National consciousness developed before mass literacy and print capitalism
Evidence
Yet they were national independence movements. Bolívar came to change his mind about slaves, and his fellow-liberator San Martín decreed in 1821 that ‘in the future the aborigines shall not be called Indians or natives; they are children and citizens of Peru and they shall be known as Peruvians.’ (We might add: in spite of the fact that as yet print-capitalism had not reached these illiterates.) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 217
Categorization
- XREF: Anderson’s own caveat — print-capitalism had not reached these illiterates — flags that his later famous print-capitalism thesis cannot fully account for these creole pioneers, a tension worth carrying forward. — connects to: National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry; Technological and print-capitalism advances enabled imagining parallel lives across oceans — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 716; Novels and newspapers supplied the technical means to imagine the nation — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 87 (+6 more)
- QUESTION: If print-capitalism and literacy were absent, what mechanism produced the national imagination in Peru?
- DEFINE: The redefinition of subject populations as ‘fellow-nationals’ is the constitutive act of the imagined community — naming (‘Peruvians’) performs the nation rather than describes it.
Related
- Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable (similarity 0.82)
- Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.81)
- Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable
#contradicts(0.90) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 233 - Wealth and schooling determined where nationalist revolution began earlier
#qualifies(0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 309 - Capitalism’s global spread spawned nationalism as its historical cost
#corroborates(0.75) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 370