Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization [Paperback]

In 1983 Benedict Anderson'sImagined Communitiesrevolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that print capitalism fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, inRepresented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on imagined communities underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the self-determining nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.

John D. Kellyis an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author ofA Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji.

Martha Kaplanis an associate professor of anthropology at Vassar College and the author ofNeither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji.

In the year 2000, Fiji was the site of chaos: a coup d'état; martial law; near civil war; local takeovers of police stations, factories, resorts, even military bases. Why has the social contract of the nation-state been unsustainable there? What is this social contract in real history, especially since World War II?

This book reconfigures the issues for the anthropology of nations and nationalism, away from nationalism as the culture of modernity, toward the nation-state as an artifact of American power. Benedict l£'