Benedict Anderson and Pransenjit Duara are two of the foremost scholars on nationalism in the world.  Nationalism, or the formation of identities and ties between people who live within a specified land mass boundary, is something that has been shifting in the Middle East in recent months and is something to which we should pay attention.  Here's a bit about why you should read Duara's Nations and Nationalism and Anderson's Imagined Communities.

Duara says nations have both hard and soft boundaries. A “soft boundary” of a community as a community with a culture which does not prevent it from potentially sharing or joining with groups around it. A “hard boundary” is a community in which there is so much dissimilarity between it and its surrounding communities, these communities couldn’t possibly share practices or join together. Duara says it is necessary for a community’s boundaries to harden in order for a nationality to form.

Anderson’s similar argument about borders of a nation is more limited and in this limited definition doesn’t contradict itself. Anderson defines a “limited nation” as a nation which has “finite, if elastic, boundaries.” This argument is similar to Duara’s because both arguments try to account for when members of a community or nation are lost to or added from a surrounding community. This simpler argument is better than Duara’s because it acknowledges this practice of gaining or losing members, most likely because of a similarity or dissimilarity of culture, does occur, but does not make claims about “hard boundaries” which it cannot support.

Duara’s explanation of the nationalist ideology of how women are incorporated into the nation is ineffective because he doesn’t explain what women he speaks of, how this idea is spread, or why this is relevant to his overall theme about culture. Duara explains how nationalist systems try to involve women by using “linguistically gendered” words such as “motherland.” While this is a potentially viable argument, Duara doesn’t go much further into explanation. The paragraph also doesn’t fit well with the rest of the cultural theme of the piece unless these women as the nation were involved culturally in some way.

Similar to Duara and his women in the nation ideology, Anderson presents an argument about how the ideology of a nation which speaks about how people’s perception of time needs to change in order to form a nation which is a more effective argument because it explains why this shift in thinking is necessary. In this argument, Anderson explains the need to change people’s conception of time in novels and newspapers from the pre-nation thinking of “simultaneity,” in which two things didn’t happen at once, to the nation thinking in “homogeneous, empty time,” in which more than one action can be performed at any given moment. Anderson says this new kind of thinking is necessary for nationalism to spread because it makes people in a community feel more connected in that they may be doing an activity at the same time as someone in their community whom they have never met. This explanation is more effective than Duara’s argument because Anderson explains why a collective change in thinking is necessary for the success of nationalism. Duara, on the other hand, does not explain the necessity of involving women or changing people’s thinking about women in the nation through this ideology.

Duara’s explanation of the change from “culturalism” to “nationalism” because of a fear of “others” is inadequate because of the circular nature of his argument. Duara says there is a very fine line between “culturalism,” which is a community’s belief in the superiority of their own culture and “nationalism,” which is a want on behalf of the community to have this culture protected by a state. Duara says such a shift only occurs when there is a threat to this culture from an outside source. This argument is ineffective because it says culturalism is only possible when there is no threat from another culture, but for this to be possible, the community would have to be entirely isolated. If this community was so isolated, there would be no threat from an outside source for it to need protection from a nation-state. So, Duara’s argument for “culturalism” as existing in the real world is circular and impossible.

Anderson’s argument about print capitalism, which is similar to Duara’s in its implications, is more effective than Duara’s. These arguments are similar because the threat from “others,” says Duara, caused a want for nationalism to protect the high culture and the printing press caused a greater “fixity of language” which allowed people to have finite examples of an aspect of their culture to protect. Anderson’s argument is more effective because it gives a concrete example of an aspect of a culture which can be looked at and protected. People knew exactly where to find examples of their culture, in the printed word, and with this actual document knew what to protect. Duara’s argument about protecting a culture through an upsurge in nationalism is more anonymous because he doesn’t explain how people know exactly which aspect of culture they are protecting nor does he explain how they would have concrete examples of only their own culture to protect.

In these examples of culture leading to nationalism, Anderson and Duara present similar ideas in their arguments about the fixity or lack thereof of national boundaries, about ideologies necessary for a nationalistic system, and about the need for nationalism to protect a threatened culture. Anderson is more effective in his arguments because, first, he doesn’t make a sweeping claim he cannot support in favor a simpler definition, second, he explains why a change in ideology is necessary for a nationalist government rather than simply stating it is different and, finally, he gives a real reason for people to protect an aspect of their culture rather than just an anonymous threat. Anderson’s work is more effective if one wishes to formulate a working definition of a nation and to apply it to a greater number of real world situations.