Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 - December 13, 2015) is a political scientist and historian, well known for his 1983 Imagined Communities book, exploring the origins of nationalism. Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & amp; Asian Studies at Cornell University. A polyglot with an interest in Southeast Asia, his work on the Cornell Paper which uncovered the official story of the September 30th Movement of Indonesia and the 1965-66 anti-Communist purge led to his expulsion from the country. He is the brother of historian Perry Anderson (born 1938).
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Biography
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Anderson was born on August 26, 1936, in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. His father, James Carew O'Gorman Anderson, is an official with Chinese Maritime Customs. The family came from the Anderson Ardbrake family, Bothriphnie, Scotland, who settled in Ireland in the early 1700s.
A maternal grandfather of Trevor Bigham's is the Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, 1914-1931. One of Benedict's grandparents, Lady Frances O'Gorman, is a member of the Mac Gorma Gaelic clan in County Clare and is the daughter of Irish House Regulations MP Major Purcell O'Gorman. Major Purcell O'Gorman in turn was the son of Nicholas Purcell O'Gorman who had been involved with the Association of the Republic of Ireland in 1798 Rising, then became Secretary of the Catholic Association in the 1820s. Benedict Anderson took his middle name from Major Purcell O'Gorman's cousin, Richard O'Gorman, who was one of the leaders of the Young Irish Rebellion of 1848.
California California, Ireland and Cambridge
The Andersons moved to California in 1941 to avoid the Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War and then to Ireland in 1945. He studied at Eton College, where he won a Newcastle Scholarship, and went on to attend King's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, he became anti-imperialist during the Suez Crisis, which affected his later work as a Marxist and anti-colonialist thinker.
Southeast Asian Studies
He earned a classic degree from Cambridge in 1957 before attending Cornell University, where he concentrated on Indonesia as a research interest and in 1967 received his Ph.D. in government studies. His doctoral adviser at Cornell is a Southeast Asian scholar, George Kahin.
The violence of Suharto's coup in Indonesia disappointed Anderson, who wrote that "it feels like finding that a loved one is a murderer". Therefore, while Anderson was a graduate student at Cornell, he anonymously co-authored "Cornell Paper" with Ruth T. McVey who uncovered the Indonesian government's official record of the failed coup of the September 30th Movement and subsequent anti-Communist purge. 1965-1966. The Cornell Paper was widely disseminated by Indonesian dissidents. One of the two foreign witnesses in the court of secretary general of the Indonesian Communist Party Sudisman in 1971, Anderson published a translated version of the last unsuccessful testimony. As a result of his actions, Anderson in 1972 was expelled from Indonesia and barred from reentry, a restriction that lasted until 1998, when the Suharto dictatorship ended.
Anderson is fluent in several languages ​​relevant to Southeast Asia, including Indonesian, Javanese, Thai and Tagalog, as well as major European languages. After the American experience in the Vietnam War and the ensuing wars between Communist countries such as the Cambodian-Vietnamese War and the Vietnam-China War, he began to study the origins of nationalism while continuing previous work on the relationship between language and power.
Anderson is famous for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, where he describes the main factors contributing to the rise of nationalism in the world over the last three centuries. Anderson defines a nation as "the imagined political community imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". (See below for a wider discussion.)
Anderson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. In 1998, Anderson's return trip to Indonesia was sponsored by the Indonesian publication Tempo, and he gave a public speech in a fancy Jakarta downtown. the hotel where he criticized the Indonesian opposition for "historical toughness and amnesia - especially with regard to the 1965-1966 massacre".
He taught at Cornell until his retirement in 2002, when he became professor emeritus of International Studies. After retirement, he spends most of his time traveling throughout Southeast Asia. Anderson died in Batu, Malang, Indonesia, in his sleep on December 13, 2015. According to Tariq Ali's close friend Anderson died of heart failure. He has been in the midst of translating his memoirs, A Life Beyond Boundary, from Japan to English, and survived two adopted children from Indonesia.
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Community Imagined
Anderson is famous for his 1983 book, The Community of the Trapped: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , in which he examines how nationalism leads to the creation of a nation, or as its title, the imagined community. In this case, the "imagined community" does not mean that the national community is false, but rather referring to Anderson's belief that any community so large that its members do not know each other face-to-face must be envisaged in some degree.
According to Anderson, earlier Marxist and liberal thinkers did not fully appreciate the power of nationalism, writing in his book that "Unlike most other isms, nationalism never produced its own great thinker: no Hobbes, Tocquevilles, Marxes or Webers." Anderson began his work by raising three paradoxes of nationalism that he would discuss in the work:
- Nationalism is a modern and modern creation even though the state is regarded by most people as old and immortal;
- Nationalism is universal because every individual belongs to a nation, but each country is considered completely different from every other nation;
- Nationalism is a very influential idea so people will die for their nation, but at the same time an idea is difficult to define.
In Anderson's nationalism theory, the phenomenon only arises when people begin to reject three key beliefs about their society:
- That certain languages ​​like Latin are superior to others in terms of access to universal truths;
- That the divine right to rule is given to the ruler of society, usually the king, and is the natural basis for governing society;
- That the origin of the world and the origin of man are the same.
Anderson argues that the preconditions for denial of this belief began in Western Europe through many of the factors that led to the Age of Enlightenment, such as economic power, scientific revolution, and the emergence of improvements in the communications brought about by this invention. from the printing press under the system of capitalism (or as Anderson calls it, print capitalism). Anderson's view of nationalism put the roots of the "nation" idea at the end of the eighteenth century when the replacement system began, not in Europe, but in the Western Hemisphere, when countries like Brazil, the United States, and the new Spanish colonies were released into the first to develop national awareness.
Therefore, in contrast to other thinkers such as Ernest Gellner, who regarded the spread of nationalism in connection with industrialism in Western Europe, and Elie Kedourie, who interpreted nationalism as a European phenomenon conducted worldwide by colonization, Anderson saw the European nation in response to the emergence nationalism in the European diaspora outside the ocean, especially in the Western Hemisphere, which is then transmitted back to Africa and Asia through colonization. Anderson considers the development of the state as an imitative and transferable act, in which new political entities imitate the model of the nation state. As Anderson notes, the large group of political entities that sprang up in North and South America between 1778 and 1838, almost all of which naturally defined themselves as nations, were historically the first states to emerge and therefore inevitably provided a real model first of what should look like a state. According to Anderson, this phenomenon led to the emergence of the nation: a community bounded by their borders and sovereign. Anderson considers nationalism to occur in different "waves".
Nationalism and print
Like other thinkers like Marshall McLuhan in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, which is very important to Anderson's theory of nationalism is his emphasis on the literary role of printed and spreading. Thinkers such as McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Anderson do not believe that nationalism arose because of the uncertain "European" way of thinking, but because of the social, economic, and cultural practices associated with the emergence of printing presses and the mass reproduction of printed materials.
According to Anderson, the "revolutionary vernacularizing capitalist urge" is central to the creation of imagined communities, because the mass mechanical reproduction of the print works brings together people who would be hard to imagine themselves as part of the same community, especially because of extreme language differences. With the advent of the printing press, the language became more stable and certain dialects became "the language of power" (like English in the English Queen) which is inherently more prestigious than the sub-regional vernacular dialect. Print capitalism also means a culture in which people are asked to be socialized as part of an educated culture, where their nation's standard language becomes the language of printed and educational material for the masses.
Nationalist colleague Steven Kemper described the role of print technology in Anderson's theory as "allowing people to know each other indirectly, for printing to mediate the imagination of society." Kemper also stated that for Anderson "the very existence and regularity of newspapers causing the reader, and thus citizen-in-making, to imagine themselves being in place and time together, united by the print language with an anonymous league alike. "
Therefore, for Anderson, the advent of printing technology is crucial to creating a "deep horizontal conspiracy" independent of socially constructed origins, as well as genuine and profound, explaining why nationalism can encourage people to fight, die and kill for the state they..
The multi-ethnic empire
Anderson also studied how 19th century European dynasties that represented the retention of power over the great polyglot domain experienced naturalization at the same time as they developed an official program of nationalism in a process which he called "the desire for the incorporation of nations and dynastic kingdoms". Anderson regards the empire as merely a pre-modern "dynastic world" and focuses on official nationalism in a multiethnic kingdom (eg, Russian Nationality), programs which he describes as "reactionary, secondary modeling". Whereas before, the legitimacy of the European dynasty had nothing to do with citizenship, Anderson argued that after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian empires after World War I, the nation-state replaced the empire as the norm in international affairs, as shown by how delegates of the imperial powers in the post-war League of Nations are careful to present themselves as national delegates, not imperial ones.
Selected works
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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