Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

This book examines the phenomenon of nationalism and attempts to place it in a new perspective, denying the myth of European origins (instead locating them in the Americas). Anderson speculates nationalism has such a pull in part because it fills in cultural gaps left by the decline of religious community and dynastic realms. He investigates the roles of vernacular language, print culture, and pilgrimages (at first bureaucratic and then educational) in creating these imagined communities and traces them from the Americas to Europe and then finally to colonial areas in Southeast Asia and Africa, where the ideas are pirated from the European colonizers. The 1991 additions are particularly interesting about maps and museums; the 2006 appendix about translations of the book struck me as insufferably self-aggrandizing.