The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World

by Benedict Anderson

“‘Come, let us build a Third Kingdom, and in this Third Reich, hey, sisters, you will live happily; hey, brothers, you will live happily; hey, kids, you will live happily; hey, you German patriots, you will see Germany sitting enthroned above all the peoples in this world.’ How clever Hitler was, brothers and sisters, in depicting these ideals!”

Thus the late President Sukarno of Indonesia, an anti-colonial leader, in a public speech while accepting an honorary degree, and viewing Europe and its history through an inverted telescope, as Europeans often regard other parts of the globe. Strange shifts in perspective can take place when Berlin is viewed from Jakarta, or when complex histories of colonial domination strand what counts as the founding work of a national culture in a language its people no longer read. The “spectre of comparisons” arises as nations stir into self awareness, matching themselves against others, and becoming whole through the exercise of the imagination.

In this series of profound and eloquent essays, Benedict Anderson, best known for his classic book on nationalism, Imagined Communities , explores these effects as they work their way through politics and culture. Spanning broad accounts of the development of nationalism and identity, and detailed studies of Southeast Asia, the book includes pieces on East Timor, where every Indonesian attempt to suppress national feeling has had the opposite effect; on the Philippines, where it is said that some horses eat better than stable-hands; on Thailand, where so much money can be made in elected posts that candidates regularly kill to get them; on the Filipino nationalist and novelist José Rizal for whom “we mortals are like turtles—we have value and are classified according to our shells;” and a remarkable essay on Mario Vargas Llosa, detailing the fate of indigenous minorities at the hands of the modern state.

While The Spectre of Comparisons  is an indispensable resource for those interested in Southeast Asia, Anderson also takes up the large issues of the universal grammars of nationalism and ethnicity, the peculiarity of nationalist imagery as replicas without originals, and the mutations of nationalism in an age of mass global migrations and instant electronic communications.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Theory, Sociology, Philosophy, Anthropology

386 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson was Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University, and is best known for his celebrated book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, first published in 1983. Anderson was born in Kunming, China, to James O'Gorman Anderson and Veronica Beatrice Bigham, and in 1941 the family moved to California. In 1957, Anderson received a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from Cambridge University, and he later earned a Ph.D. from Cornell's Department of Government, where he studied modern Indonesia under the guidance of George Kahin. He is the brother of historian Perry Anderson.

Reviews

[Smiley]

Having scribbled on the last page 'Interestingly tough', I found this 4-part, 17-chapter book read as my No. 4 by Prof. Anderson complex and informative in terms of his formidable knowledge, analyses and viewpoints on comparative nationalism in Indonesia, Siam (Thailand currently) and the Philippines dating back since the nineteenth century. When I looked at the front cover photo, it vaguely reminded me of a historic episode I saw many years ago but I could not recall what and who it depicted to posterity till I found it out a few weeks ago on Jose Rizal in its wikipedia archive. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Rizal) It is indeed a hopelessly tragic photo with eerie atmosphere since it has long been taken as a photographic record of his execution on December 30, 1896 due to his nationalist movements against Spanish colonial rule. Eventually, it was my delight to read Chapter 10 The First Filipino, knowing him more with awe and respect; thus, I think it is all right to recommend interested readers to read this chapter right away after seeing one of the nationalism-related photos on the front cover.

Reading his biography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedic...) is an essential background to one's better understanding, I think, before reading his books. For instance, from the biography, it informs us why he has remarkably written on the three countries with different colonial rules and the most religious faiths in each country, that is, Indonesia under the Dutch (87.2% Islam), Siam uncolonized (94.50% Buddhism) and the Philippines under Spain (91.3 Christianity). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thailand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp...] So such big data as revealed in the three websites nearly unthinkably reflect The Spectre of Comparisons, the title of "this series of profound and eloquent essays." (back cover)

To continue . . .

[Patrick]

A really great book. Anderson has the fine distinction of being an amazing scholar as well as a very talented writer. He manages to successfully pull off a very self-aware comparative history of Southeast Asia through the three nations he became an expert in: the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. The book is not a monograph per say, but instead a collection of essays varying in scope and writing style. Some are constructed historical narratives, others are close literary and textual analyses of nationalist print. He manages very successfully to show that nationalism was conceived in an international setting in the early twentieth century, and that the individual nationalisms of these three nations are entirely related to nationalist thought and movements around the world. A very good sequel to read after his more famous Imagined Communities. It better elaborates his personal feelings towards nationalism. Nationalism can be very dangerous and is often scoffed at by the intellectual left of the post-modern West, but it was also very inspiring, optimistic, and internationalist for anti-colonial revolutionaries, writers, and state builders of Cold War era Southeast Asia. I think I will be incorporating this book as assigned reading for teaching future courses in Southeast Asian and/or global history.

[Nicholas]

The great Benedict Anderson himself is the Spectre of Comparison. Writing in the way as he always does, Ben shuns the rigidity of comparative politics by effortless transporting the reader from one locale to another, from one language to another, and from one text to another in trying not only to put Southeast Asia in the world, but also the world in Southeast Asia. Some of the writings of this 1998 book may look dated but the key question of nation and nationalism still beguile us till this day. Admittedly, Ben's encyclopedic knowledge and eclectic interest make him hard to follow, as he moves from literary criticism to Marxist analyses, and from colonial history to a world-historical view of Southeast Asia up until the 97 financial crisis from chapter to chapter. Flippant and sometimes even vertiginous, it follows from the spirit of Imagined Communities. That it is the ability to imagine that constitutes nations. As scholarship turned dry and more disciplined than ever, Ben's spectre will enrich the imagination of Southeast Asianists for many years to come.

[Manuel]

The book has a good compact chapter on Philippine history called "Cacique Democracy." It covers the arrival of the Spaniards to the Aquino years. It argues that mestizos, especially of the Chinese/Tagalog variety, were the instigators of the Katipunan movement that launched the Philippine revolution of 1896. Furthermore, the mestizos effectively took control of the commonwealth under U.S. auspices until 1946.

[Phạm Thảo]

Reading Benedict Anderson’s *The Spectre of Comparisons* was difficult for me. I am not a fan of nonlinear books composed of essays that sometimes seem only loosely connected. Still, after reading *Imagined Communities*, which I found much easier to follow, I wanted to explore more of Anderson’s work. The idea that stayed with me most was his distinction between bounded and unbounded seriality. Unbounded seriality allows people to imagine themselves as members of open-ended communities through newspapers, trade, and shared political language. Bounded seriality, by contrast, sorts people into fixed, countable categories and is closely connected to instruments of state power such as the census. A census does not merely describe a population; by determining which identities can be counted, it helps produce majorities and minorities. This becomes especially visible through migration, when a nationality in the country of origin may be reclassified as an ethnicity in the host country. Ethnic categories, therefore, are neither entirely natural nor simply invented. They emerge through an interaction between state classification and people’s responses to it.

This argument reminded me of segmented assimilation theory, which shows that immigrants do not follow a single path of integration. Their experiences are shaped by how the host society receives and categorizes them, as well as by race, class, local communities, and access to resources. Anderson adds another dimension by showing that migrants are shaped not only by their incorporation into the host country but also by their continuing attachment to the homeland. Migration does not necessarily weaken national identity; through long-distance nationalism, it may actually intensify it. People are therefore pulled in two directions: they encounter new racial and ethnic categories in the host country while reconstructing their national identity through memory, nostalgia, and cultural practices. Overall, although this was not an easy book for me, it was a worthwhile read that brought several useful ideas back into my theoretical framework for understanding migration, identity, and national belonging.

[竹溪 刘]

这一本比较专注于安德森擅长的东南亚，在民族主义的基础框架上根据东南亚各国（主要是印度尼西亚、菲律宾、泰国、马来西亚）的情况有一些有趣的展开，甚至其中一些判断放在21世纪再看也是颇有启发的——是的我就是在说2020年代以来，东南亚那些以流行文化符号（《饥饿游戏》里的嘲笑鸟手势或者《海贼王》中的海贼旗帜）为纽带、跨越了国界的“平民主义”运动与何塞·黎刹那一辈民族发明家们的小说扮演的角色对照起来看，是何其有趣呢。

[Yeast]

Witty essays whose source materials are sometimes more interesting than the analysis (which is remarkable given that the analysis is great enough). The question is: from now where should Southeast Asia go?

[Wang Yu]

了解东南亚民族建构，民主进程，历史文化的工具

[Jeany Lin]

論文集。不是很好讀，和《比較的幽靈》差不多同時間，可以同時讀。

[Vip Vinyaratn]

Many great articles on South-East Asian

[Karlo Mikhail]

Don't agree with everything written here but it still sure is fascinating and insightful.