Benedict Anderson Quotes
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No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ashamed if his or her state or government commits crimes including those against their fellow citizens.
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No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers.
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This fraternity... makes it possible... for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.
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I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, the nation is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.
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It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of Normans (Plantagenets), Welsh (Tudors), Scots (Stuarts), Dutch (House of Orange) and Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne. No one much cared until the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I. House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schönbrunn or House of Versailes.
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What the eye is to the lover — that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue — is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.
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The ideal way to start interesting research, at least in my view, is to depart from a problem or question to which you do not know the answer.
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What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which — as well as against which — it came into being.
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I began to realize something fundamental about field-work: that it is useless to concentrate exclusively on one's 'research project.' One has to be endlessly curious about everything, sharpen one's eyes and ears, and take notes about everything. The experience of strangeness makes all your senses more sensitive than normal, and your attachment to comparison grows deeper. This is why fieldwork is also so useful when you return home. You will have developed habits of observation and comparison that encourage or force you to start noticing that your own culture is just as strange.
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It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.
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In the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it.
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All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives… The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.
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Already in the 1550s, 10% of Lisbon’s population were slaves; by 1800 there were close to a million slaves among the 2,500,000 or so inhabitants of Portugal’s Brazil.
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It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, 'Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.
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Many people have complained that Imagined Communities is a difficult book and especially difficult to translate. The accusation is partly true. But a great deal of the difficulty lies not in the realm of ideas, but in its original polemical stance and its intended audience: the UK intelligentsia. This is why the book contains so many quotations from and allusions to, English poetry, essays, histories, legends, etc., that do not have to be explained to English readers, but which are likely to be unfamiliar to others.