5 ms·

The article starts by mentioning Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). I wonder

• barry-cotter 8y ago
  Be grateful you can’t remember Imagined Communities. It conflates nations, nationalism and the nation state in an attempt to argue that nationalism postdates the American Revolution. It’s possibly the second worst widely read book in the humanities. Other scholars wrote more intelligently and with far greater insight on the nation and its relation to the state, before and after Anderson. Before, Ernest Gellner, after, Azar Gat. https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/tag/imagined-communities/ https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/tag/imagined-communities/ > Non-Europeans have no agency or originality in creating their own national identities. They were blank slates upon which European colonials drew something. > Luckily for me, I don’t come into reading Imagined Communities totally ignorant of other viewpoints. I’ve read Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, which makes the case that mainland Southeast Asia resembled Europe in the coalescence of distinct proto-national identities one to two thousand years ago. > The same is true to the north. China was arguably a nation-empire long before Europeans arrived. Though the Chinese peasantry spoke different dialects, it was united by a ruling class with a sense of coherency. The modern Japanese nation-state state is modeled on Western nation-states, in particular, Prussia. It strikes as bizarre to hold that this unique and isolated nation didn’t exist in the imagination of Japanese when the Europeans first arrived. http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/ http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/ > Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice technical and organizational innovations, they continually change how they employ resources, especially human resources. Their occupational structures change significantly in a generation at most, and often more quickly, so no one can expect to follow in the family profession. (A hundred years ago, there were no system administrators, but there were carriage-drivers.) In Agraria, training could be left to families or guilds, be largely tacit and physical and tied up with the rituals and social context of the trade, and different parts of the same society could be almost unintelligible to each other, provided only they could go through the customary haggling or tithing. None of this will do in an industrial, changing society, in which training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free symbols (even manual work increasingly becomes controlling a machine, which must be, as we say, read); it must in short take on the characteristics formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria, and moreover this training must be received by the entire economically effective population. (A rough definition of an industrial society might be: one where you can learn a trade from books, a society of reference manuals.) So far, such training, on such a scale, has always needed at least elementary literacy, and it hasn't been reliably provided by any institutions weaker and smaller than states. Moreover, the teachers employed by this system must themselves be trained in the same High Culture, and so on, quickly escalating to the point where the culture needs an entire university system, at the least, to be self-sustaining. States become the protectors of High Cultures, of "idioms"; nationalism is the demand that each state succor and contain one and only one nation, one idiom.
  • jeffreyrogers 8y ago
    > It’s possibly the second worst widely read book in the humanities. Alright, I've got to ask: what's the worst widely read book in the humanities?
    • barry-cotter 8y ago
      Orientalism, Edward Saïd, a book riddled with factual errors whose Eurocentrism is as complete as that he criticises but of the opposite valence.