Sacred-language communities absorbed outsiders through script mastery
Evidence
Yet such classical communities linked by sacred languages had a character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations. One crucial difference was the older communities’ confidence in the unique sacredness of their languages, and thus their ideas about admission to membership. Chinese mandarins looked with approval on barbarians who painfully learned to paint Middle Kingdom ideograms. These barbarians were already halfway to full absorption. Half-civilized was vastly better than barbarian. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 61
Categorization
- XREF: This openness of older religious communities contrasts with the closed racialized membership of modern nations — a direct scaffold for the race-thinking and statelessness readings in the Islamophobia canon. — connects to: Mastery of a society’s codes enables successful passage through its culture; Shared script enabled mass literacy despite mutually unintelligible spoken dialects — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 371; Pre-modern great communities imagined themselves via sacred script, not ethnicity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 60 (+2 more)
Related
- Mastery of a society’s codes enables successful passage through its culture (similarity 0.87)
- Sacred-languistic community imagined membership as alchemic absorption rather than adherence (similarity 0.87)
- Pre-modern great communities imagined themselves via sacred script, not ethnicity (similarity 0.85)
- Sacred languages were imagined as emanations of reality itself (similarity 0.84)
- Sacred written languages created pre-national communities out of signs, not sounds (similarity 0.80)
- Shared script enabled mass literacy despite mutually unintelligible spoken dialects (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Sacred-languistic community imagined membership as alchemic absorption rather than adherence
#expands(0.90) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 64