Language, not sight, is the primary organ of patriotic attachment

Evidence

It may appear paradoxical that the objects of all these attachments are ‘imagined’ – anonymous, faceless fellow-Tagalogs, exterminated tribes, Mother Russia, or the tanah air. But amor patriae does not differ in this respect from the other affections, in which there is always an element of fond imagining. (This is why looking at the photo-albums of strangers’ weddings is like studying the archaeologist’s groundplan of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.) What the eye is to the lover – that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with – language – whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue – is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 582

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core move of the whole book — that patriotic love operates like all affections through ‘fond imagining’ — packed into one dense analogy, with language as the patriot’s eye.
• XREF: This is the mechanism by which nations get constructed as imagined communities; scaffolds how Islamophobia discourse treats language and homeland as the vehicles of collective identity. — connects to: The nation is conceived in language, not in blood — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 552; Popular nationalism reproduced exclusion by demanding linguistic uniformity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 386; Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572 (+4 more)

Related

• The nation is conceived in language, not in blood (similarity 0.84)
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference (similarity 0.79)
• A language of state becomes a double-edged loyalty when it gains national valence (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Popular nationalism reproduced exclusion by demanding linguistic uniformity #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 386
• Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities #expands (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 345
• Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience #qualifies (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference #corroborates (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 212
• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry #corroborates (0.80)
• Shared language and culture do not constitute belonging to a nation. #qualifies (0.78)