Logo-maps and martyr legend made an unseen territory sacred in the national imagination.

Evidence

The internment, and often interment, there of nationalist martyrs gave West New Guinea a central place in the folklore of the anticolonial struggle, and made it a sacred site in the national imagining: Indonesia Free, from Sabang (at the northwestern tip of Sumatra) to – where else but? – Merauke. It made no difference at all that, aside from the few hundred internees, no nationalists ever saw New Guinea with their own eyes until the 1960s. But Dutch colonial logo-maps sped across in the colony, showing a West New Guinea with nothing to its East, unconsciously reinforced the developing imagined ties. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 666

Categorization

• XREF: The imagined unity spanning unseen territory is the same mechanism as Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ of the nation — and parallels how diasporic or externally-defined Muslim identities are imagined to span territories never visited. — connects to: Tombs of unknown soldiers show nationalism’s affinity with religious imagining — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 54

Related

• The map can create a national community where none previously existed (similarity 0.79)
• Tombs of unknown soldiers show nationalism’s affinity with religious imagining (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalists fought for territories they had only seen on schoolroom maps (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Tombs of unknown soldiers show nationalism’s affinity with religious imagining #qualifies (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 54