Extraordinary book on nationalism, and how we create these images of who we are.

(I took a graduate course in Cultural Anthropology on ethnicity and nationalism, where we read a tremendous amount of the current academic thinking on related topics, and I found nearly all of it appallingly bad: in a world all their own, little touch with reality, and also a ridiculous fog index in the writing. There were a few gems in there, though, and this was the standout, by far. And more than a decade later, it has held up. This book has stuck with me.) ( )

Coming from the perspective of someone who'd read post-Anderson stuff before this book, I still understood why it was groundbreaking, I think, but it didn't absolutely knock my socks off.

Anderson is a great treatment of nationalism and I agreed with a lot of what he had to say; sometimes he was a little vague in ways that helped his arguments, but overall it's very much worth reading. Of course, if you're at all interested in nationalism, you've probably either already read this book or are going to read it regardless of what this review says. ( )

Vad är det som får människor att älska sin nation och dö för den, vad får dem att hata och döda i dess namn? Hur kan man uppleva gemenskap i en sådan abstraktion som nationen faktiskt utgör? (Från baksidan)

This book was something of a difficult read. Anderson does his best, though-- he's actually quite good at clearly separating and enumerating multiple points. There's some great ideas in here, too, about what constitutes a nation, where nations came from, what cultural artifacts constitute a nation, and so on; he attributes nations to the rise of what he calls "print capitalism" as well as the collapse of a universal Catholic Church, among other things. I suppose what makes it inaccessible at times is the supporting data, which often derives from the South Pacific and other areas where I lack historical context and knowledge. Anderson has great ideas, but I feel like they get lost within the book-- discussing it with others and drawing these ideas out is highly recommended. Or, you can just read the chapter of Jonathan Culler's The Literary in Theory where he essentially summarizes the whole book for you. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book was the food for thought it provides about what comes after the nation-- Anderson doesn't really discuss this at all, but you can't help thinking about it and wondering...

This little book is one of the most important works of historical sociology written in the late twentieth century. Anderson defines the nation as an imagined community built by capitalism on the basis of territory in the modern world. He shows how language, culture, capitalism, and the use of printing intersect and interact to create these imagined communities in the modern world. A triumph of theory-building. ( )