Tombs of unknown soldiers show nationalism’s affinity with religious imagining

Evidence

No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 54

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the ‘Unknown Soldier’ trope gets redeployed by other identity movements, or how civic sacrality reproduces itself in contemporary monuments and memorials.
• XREF: connects to: Logo-maps and martyr legend made an unseen territory sacred in the national imagination. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 666; Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation; Somali national patriotism evolved from religious expression to modern political consciousness (+1 more)

Related

• Reverence for empty tombs of unknown soldiers is a uniquely modern nationalist practice (similarity 0.88)
• Logo-maps and martyr legend made an unseen territory sacred in the national imagination. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Somali national patriotism evolved from religious expression to modern political consciousness #exemplifies (0.80)
• Drones’ necroethics embody a nationalism of self-preservation #exemplifies (0.75)