We Study Empires as we do Dinosaurs: Nations, Nationalism, and Empire in a Critical Perspective, Interview with Benedict Anderson

57 Ab Imperio, 3/2003 Interview with Benedict ANDERSON “WE STUDY EMPIRES AS WE DO DINOSAURS:” NATIONS, NATIONALISM, AND EMPIRE IN A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE* Alexander SEMYONOV. The book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism and the name of its author need no introduction for Russian readers. This book and other works were translated into Russian and have become part of the corpus of available theories of nationalism, referred to not only by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, but also historians.1 Yet, the nascent state of the field of nationalism studies in post-Soviet Russia necessitates a question on the intellectual origins and authorial intention in writing of Imagined Communities . Could you please describe for Russian readers your path (both personal and academic) to theoretical engagement with the problem of nationalism? How did academic training as a philologist and anthropologist influence your approach to nationalism as a cultural system or “cultural artifact?” What made you drift from the Indonesian case to a general overview of * Interviewer Alexander Semyonov with technical assistance of Serguei Glebov. 1 B.Anderson. Voobrazaemye soobshchestva. Razmyshlenia o istokakh i rasprostranenii natsionalisma / Tr. by V. G. Nikolaev. Foreword by S. Ban’kovskaia. Moscow, 2001. See also A. Miller. B. Anderson. Natsionalism kak kul’turnaia sistema // A. Miller (Ed.). Natsionalism i formirovanie natsii. Teorii, modeli, interpretatsii. Moscow, 1994. 58 Interview with B. Anderson, “We Study Empires as We Do Dinosaurs”... modern cultural transformations in the New and Old World? How did you position your contribution in the context of debates in theory of nationalism ? Now, reviewers of the field of nationalism studies operate with a set of labels for describing the trends within theory of nationalism: essentialists , primordialists, modernists, constructivists, etc. What is your attitude toward these labels, and is it possible to contextualize your approach with the help of these characteristics? BenedictANDERSON. I could write many pages. Some of the answers are contained in the introductions to my Language and Power: Exploring Indonesian Cultures (1990) and the more recent The Spectre of Comparisons (1998).2 First, I should clear up an evident misunderstanding. By training I am neither an anthropologist nor a philologist. I got my Ph.D. in 1967 in what Cornell and Harvard still call “Government” but what in most other American universities is known as Political Science. (But it is true that I am an odd kind of political scientist, and some of my mail is addressed to me at our anthropology department.). Up to the time when I completed my BA at Cambridge University, my schooling was overwhelmingly in literature and history. I started learning Latin when I was eight; Greek when I was about twelve. My Cambridge degree was in Classics (Classical Literature, History, etc). I studied French intensively in high school, and visited France often during my adolescence. As a teenager I was overwhelmed by the Russian literature that I read in translation, and while still in high school I therefore studied the Russian language and attended (alone!) a special summer school for Russian language taught by two charming “White” refugees a little bit north of Dublin. I even once translated into English a boring text by Bukharin that had not previously been translated. The Russian literature I was reading started with Lermontov and Turgenev, then Goncharov, Dostoevsky, and a little Pushkin, and finally Tolstoi, Chekhov, and Gorky. Later I was fond of Mayakovsky, and the epigraph for The Spectre of Comparison comes from a poem of his that I know by heart. As a youngster my favorite film was Donskoi’s trilogy of Gorky’s autobiography, and I always dreamed one day of taking a boat down the Volga. But once inAmerica my interests shifted to SEA, and I did not keep 2 Benedict Anderson. Language and Power: Exploring Indonesian Cultures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990; Idem. The Spectre of Comparisons. New York: Verso Books, 1998. Ab Imperio, 3/2003 59 up my Russian, though I continued to read Russian literature in translation (especially Babel and Leskov). I only became politically conscious at the age of 20 during the Suez/ Hungarian crisis. It should be added that I have a curious family background, half rising middleclass...