Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism

In Chapter Ten, “Census, Map, Museum,” Anderson focuses on three institutions that together shaped the way colonial territories (and the post-colonial states that succeeded them) imagined their domains. The census, map, and museum exemplify how humans, geography, and ancestry were organized and manipulated to administer colonial states and to establish the legitimacy of their rule. These institutions were inherited and adapted by post-colonial regimes to serve their own programs of political administration and national identity-formation.

Historical analyses of the censuses crafted by European administrators and used in colonial south-east Asia demonstrate how race replaced religion over time as the primary means of classifying inhabitants. Colonial powers constructed lists of ‘identities’ that were often a hodgepodge of linguistic, ethnic, and geographical classifications and sub-classifications. These labels said more about the confusion of the colonial state’s classifying mind and the accidental boundaries of empire than the lived experience of the natives they purported to assess. Anderson suggests that “[i]t is extremely unlikely that […] more than a tiny fraction of those categorized and subcategorized [in a 1911 Dutch census of Malaysia] would have recognized themselves under such labels” (165).

The systematic quantification of these problematic ethnic-racial classifications aided the colonial state in organizing its educational, legal, public-health, police and other bureaucracies.