![]() Between 19, the traditional words krung and muang largely disappeared, because they imagined dominion in terms of sacred capitals and visible, discontinuous population centres. ![]() “Thongchai notes that the vectoral convergence of print-capitalism with the new conception of spatial reality presented by these maps had an immediate impact on the vocabulary of Thai politics. ![]() The task of, as it were, ‘filling in’ the boxes was to be accomplished by explorers, surveyors, and military forces… Triangulation by triangulation, war by war, treaty by treaty, the alignment of map and power proceeded.” “Ever since John Harrison’s 1761 invention of the chronometer, which made possible the precise calculation of longitudes, the entire planet’s curved surface had been subjected to a geometrical grid which squared off empty seas and unexpected regions in measured boxes. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.” “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. ![]() “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” “In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following / definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” ![]()
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