Chief among Imagined Communities’s many contributions is its attention to the culture of symbols, creative imagery and the role of ‘invented traditions’ as a meta-narrative of the nation. The nation then, as Anderson would have it, is not just a story that people tell themselves about themselves, but a story that evolved upon subjection to the forces of capitalism and cultural selection. Anderson’s explanation of nationalism is resolutely modernist in that it diverges from the ‘primodialist paradigm’ of nationalism with rigid ‘racial’ categories where “popular attachments, kinship and cultural bonds” are animated to explain why “millions are prepared to lay down their lives for their ‘nation’” (Smith 2000, p. 2; see also Smith 1998; 2001). Instead, Anderson resolves the question of
“popular attachment, kinship and cultural bonds” by advancing the social construction, even romanticization, of the community. The national community is thus imagined not as a specific network of individuals connected to each other, the way traditional cultures did in a particularistic manner, but as umbilical cords from individuals to a larger abstract community where everyone was imagined as members in a “deep, horizontal comradeship” (1991, p. 7). Thus unlike Smith’s primodialist nation where citizens laid down their lives for their ethnie or some ontological essence, Anderson’s nation saw people willing to do so for the fraternity and comradeship of this imagined community, hence offering contemporary scholars a useful framework for today’s multicultural societies.
It is thus deliciously ironic that such an important exposition on nationalism in Southeast Asia should be confronted with the simple yet fundamental question: whose imagined community? The most compelling critique of Imagined Communities came from Partha Chatterjee (1986; 1991) whose question reminds us of historical and cultural specificity between the European and Asian experience. Chatterjee takes issue with Anderson’s conception of nationalism as one that exists in ‘modular’ forms, whereby its basic creeds and doctrines may be exported from Europe and resurrected unproblematically in post-colonial societies. Chatterjee’s criticism was devastating: Anderson’s explanation of nationalism came from a totalizing and universal history of the modern world, and failed to consider the dynamics and subjectivities of anti-colonial nationalisms (see also Culler and Cheah 2003).
Anderson’s response to such post-colonial critique was to add the chapter — “Census, Map, Museum” — in the 1991 edition. In so many ways, it is this chapter that elevated Imagined Communities from being a merely good book to a great book. One can do no better than let Anderson (1991, p. 163) speak for himself as he begins the new chapter: