National Sentiment, Social Distance, and the Problem of Adherence

The proliferation of separatist struggles in the postcolonial world in the past decades has prompted a surge of scholarly interest since 1980 in nations and nationalisms (see, e.g., Anderson 1983; Fox 1990; Handler 1988; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Kapferer 1988). In his

singularly influential essay, "Imagined Communities," Benedict Anderson offers an "anthropological" definition of the nation as "an imagined political community—[one] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (1983, 15). Anderson's nations imagine themselves as sovereign entities even though they may find it impossible to achieve or maintain genuine political independence. In its current anthropological formulation, "nationalism" refers to shared "conceptions of peoplehood" or of a "common ('national') culture" (Fox 1990, 3). By that measure, all nationalisms are ethno nationalisms in that all are concerned with peoplehood and with "cultural productions of public identity" (Fox 1990, 4). Nations do differ from certain other imagined or ascribed ethnic entities—Irish Catholics, for instance, or Asian Americans, or "people of color"—in that they are almost always bounded territorially as well as conceptually, with territoriality a matter of utmost significance even in those cases where a considerable proportion of a nation's citizens reside outside its enunciated boundaries. Nations (or nationalist political movements) are also distinguished by their possession of official nationalist ideologies. Nationalist elites produce particular conceptions of peoplehood and create "citizens" by means of formal discourses, representations, and rituals.

Nationalism constitutes a politics of shared heritage in that nationalist ideologies invariably assert a collective birthright of sovereignty over a particular territory. Nationalism is also a politics of heritage in the less literal sense in that nationalist ideologies prominently feature self-conscious attempts to identify and preserve a posited cultural heritage (see, e.g., Handler 1988; Bendix 1992; Spencer 1990). Nations, or "nation[s]-in-waiting" (Bowman 1993, 451), are self-regarding social collectivities with specific political goals, the most important of which is the control of the core territories claimed as their rightful heritage. Separatist struggles feature attempts by aspiring nations to wrest control of a proclaimed national territory from the illegal grasp of an alien state.

The Bangsamoro Rebellion—the armed endeavor by supporters of a proclaimed Philippine Muslim nation (Bangsamoro) to reclaim the "traditional" lands of the Muslim peoples of the Philippines—typifies such a separatist struggle. Its examination also points up a characteristic complexity when one attempts to understand the process by which symbolic appeals to a particular shared heritage are used to mobilize populations for nationalist action. As is the case with most other envisioned nations, the social collectivity imagined as the Philippine Mus-

lim nation contains substantial disparities in social power—disparities that generate conflicting interests and centrifugal tensions. Insofar as social collectivities constituted (or in the process of constituting themselves) as nations tend overwhelmingly to be crosscut by structurally opposed positions and interests, analyses of nationalism must face squarely the problem of the mobilization of national sentiment across class, caste, and other structural divides. To assert in response that nationalist mobilization in such cases is accomplished by means of nationalist ideologies merely begs the question. One must confront first an accumulation of inharmonious data concerned with political relations within modern states. On the one hand, we find a good deal of evidence that appears to support Benedict Anderson's characterization of nations as imagined communities: "The nation is imagined as a community , because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings" (1983, 16). Various historical and journalistic accounts exist of collective national action that seems to express the broad-based communalism noted by Anderson.

Counterpoised to such evidence for the potency of national sentiment is a second body of research examining everyday resistance by political subordinates to local power or local expressions of supralocal domination. This analytical project, whose preeminent practitioner has been James Scott (1985, 1990), chronicles the omnipresent though often hidden existence of divergent interpretations and subversive discourses. Writes Scott in portraying everyday forms of ideological struggle: "The process by which any system of political or religious beliefs emanating from above is reinterpreted, blended with pre-existing beliefs, penetrated and transformed is characteristic of any stratified society . . . Deviant interpretations—ideological heterodoxy—are hardly astonishing when they arise among subordinate classes which, by definition, have the least stake in the official description of reality" (1985, 319).

These separate projects prompt one to ask how it is possible that members of subordinate classes, on the one hand, respond readily to nationalist calls to action and, on the other, routinely manage to penetrate elite rhetoric and subvert domination. Recent anthropological analyses of nations as imagined communities have sought to overcome

this problem by various means, very often by recourse to a concept that has been broadly employed to understand power relations in complex societies—that of "cultural hegemony."