How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

suggests that scholars should put aside any pretense of determining whether a given
group of people belong together according to some abstract criteria, and should instead
look at the ways that people organize themselves into groups. For Anderson, this is less
a general statement about knowledge of the world, and more a specific claim about the
character of human community and human social action. The dynamics associated with
a national community or nation, in Anderson’s perspective, depend on the participation
of a number of individuals in a set of meaningful practices, and cannot be reduced to or
explained in terms of pre-social or non-meaningful factors. As for Rogers Brubaker
(1996, 2006), “nation” for Anderson is a category of practice, not a category of analysis;
what matters is how people speak and act so as to reproduce, or to challenge, their
membership in the nation and the implications that such membership carries.
Traditional scholarship on nations and nationalism often conflates this
distinction with the attribute/process distinction, as though scholarly delineation went
hand in hand with an attribute-ontology and attentiveness to participant narratives
necessarily entailed a process-ontology. But there is no logical reason why a scholar
couldn’t adopt a process-ontology together with a commitment to deploying an abstract
scholarly vocabulary rather than grounding an analysis firmly in the lived experience of
one’s informants; this would mean not advancing the kind of explanatory claims based
on categorical membership that are characteristic of a “general linear reality” approach
to explanation, but instead turning to some other explanatory logic to interrogate the
effects of mechanisms and processes that were abstractly delineated by the scholar.
Fortunately for such a scholar, there is a long-standing tradition of structural analysis in
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 20