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Nation and decolonization

Toward a new anthropology of nationalism

University of Chicago, USA

Martha Kaplan

Vassar College, USA

The anthropology of nationalism following Anderson's Imagined Communitiesdepicts nationalism as the culture of modernity, and punctuates time with emphasis on 1776, 1789 and (say some) a contemporary postmodern or millennial crisis. We argue instead that the era of nation-states begins in 1945, an era of formal horizontal symmetries and nations imagined as communities, dominated in fact by American power and its exigencies of ‘self-determination’, ‘open doors’ and multilateral trade. Scholarship that projects the nation-state back to the Enlightenment has occluded imperial history, just as depictions of American power as ‘neo-imperial’ depict it too vaguely, and fail to capture the dilemmas in political dialogics in many localities created by the exigencies of the United Nations era. We seek to relocate ethnographic and critical study of nationalism away from concern with impasses of ‘the Enlightenment’, ‘the West’, and ‘modernity’, in favor of attention to the Second World War as a watershed and decolonization as a beginning, not an end, exit from empires but also entry into a world newly ordered by American power.

Key Words: American power • decolonization • dialogics • Imagined Communities • nation-state

Anthropological Theory, Vol. 1, No. 4, 419-437 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/14634990122228818


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