Colonial archaeology gave postcolonial states an inherited depth of field.

Evidence

Map and census thus shaped the grammar which would in due course make possible ‘Burma’ and ‘Burmese,’ ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Indonesians.’ But the concretization of these possibilities – concretizations which have a powerful life today, long after the colonial state has disappeared – owed much to the colonial state’s peculiar imagining of history and power. Archaeology was an unimaginable enterprise in precolonial Southeast Asia; it was adopted in uncolonized Siam late in the game, and after the colonial state’s manner. It created the series ‘ancient monuments,’ segmented within the classificatory, geographic-demographic box ‘Netherlands Indies,’ and ‘British Burma.’ Conceived within this profane series, each ruin became available for surveillance and infinite replication. As the colonial state’s archaeological service made it technically possible to assemble the series in mapped and photographed form, the state itself could regard the series, up historical time, as an album of its ancestors. The key thing was never the specific Borobudur, nor the specific Pagan, in which the state had no substantial interest and with which it had only archaeological connections. The replicable series, however, created a historical depth of field which was easily inherited by the state’s postcolonial successor. The final logical outcome was the logo – of ‘Pagan’ or ‘The Philippines,’ it made little difference – which by its emptiness, contextlessness, visual memorableness, and infinite reproducibility in every direction brought census and map, warp and woof, into an inerasable embrace. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 680

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘logo’ as the endpoint of colonial imagining — an empty, contextless emblem joining census and map.
• XREF: The logo and inherited historical depth of field are the mechanism by which imagined communities get their ancient pedigree — foundational for reading how nationalist discourse in Islamophobia debates naturalizes religious/national identity. — connects to: Colonial states museumized sacred sites to legitimize themselves as guardians of tradition — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 673; Colonial histories are internal to the identity of the colonizer nation; Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143

Related

• Postcolonial museums inherit the political functions of colonial archaeology (similarity 0.81)
• Monument restoration served as colonial propaganda proclaiming native incapacity for self-rule (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial states invented historical maps fabricating ancient territorial identities. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial states museumized sacred sites to legitimize themselves as guardians of tradition (similarity 0.79)
• Museumizing and education of the colonized were launched together as twin colonial projects (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial histories are internal to the identity of the colonizer nation #corroborates (0.72)
• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge #corroborates (0.72) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143