The map can create a national community where none previously existed

Evidence

But what brought the often quarrelling young West Papuan nationalists together, especially after 1963, was the map. Though the Indonesian state changed the region’s name from West Nieuw Guinea, first to Irian Barat (West Irian) and then to Irian Jaya, it read its local reality from the colonial-era bird’s-eye atlas. A scattering of anthropologists, missionaries and local officials might know and think about the Ndanis, the Asmats, and the Baudis. But the state itself, and through it the Indonesian population as a whole, saw only a phantom ‘Irianese’ (orang Irian) named after the map; because phantom, to be imagined in quasi-logo form: ‘negroid’ features, penis-sheaths, and so on. In a way that reminds us how Indonesia came first to be imagined within the racist structures of the early-twentieth-century Netherlands East Indies, an embryo ‘Irianese’ national community, bounded by Meridian 141 and the neighbouring provinces of North and South Moluccas, emerged. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 668

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the map as an instrumentality of the ‘profane’ colonial state that ‘read[s] local reality’ through the atlas, overriding actual local knowledge.
• XREF: The map’s phantom ‘Irianese’ parallels how racialized categories in the Islamophobia field get imposed on heterogeneous populations from state top-down vantage points. — connects to: Nationalists fought for territories they had only seen on schoolroom maps — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 501; Maps can precede and shape territorial reality rather than merely reflect it. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 660; Map and census mutually constitute each other to bound identities territorially. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 662 (+9 more)

Related

• Nationalists fought for territories they had only seen on schoolroom maps (similarity 0.84)
• National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders (similarity 0.82)
• Maps can precede and shape territorial reality rather than merely reflect it. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial map coloring evolved into a detachable logo-map that fueled national identity. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial states invented historical maps fabricating ancient territorial identities. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial cartography created nations whose borders match neither history nor language. (similarity 0.79)
• Map and census mutually constitute each other to bound identities territorially. (similarity 0.79)
• Logo-maps and martyr legend made an unseen territory sacred in the national imagination. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 191
• Colonial cartography created nations whose borders match neither history nor language. #exemplifies (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 507
• A universal imagined community was reproduced through countless particular local forms #expands (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 82
• Universal maps established space as independent of any particular place #expands (0.80) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 55
• The nation is an imagined, limited, sovereign political community #expands (0.78) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37
• Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 345