It has a birth certificate, late eighteenth century, and a list of preconditions: print capitalism to weld dialects into reading publics, the novel and the newspaper to teach millions the experience of moving together through calendar time, the decay of sacred languages and divine kingship to clear the ground. Before those conditions, no nations, whatever groups there were. The disagreement is total on its face. One theory says the fuel is ancient. The other says the vessel is modern. The question Anderson’s admirers should sit with, because it is the harder one for them, is this: what if Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right?
Grant it, and watch what it explains that Anderson cannot. The voltage, first. Anderson’s machinery builds communities of shared reading and shared time, but shared reading is cheap. Print capitalism also built the community of stamp collectors, the readers of detective fiction, the subscribers to gardening weeklies, publics in every formal respect resembling his national one, simultaneous, anonymous, bounded by language, and no philatelist has ever charged a machine gun for the community of collectors. Something separates the nation from every other print community, and Anderson knew it, which is why his book keeps reaching past print toward kinship, fatality, and death. Mearsheimer supplies what the reaching gropes for. The nation commands sacrifice because it has captured the survival circuitry, the ancient wiring that binds the individual to the group that protects him, and no hobby public ever plugs into that socket. Second, the recurrence. Anderson’s theory ties the nation to a media environment, and media environments keep changing. Print gave way to radio, radio to television, television to a networked medium that shreds shared attention into fragments, and the nation has survived every transition, including the current one that was supposed to dissolve borders into a global conversation. A form tied to its founding technology should weaken when the technology goes. Standing equipment does not. Third, the record of failed obituaries. Marxists predicted nationalism’s death, then liberals did, and Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains the serial failure in one sentence: both creeds theorized man as something he has never been, a reasoning atom, and the group keeps reasserting itself because the group is what man is.
Anderson’s life, read through this anthropology, confirms rather than refutes it, which stings. Here was the most deracinated of scholars, the perpetual crosser, Irish passport, Chinese birthplace, American employer, a man who chose his attachments with a freedom almost no one has. And what did the freedom produce? Serial embeddedness. He left the tribes of his birth and was adopted by others, the Cornell program with its initiations and its house journal, and above all Indonesia, which banned him like a traitor, readmitted him like a son, named him Om Ben, and took his ashes into its sea. The great individualist of the passport queue never spent a season outside a group. If reason were the master faculty, Anderson is where it should have shown itself, and what his reason chose, every time, was another belonging. Mearsheimer’s chapter could enter him as Exhibit A: even the exception transfers; no one exits.
That is the case for the prosecution, and it is strong. Now the defense, because Mearsheimer’s anthropology, granted in full, stops one step short of everything Anderson explains.
Groupness underdetermines the group. Say the body demands belonging and the group secures survival: nothing in that wiring names the nation as the beneficiary. The family satisfies it. The clan, the village, the sect, the guild, the dynasty’s subjects, the umma, the class, all satisfy it, and for most of human history they did, while the nation did not exist as a claimant. A Javanese man in 1700 was a Muslim, a subject of Mataram, a member of a village and a lineage, and the survival circuitry ran through all of it without once producing an Indonesian. Two centuries later his descendants died for Indonesia, a community assembled out of three hundred ethnic groups, seven hundred languages, and a colonial bookkeeping unit, in the name of a national language that in 1900 was the mother tongue of almost no one. The wiring did not change between 1700 and 1945. The channels changed, and the channels are Anderson’s subject: the presses, the schools, the maps, the census categories, the administrative pilgrimages that took the loyalty the body always offers and redirected it toward a container that had to be built first. Mearsheimer explains why the loyalty exists and cannot say why it landed there. His anthropology predicts that men will die for their group and goes silent when the groups nest and conflict, when Java competes with Islam competes with Indonesia for the same man’s death. Deciding that competition is what Anderson’s machinery does all day.
The immigrant nations press the point. A strictly tribal anthropology, read as blood, predicts that national boundaries track descent. Argentina and the United States built nations out of arriving strangers at industrial scale, absorbing Sicilians and Poles and Lebanese into national communities their grandparents had never imagined, and the solvent was Anderson’s, language and print and schooling, the manufactured memory of a shared past most members’ ancestors did not share. Mearsheimer can answer that the group redefined its membership rules, which is true and concedes the case: rules that can be redefined by newspapers and naturalization ceremonies are conventions riding on the wiring, and the conventions are where the action is.
Then there is the fault line neither man can paper over, the relation of nationalism to hatred. Anderson built a firewall between them. Nationalism, he argued, thinks in historical destinies, racism in eternal contaminations, and he traced racism’s pedigree to class ideologies of breeding rather than to the nation. His nation is defined by what it loves. Mearsheimer’s anthropology tilts the other way without saying so: if the group bond is survival equipment, then fear of the outside is not a corruption of the bond. It is the bond’s other face, selected by the same dangers, and the firewall between loving the inside and dreading the outside is a hope rather than a structure. The twentieth century’s ledger lets both men cite it. Civic nations absorbed millions peaceably, as Anderson’s firewall predicts. Nation-building also ran on expulsion and massacre often enough, from Anatolia to Punjab to the Drina, to suggest the firewall fails exactly when the survival circuitry believes what it was built to believe, that the neighboring group is a threat. Anderson watched the largest massacre of his lifetime performed by his adopted country on its own citizens, neighbors killing neighbors sorted by a category, and his framework filed it under the politics of the army rather than the anthropology of the group. A Mearsheimerian reading of 1965 is grimmer and simpler: the machinery of belonging, pointed inward.
Death divides them last. Mearsheimer’s man dies for the nation because the nation is the survival vehicle and sometimes the vehicle demands a payment; the logic is protective, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is group memory doing maintenance for the next war. Anderson’s man dies for the nation because the nation answers death, converting his single extinction into a place in the procession of the dead and the unborn; the logic is religious, and the tomb is a theology in stone. Danger against oblivion. The soldier’s letters home have always contained both, and neither theorist can evict the other from that archive.
So render the verdict the essay promised. If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, and the record of failed obituaries argues it is, Anderson survives, demoted and deepened at once. Demoted, because Imagined Communities becomes the history of one container rather than the theory of the force, a magnificent account of how the ancient loyalty was rerouted into its modern channel. Deepened, because the observation his critics found softest, that nations are loved, gains a floor under it: the love is not a print effect, it is the oldest equipment the species owns, which is why the internet has not dissolved it and the next medium will not either. And Mearsheimer, granted his anthropology, still needs Anderson the day he asks why the equipment serves Indonesia rather than Java, France rather than Christendom, the nation rather than the thousand other groups on offer. The body brings the loyalty. History appoints the recipient. One man studied the demand and the other studied the supply, and the discipline that keeps them in separate wings has spent forty years discussing halves.
