Shared bureaucratic pilgrimage transforms colonial states into national states

Evidence

Yet in each constricted journey he found bilingual travelling companions with whom he came to feel a growing communality. In his journey he understood rather quickly that his point of origin – conceived either ethnically, linguistically, or geographically – was of small significance. At most it started him on this pilgrimage rather than that: it did not fundamentally determine his destination or his companions. Out of this pattern came that subtle, half-concealed transformation, step by step, of the colonial-state into the national-state, a transformation made possible not only by a solid continuity of personnel, but by the established skein of journeys through which each state was experienced by its functionaries. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 448

Categorization

• XREF: This is the ‘pilgrimage’ mechanism Anderson established in earlier chapters on creole functionaries, now extended to twentieth-century colonial functionaries — a direct payoff of the earlier scaffold. — connects to: Siam’s king toured colonies to copy imperial models — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 426; Colonial administrators on rotation resembled pilgrims in a secular sacred journey. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 264; Absolute-monarchy bureaucracy turns career advancement into a shared pilgrim’s road — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 224

Related

• Colonial administrators on rotation resembled pilgrims in a secular sacred journey. (similarity 0.89)
• Absolute-monarchy bureaucracy turns career advancement into a shared pilgrim’s road (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial school hierarchies converted bureaucratic geography into national pilgrimage (similarity 0.82)
• Shared journeys among strangers create the sense of an imagined community (similarity 0.82)
• Educational and administrative pilgrimages built national imagined communities (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrators on rotation resembled pilgrims in a secular sacred journey. #expands (0.95) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 264