Josh
Anderson suggests the ability of recent advances in communications technology to create a national imagined community across languages, why does he leave aside the possibility of imagined communities across national boarders as well as the potential for fragmentation?

Josh
Why is it significant that the American revolutions were to maintain parallelism rather than replace the center against which they are fighting?

Lolan
Is it possible for the product of nationalism to reflect a dominant ethnic group and culture in their symbolisms and to therefore become biased and ultimately detrimental to the nationalistic agenda?

Alison
Anderson links revolution to nationalism and capitalism to Marxist, claiming that these pairs are piratable "inventions, on which patents are impossible to preserve" (156). He goes on to discuss revolutions focusing on their place within socialist nations. What are some ways in which actual revolutions or even the concept of revolution have contributed to or laid the groundwork for capitalism to thrive?

Lucas
Can we think of nationalism as something separate from the state?

Lucas
Anderson’s presents current nationalism as a result of two centuries of historical change, a result of a set of events that happened in the past. Nonetheless, the past is a current construct of the present, therefore an ever changing reality. How the nation-state construct its own history in order to justify its reason of being, rather than being created by the past it describes? Is the creator (the state) creating its own creator (the past) to justify a imagined condition (the nation)?

Grace
How do the contrasting concepts of the modern European nation "awakening from its past" and the new world nation being represented as "old" and yet also "new" intersect with the necessity, as Anderson previously put it, for people to comprehend time as cyclical in order to "imagine the nation?"

Grace
How does the idea of language as sentimentally attached to the nation play out in areas with minoritized languages, or even in households in which a different language is spoken at home than outside of the home?

Alison
If “print-language is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se,” (134), then how is it some nations print in multiple languages or contain vast numbers of illiterate citizens and still maintain a sense of nationalism? This statement assumes that only literate peoples and those with an orthographic description of their language are allowed to form nations. How is that possible? Surely printed ideas are not the only element in the ‘invention’ of nationalism.

Mary
In the book up to this point, Anderson does not address what role the illiterate play in nationalism. Is it that nationalism is for the educated (popular nationalism) or the elite (official nationalism)? Is it an element of imagination?—if we are imagining our national community, we would most likely do so in more flattering terms (making it shinier, prettier, happier, etc.). While we know that the illiterate, who may also serve as a stand or a symbol (?) for the destitute, exist in each community, we choose not to imagine them. Could the real and tangible result become, that when nationalist movements occur, because we never imagined the illiterate in our national communities, they are left out of our movements? OR, could Anderson have just not have fully considered the illiterate (and also communities/groups that do not value print media) when he conducted his nationalism analysis?

Dannah
To Anderson's claim that "it is always the ruling classes... that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has a stagey quality to it" (111): this seems to imply that the lower classes are somehow feeling or imagining the nation/empire differently than the ruling classes do. How does this come about?

Mary
I wonder if this whole chapter is a bit too nation-philic on the part of Anderson? He does not seem to agree that the nation could produce the ills of hate or racism that other scholars have attributed to it. While I can agree that nations and nationalism can produce great pride and art in its citizens, and I can also agree that racism is not a product of nationalism alone, I cannot agree that nations and nationalism are innocent in producing hate or racism. I wonder if I am misreading Anderson? I can think of examples of nations inspiring hateful rhetoric or art (directed at other nations or peoples). I can also think of examples of “racism” directed at peoples or communities because of their nationalities alone, or at least their perceived nationalities.

Nathalie
He is saying that racism has it's origins in the ideology of class rather than nation. But doesn't the ideology of nation also revolve around which "race" belongs (or is imagined to belong) to  it ? Even if one becomes "naturalized" in the US, he remains faced with the questions "where are you originally from?"

Cathy
“The fact of he matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history” (149). Put this way, racism arises out of fear of one’s blood being ‘contaminated’ why would racism be associated with that which is tangible (blood) and nationalism with something intangible (history) and what are the implications of the terms and their respective categories?

Nathalie
Throughout the book, he seems to be presenting a "grand theory" of nationalism. In this chaper however, he seems to be pointing out to the fact that nationalism can be modeled differently and adapts according to different political, economic, and social structures. So how can we use his broader definition of nation as an imagined community and apply it to specific cases?

Mary
Anderson discusses the concept of “sleep” as a way in which “Old World” nationalists were able to imagine the historic immortality, perhaps inevitability, of their own nationalisms. For example, on page 196, Anderson discusses how this idea of “sleep” conceptually allowed certain nationalist groups who were becoming conscious of themselves to feel as though they were “rediscovering” something deep-down always known. I can see parallels to this idea of “sleep” in certain sub-national groups today. For example, in the LGBT Movements in the USA there is frequently a sort of embrace of this sense self not as distinct historically, but rather as something ancient and rediscovered. I wonder if, in this way, Anderson's discussion of nation and nationality can reach beyond what seem to these standard and assumed national boundary or ethnic lines, allowing for the creation of a different sort of nation (perhaps one contained within and concurrent with the nation-state, one that does not seek to completely replace that entity in imagining its community)?

Nathalie
What is the mechanism of imagination in "narratives of identity?"

Cathy
Do narratives really spring, as Anderson suggests, from forgetting? “Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity…which, because it can not be ‘remembered’ must be narrated” (204). What other functions might narratives of the state serve?

Dannah
Benedict is right to flag "naturalization" as a "wonderful word" (145). As he points out, "natural" usually means something unchosen (like one's skin color or first language). But the process of becoming a "naturalized" citizen involves a long series of deliberate choices (at least in the US) that seem designed to (re)make a person into a "natural" citizen. How would acquired citizenship look if it were a different kind of process, such as paying a fee? I'm also thinking now about resonances between the naturalized citizenship process and the adoption process...

Dannah
I'm curious how Anderson would integrate the passport into his discussion of the census, the map, and the museum. Seems to me that the passport is directly linked to the census (same idea of government knowledge of each serialized individual) and allows one to transcend (in a limited, modified, controlled way) the boundaries of the map.

Lucas
If the state is the entity that detain the “legitimate” tools, apparatus, methods, and/or ways to recover/construct the past, and it is in the past that one sees the events and preconditions that fomented the nation, is the nation not an imposed community?

Cathy
Gupta and Ferguson suggests “exploring the processes of production of difference” (43) and offers the example of two different anthropologists analysis on the !Kung to exemplify how looking at the production of difference can offer a more holistic view. Can we think of other examples of how examining the “processes of production of difference” has been, or could be helpful?

Nathalie
So would the mechanism of imagining a homeland differ work differently than that of the nation? If so how and to what extent does the imagination of the actual nation influence the imagination of the homeland? 

Josh
How much do Gupta and Ferguson's suggestions change the essentialization of difference?  In order to investigate the historical processes of production of difference the difference must be posited/accepted and the investigation must be somehow limited spatially since one cannot know with sufficient detail the histories of everywhere.

Lolan
“The partial erosion of spatially bounded social worlds….must be situated within the highly spatialized terms of a global capitalist economy”- Is this necessarily the case? Isn’t the entire object of a global capitalist economy to destroy the necessity of spatially bounded social worlds for economic activity? Its failure to achieve this aim would then be a paradox of capitalism instead of a necessary “term” of capitalist economy.

Grace
Why is an imagined homeland so important and so attached to so many imagined communities?  And in what ways do imagined communities without a constructed "homeland" differ from those who have one?

Dannah
Gupta and Ferguson "want to contend that the notion of borderlands is a more adequate conceptualization of the 'normal' locale of the postmodern subject" (48). Should we then regard everywhere as borderland? How might this advance (or undermine) our analyses of relations between people, land, and nation-state?

Lauren
If we think back to Anderson’s chapter on the census, the map, and the museum as means of quantifying and supervising the movements and identifications of individuals, what might we identify as modern day equivalents or experimental means of solidifying this kind of information that Gupta and Ferguson are describing? Is it possible?

Mary
On Page 41, the Authors essentially state that in order for a large-scale political movement to gain momentum, there must be a rallying of people around a (national) homeland. When reading this passage, I wondered if there was more to this than just the need to have the presence of a homeland. I wondered if there must also be some sort of threat that the homeland would be taken from those rallying around the political movement, should the movement not occur? This threat could be real (the people would be removed from the homeland) or potentially imaginary (fear that the group in power wishes to remove them), or this threat could be actual (physical removal) or constructive (removal of status or rights—as examples). If these successful political movements are centered, in a sense, around a fear of removal, could this undercut the article's assertion that there is a global re/de-territorialization occurringg (perhaps there is not one model—maybe there is a nation model and a postnational model operatingsimultaneouslyy, if that's possible?)?

Alison
Gupta and Ferguson talk about the 'process of construction of place and homeland by mobile and displaced people' (39). If people are united by a common 'homeland,' how deep does that connection run if they live in separate nations? For example, members of some diasporic communities undergo a second, third, etc. diaspora. Where is their 'homeland' and is it still shared with the first wave of diaspora? If not, does that mean that they no longer share a common ethnic identification? More broadly, what constitutes a 'homeland' and what does it mean to share one?

Nathalie
Doesn't diasporic pluralism also have an all-encompassing self-narrative?

Cathy
Appadurai suggests that territory “can be seen as the crucial problem in the contemporary crisis of the nation-state…Insofar as actually existing nation-states rest on some implicit idea of ethnic coherence as the basis of state sovereignty, they are bound to minoritize, degrade, penalize, murder or expel those seen to be ethnically minor” (346). What new ways might the nation-state begin to dominate as the world becomes “deterritorialized”?

Alison
Much of Appadurai's argument seems to rely on the assumption that people living within territories view one another as sharing the same ethnicity (i.e., in the section on territorial habits) or somehow consider one another to share a 'pure' ethnicity. At least, this would seem necessary with regard to the complications of reterritorialization he refers to. How is it possible that this is the case when it would seem that the concept of being a 'pure' American (or Italian, or Spanish) person relies on mixing of 'ethnicities'?  

Josh
Appadurai writes, "states are the only major players in the global scene that really need the idea of territorially based sovereignty" (342).  Somewhat against the trend of his essay, here he seems to be treating the various "major players" as being minimally interconnected, but do not transnational capitalists and their corporations influence politics everywhere possible while relying on territorial boundaries to ensure their own sovereignty, namely by taking advantage of differences in labor and tax laws between countries, the increased difficulty of workers to organize across national and language boundaries, and, as Anderson noted, patriotic sacrifices that/to defend property rights.

Dannah
On p. 338, Appadurai claims that "the work of producing localities... is often at odds with the project of the nation-state" and that the attachments that people form to specific places "are often at odds with the needs of the nation-state." He then goes on to argue in the rest of the paper that territoriality is integral to the (fiction of the) nation-state and that the rampant translocality of the contemporary world is a serious threat to the nation state. In light of his main argument, then, wouldn't it be worthwhile to consider how the attachments that people form to particular places can be manipulated to serve the interests of the state in some cases? (For example, urging potential military recruits to defend their "homes"?)

Lauren
Towards the end of this article Appadurai argues that ethnic plurality violates the sense of isomorphism between territory and national identity on which the modern nation-state relies, thus making it difficult for the state to regulate borders, opinions, entitlements, etc. If we accept what Anderson puts forward about the nation coming forth out of a community that imagines itself united, be it through language, education, administration, or ethnicity, how might we question the motives of the state and the intentions of state power when the national community in its previously manageable imaginative state begins to disintegrate? Is it the right of the national community to reimagine itself in such a manner that its constituents identify with each other along new axes of communication? Or does the structure of the imagined national community become locked and/or indebted to the bureaucratic apparatus it originally helped to construct?

Mary
On pages 343-344, the Author uses the United Nations as a prime example of a transnational force and suggests that the UN is a serious player in the “global market for loyalty,” is helping to erode territorial integrity of existing nations, and is essentially helping to erode the concept of nation. I guess my question would be: how much does the author know about the United Nations, as I would actually point to the United Nations as evidence of the continued strength of nationalism?

Grace
The "fiction of ethnic singularity on which most nations ultimately rely" and the "territorial integrity that justifies states" are according to Appadurai, coproductions of history.  How does this contrast with Anderson's idea of racism and nationalism growing from two separate places?

Lolan
“Production of locality challenges order & orderliness of nation state” = only if such locality does not fall within a predetermined or subsequently mobilized / recognizable theatre of organization / scheme of administration of the nation-state.
Is spatial- social standardization really the main prerequisite for modern subject-citizens? Is it not commitment to the ideals of the nation-state?