Reserve Text: Chapter 10: "Census, Map, Museum" from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1989.

Preface to the Second Edition

Who would have thought that the storm blows harder the farther it leaves Paradise behind?
The armed conflicts of 1978-79 in Indochina, which provided the immediate occasion for the original text of Imagined Communities, seem already, a mere twelve years later, to belong to another era, Then I was haunted by the prospect of further full-scale wars between the socialist states", Now half these states have joined the debris at the Angel's feet, and the rest are fearful of soon following
them, The wars that the survivors face are civil wars, The likelihood is strong that by the opening of the new millennium little will remain of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics except, , , republics,
Should all this have somehow been foreseen? In 1983 I wrote that the Soviet Union was 'as much the legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century internationalist order,' But, having traced the nationalist explosions that destroyed the vast polyglot and polyethnic realms which were ruled from Vienna, London, Constantinople, Paris and Madrid, I could not see that the train was laid at least as far as Moscow, It is melancholy consolation to observe that history seems to be bearing out the 'logic' of Imagined Communities better than its author managed to do.

It is not only the world that has changed its face over the past

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twelve years. The study of nationalism too has been startlingly transformed -in method, scale, sophistication, and sheer quantity. In the English language alone, J .A. Armstrong's Nations Before Nationalism (1982), John Breuilly's Nationalism and the State (1982), Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism (1983), Miroslav Hroch's Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (1985), Anthony Smith's The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), P. Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), and Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1788 (1990) -to name only a few of the key texts -have, by their historical reach and theoretical power, made largely obsolete the traditional literature on the subject. In part out of these works has developed an extraordinary proliferation of historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, feminist, and other studies linking the objects of these fields of enquiry to nationalism and nation.1

To adapt Imagined Communities to the demands of these vast changes in the world and in the text is a task beyond my present means. It seemed better, therefore, to leave it largely as an 'unrestored' period piece, with its own characteristic style, silhouette, and mood. Two things give me comfort. On the one hand, the full final outcome of developments in the old socialist world remain shrouded in the obscurity ahead. On the other hand, the idiosyncratic method and preoccupations of Imagined Communities seem to me still on the margins of the newer scholarship on nationalism -in that sense, at least, not fully superseded.

What I have tried to do, in the present edition, is simply to correct errors of fact, conception, and interpretation which I should have avoided in preparing the original version. These corrections -in the spirit of1983, as it were -involve some alterations of the first edition, as well as two new chapters, which basically have the character of discrete appendices.

In the main text, I discovered two serious errors of translation, at least one unfulfilled promise, and one misleading emphasis. Unable to read Spanish in 1983, I thoughtlessly relied on Leon Ma. Guerrero's English translation of Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, although earlier

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1. Hobsbawm has had the courage to conclude from this scholarly explosion that the age of nationalism is near its end: Minerva's owl flies at dusk.

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translations were available. It was only in 1990 that I discovered how fascinatingly corrupt Guerrero's version was. For a long, important quotation from Otto Bauer's Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie I lazily relied on Oscar Jaszi's translation. More recent consultation of the German original has shown me how far Jaszi's political predilections tinted his citations. In at least two passages I had faithlessly promised to explain why Brazilian nationalism developed so late and so idiosyncratically by comparison with those of other Latin American countries. The present text attempts to fulfil the broken pledge.

It had been part of my original plan to stress the New World origins of nationalism. My feeling had been that an unselfconscious provincialism had long skewed and distorted theorizing on the subject. European scholars, accustomed to the conceit that everything important in the modern world originated in Europe, too easily took 'second generation' ethnolinguistic nationalisms (Hungarian, Czech, Greek, Polish, etc.) as the starting point in their modelling, no matter whether they were 'for' or 'against' nationalism. I was startled to discover, in many of the notices of Imagined Communities, that this Eurocentric provincialism remained quite undisturbed, and that the crucial chapter on the originating Americas was largely ignored. Unfortunately, I have found no better 'instant' solution to this problem than to retitle Chapter 4 as 'Creole Pioneers.'

The two 'appendices' try to correct serious theoretical flaws in the first edition.2 A number of friendly critics had suggested that Chapter 7 ('The Last Wave') oversimplified the process whereby early 'Third World' nationalisms were modelled. Furthermore the chapter did not seriously address the question of the role of the local colonial state, rather than the metropole, in styling these nationalisms. At the same time, I became uneasily aware that what I had believed to be a significantly new contribution to thinking about nationalism

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2. The first appendix originated in a paper prepared for a conference held in Karachi in January 1989, sponsored by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University. A sketch for the second appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of June 13, 1986, under the rubric 'Narrating the Nation.'

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changing apprehensions of time -patently lacked its necessary coordinate: changing apprehensions of space. A brilliant doctoral thesis by Thongchai Winichakul, a young Thai historian, stimulated me to think about mapping's contribution to the nationalist imagination.

'Census, Map, Museum' therefore analyses the way in which, quite unconsciously, the nineteenth-century colonial state (and policies that its mindset encouraged) dialectically engendered the grammar of the nationalisms that eventually arose to combat it. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that the state imagined its local adversaries, as in an ominous prophetic dream, well before they came into historical existence. To the forming of this imagining, the census's abstract quantification/ serialization of persons, the map's eventual logoization of political space, and the museum's 'ecumenical,' profane genealogizing made interlinked contributions.

The origin of the second 'appendix' was the humiliating recognition that in 1983 I had quoted Renan without the slightest understanding of what he had actually said: I had taken as something easily ironical what was in fact utterly bizarre. The humiliation also forced me to realize that I had offered no intelligible explanation of exactly how, and why, new-emerging nations imagined themselves antique. What appeared in most of the scholarly writings as Machiavellian hocuspocus, or as bourgeois fantasy, or as disinterred historical truth, struck me now as deeper and more interesting. Supposing 'antiquity' were, at a certain historical juncture, the necessary consequence' of 'novelty?' If nationalism was, as I supposed it, the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness, should not awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create
its own narrative? Seen from this perspective, the atavistic fantasizing characteristic of most nationalist thought after the 1820s appears 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.

Aside from any theoretical merits or demerits the two 'appendices' may prove to have, each has its own more everyday limitations. The data for 'Census, Map, Museum' are drawn wholly from Southeast Asia. In some ways this region offers splendid opportunities for

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comparative theorizing since it comprises areas formerly colonized by almost all the great imperial powers (England, France, Holland, Portugal, Spain and the United States) as well as uncolonized Siam. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether my analysis, even if plausible for this region, can be convincingly applied around the globe. In the second appendix, the sketchy empirical material relates almost exclusively to Western Europe and the New World, regions on which my knowledge is quite superficial. But the focus had to be there since it was in these zones that the amnesias of nationalism were first voiced over.

Benedict Anderson
February 1991