Trivedi, 1/28, Nationalism

On Thursday, January 29th, we talked more about nationalism in class. We began by finishing up discussing Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities from the previous class. In regard to Anderson, we talked mostly about his chapter on "Census, Map and Musuem." These three things are related in that they all serve to objectify a population. Census categories reflect the ways in which the census-makers already conceive of a certain group of people. A mueseum can show a nation's power over its past -- the power of imperialism, colonialism and economic domination over certain groups. We show in our musuems that which we wish to preserve through memory, but omit that which we wish to forget. Moving on from this chapter, we then discussed "Memory and Forgetting." The main ideas of this chapter were that, in creating a sense of a national identity, we suppress memories while we remember others that favor the ways in which we want to be viewed as a nation (much like the way in which musuems favor certain artifacts as opposed to others). We see how nationalism attempts to make itself seem like a natural process by omitting certain details and events in its collectively remembered history.

We then moved on to discuss Partha Chatterjee, who writes against colonial history -- specifically in India. Chatterjee agrees with many of Anderson's points, but has one major problem with the fact that Anderson assumes the model for nationalism was created solely by western European nations (and Russia) when in fact, the process of nation-creation may be the same for certain nations, but many nations capitalize on the differences from that original model. Furthermore, Chatterjee expresses that nationalism is not solely the effect of being dominated but a process of self-creation. We also discussed Chatterjee's theory of Anti-Colonial Nationalism: dividing social institutions into two domains, spiritual and material.

After discussing Chatterjee, we moved on to talk about Thongchai Winichakul. Winichakul was a student of Anderson's and his biggest contribution to the debate on nationalism stems from his creation of the idea of a geo-body. He studies what is lost in a nation through the processes of mapping, naming, dividing and categorizing a culture/population into a nation. In addition, he talked about the ways in which a geographic piece of land is objectified and represented and how that objectification then contributes to the formation of a nation. We concluded class with the reflection that, by mapping, dividing and naming a nation, the population of that nation is then able to conceptualize their society as bounded and sovereign, and in turn, view themselves as an independent entity.