English integrated edition · v003
Chapter 29. Nation and Community: Long-Term Interaction, Shared Memory, and Boundary Generation
It is easy to speak too hastily about nations. At the mention of a nation, some people think of descent, ancestors, language, customs, and shared origins. Others turn to state registration, identity cards, household registration, policy classifications, and administrative identification. Still others describe the nation directly as a concealment of class contradictions, regarding it as a false community formed when class contradictions are concealed. Another account portrays the nation as a pure victim, as if the community consisted only of harm and humiliation. Interpreters who adopt these images have each extracted certain real differences. The problem arises when users give any one image a monopoly on explanation, allowing it to occupy the place of the national community itself.
Closely related ancestry does not automatically generate a shared language, shared memory, shared protection, or demands of responsibility. The state can identify, name, register, administer, or protect certain positions within national communities, but administrative fields cannot substitute for community. Interpreters using class theory can extract differences in labor, property, power, and resources, and can point out how those wielding power may exploit national narratives. But they cannot reduce a national community to a class illusion. Differences of region, language, social stratum, religion, way of life, political position, and generation also exist within a nation. The real existence of a community has never depended on its members being identical. National communities may form through long-term interaction, multiple layers of relaying, language, rites and customs, shared memory, shared harm, shared protection, demands of responsibility, experiences of boundaries, and intergenerational write-back. Migration routes, marriage networks, family education, local communities, commemorative rituals, and external pressures are common entry points through which differences enter this network; they are not an exhaustive list. The reality of a nation does not depend on a fixed essence. It can be traced along concrete nodes and relational chains: how differences are preserved over time, where they are translated, extracted, or certified, and how they enter into consequences.
II. A Nation Involves Interaction Through Multiple Layers of Relaying, Not Direct Interaction Among Everyone
A nation is a network of long-term interaction; it does not require all its members to know one another. Once a community grows in scale, no one can interact directly with every other member through meetings, conversation, mutual assistance, or conflict. It is through the relaying of differences across multiple layers of nodes that the community can continue. Within these processes, family members preserve forms of address, ancestral memories, and experiences of boundaries. Members of local communities and those who keep records preserve accents, rites and customs, marriage networks, burial grounds, and local history. School personnel and procedures preserve language norms, institutional classifications, and official accounts. Traders in markets preserve mutual translation, trading practices, relations of trust, and contact across groups.
A child hears his grandmother repeatedly mention certain place names at the dinner table, takes examinations using standardized written language at school, is registered under a particular ethnic category on forms, and translates for his elders at the market. What he encounters are not repeated versions of the same content. Nodes such as family, school, market, and state registration each extract, format, or downweight different differences, so that several relational chains handle his position in the community at the same time. Meanwhile, organizers and participants in rituals and commemorations preserve harm, protection, heroes, failures, and shared shame. Migrants and those who help one another along the way preserve routes, places to settle, relations of mutual assistance, and external pressures. Marriage networks bring boundaries into evaluations among kin and long-term responsibilities.
Abstract classification can also place many people in the same classification field without necessarily involving interaction that can continue. Real communities usually require relational chains, preservation nodes with concrete carriers, mechanisms of mutual translation, demands to bear responsibilities together, and memories that later people can extract anew. Even members of a nation who have never met may enter into connected consequences through the multiple layers of relaying described above. Such connection does not guarantee solidarity, still less does it eliminate conflict. But it differs from belonging to an abstract category whose members share only a name.
In a small border town, several languages may be present at once: older people bargain in one language at the produce market, young people take examinations in another at school, government service counters use standardized written language, and weddings and funerals preserve yet another set of forms of address and rites. Schools use uniform teaching materials, while families still teach children the stories of their forebears. When a commemorative date arrives, some attend public ceremonies, some light lamps at home, and others remain silent. These are not the background to questions concerning nations. They are the concrete relational fields in which differentiating units concerning nations are preserved, extracted, certified, and written back.
What the child hears from his grandmother is not a complete history, but recurring place names, a few sentences that must not be forgotten, a name connected with the loss of kin, an escape, and an experience of being protected by others. He may not fully understand, yet these words have already left differences at the family node that can be extracted later. The school requires him to write history according to its teaching materials, enter an ethnic category on forms, and answer questions in a uniform language. It also provides channels to examinations, further schooling, opportunities in the city, and public expression. School does not merely suppress family memory, but it does recast a complex community into forms that can be managed, graded, and registered.
At the market, the child translates for his parents and older people. On commemorative dates, he hears public accounts during the day and relatives' memories at night. When romantic relationships and marriage come under evaluation, relatives remind him which names must not be forgotten and which relationships will provoke comment. If conflict breaks out at the border, he may also be required to declare a position. The same position within a national community is thus repeatedly extracted, downweighted, translated, certified, and written back through family, school, market, commemoration, romantic relationships and marriage, state registration, and conflict. It neither grows fully formed from bloodline all at once nor is decided once and for all by a registration field; it gradually acquires real weight along multiple relational chains.
The temporal sequence in the small town also matters. First, at home, the child hears fragments about migration and being protected; later he learns institutional classifications at school, then repeatedly practices negotiation across languages at the market. Commemorative dates and discussions of romantic relationships and marriage extract anew the names he heard earlier, while border conflict may change the weights of these differences within a short time. Traces left by an earlier node become materials that a later node can use, revise, or reject.
More concretely, the grandmother chooses which names to repeat, teachers decide which answers earn marks, staff at service counters confirm institutional status according to form fields, and stallholders and border traders decide in each transaction whether to switch languages. Relatives reaffirm or relax boundaries in discussions of romantic relationships and marriage; ritual organizers arrange who stands at the front and whose names are read out. The community does not operate on its own apart from these people. It is their individually limited, potentially conflicting actions that give differences different weights and make the child bear concrete consequences concerning further schooling, trust, romantic relationships and marriage, and declarations of position.
A form of address may preserve an order of seniority; a place name may index migration; a story may preserve an experience of being harmed or protected. Language preserves not only vocabulary but also kinship relations, forms of politeness, a sense of shame, jokes, taboos, prayers, and judgments about life. Language is not the sole essence of a nation, but it is often an important node of community. The continuity of a national community depends on the preservation of differences. These differences do not exist only in books; they also enter language, forms of address, place names, stories, rites and customs, burial grounds, markets, schools, family education, commemorative rituals, and state registration.
Family education allows migration, war, famine, humiliation, protection, flight, marriage, taboos, and kindness received to leave traces across generations. These do not necessarily enter formal history, yet may gain weight again on commemorative dates, in conflicts, in choices about romantic relationships and marriage, or in language disputes. Rites, customs, and commemorations preserve shared rhythms: when to gather, how to mourn, how to offer blessings, which names are read out, and which harms must not be forgotten all make community memory available for repeated extraction. Villages, neighborhoods, small border towns, temples, markets, burial grounds, and monuments are likewise not passive spaces, but nodes at which differences can be seen, remembered, and certified.
State registration is another powerful node. Household registration, identity cards, school forms, policy classifications, language education, local autonomy, cultural protection, and administrative boundaries may all change the institutional visibility of a national community and its consequences. After registration, a language may enter the curriculum, certain rituals may receive protection, and people able to connect with policy provisions may gain standing to represent others. At the same time, complex internal differences may be compressed into a uniform label, while marginal members whose registration is unclear may find it difficult to obtain resources. The state can format differences pertaining to national communities, but it cannot exhaust the community networks that precede or lie beyond registration.
This formatting also changes modes of preservation in turn. School procedures may bring a language into the curriculum. Families may explain their origins anew for registration, further schooling, or migration. Organizers of rituals and commemorations may also adjust forms of preservation in accordance with protection or registration procedures. Some thereby gain the conditions for public transmission across generations, while others fall at the margins of a label because of accent, mixed marriage, or missing documents. Preservation has never meant sealing up the original unchanged. Every act of telling, registration, teaching, or commemoration may preserve one part and rewrite another, leaving new entry points for the next extraction.
Family members decide which language children speak at home, and people at the market continue to use familiar forms of address for regular customers. People and organizations that maintain burial grounds, organize stories, or carry out protection procedures enable inscriptions, place names, and elders' memories to continue. These everyday actions give preservation continuing carriers and show that the same difference takes different forms at different nodes.
Shared memory does not speak automatically, nor do boundaries harden on their own. Organizers of commemorative activities decide which names enter public rituals: specific people and nodes always carry out extraction, naming, interpretation, and certification. Defining an event as shared harm, naming a particular act as betrayal, judging that someone does not sufficiently belong to "us," and deciding what to commemorate, what to remain silent about, and who may speak for the community are determinations of standing. They are more than differences of opinion: they assign different weights to memories, draw boundaries, and allocate demands of responsibility to specific members.
Within families, elders may interpret ancestral stories, while those who educate children at home choose which words to pass on. In ritual and local life, religious figures interpret rites and taboos, and local elders explain burial grounds, place names, marriage, and kinship boundaries. These forms of standing to interpret are not the same. Schools and teaching materials provide official accounts; state registration personnel use form fields to format complex communities into institutional categories; intellectuals and writers organize scattered memories into texts that can circulate. Witnesses to disasters, migration, protection, and conflict may also gain strong interpretive authority. Who recounts a memory and the form in which it circulates therefore bear on standing to interpret the past, certify responsibilities, and draw boundaries. Power within national-community networks is not expressed only through possession of resources.
Interpretive authority is not held stably by any single node. Young people may reject elders' accounts; local memory may not fully coincide with teaching materials; women's experiences may be downweighted in public commemorations; and representatives may overlook the memories of marginal groups. Struggles over shared memory themselves change the community: certain harms become public, while other experiences retreat into the family; certain names become representative, while other members become difficult to see. Acknowledging the national community as a real network also requires acknowledging certification, downweighting, contestation, and revision within that network.
Members of a national community, families and those who pass things on across generations, recorders, educators, organizers, and participants in commemorative activities do more than preserve memory: they also put forward demands to bear responsibilities together. This is not an inborn obligation deduced from the name of a nation, still less does it mean that as soon as someone belongs, they are naturally obliged to meet every demand the community makes. The pressure of responsibility usually forms in concrete events. Shared memory, shared harm, shared protection, and experiences of boundaries are extracted anew, bringing certain differences that previously carried less weight into present consequences. Demands of responsibility have relational sources and must also have boundaries; they cannot expand without limit in the name of community.
External insults may extract shared humiliation, protection, and pressure to respond, while boundary conflicts may rapidly give demands for shared defense greater weight. Prohibitions on the use of a language, or attacks on burial grounds, monuments, schools, and religious sites, may likewise assign renewed weight to shared protection. Dangers during migration, mutual assistance during disasters, and protection under pressure also become grounds for later demands to bear responsibilities together. These events cannot create a community out of nothing, but they can push long-preserved differences into the foreground along existing nodes and relational chains.
Family members, local communities, school procedures, religious organizations, and people and organizations providing protection may all put forward or transmit demands. Those who make demands command different capacities for certification and different resources, so the weight of their demands differs accordingly. The same statement, "Everyone should bear responsibility," imposes different costs on members facing the pressures of care, schooling, poverty, or mixed marriage. Whether a demand is valid also depends on whether those to whom it is addressed can respond, refuse, or propose alternative ways of bearing responsibility.
Demands to bear responsibilities together can protect people and can also oppress them. They can give members support in danger, but may also force individuals to accept a single narrative, downweight internal dissent, or bear obligations beyond their relational positions. To judge whether a demand is valid, one cannot consider only whether it is made in the name of the nation. One must also ask: which memory has been extracted, who extracted it, which nodes certify it, along what relational chains the demand travels, who bears the burden, and which counterexamples and internal differences call for calibration. The reality of a community cannot provide advance justification for any boundless demand of responsibility.
The appearance of differences does not mean that the boundaries of national communities must harden. Bridging nodes within the network allow many differences to coexist over time. Bilingual people sustain translation between languages, and intermarried families allow kinship relations to cross certain boundaries. Market transactions maintain everyday contact among people with different rites and customs; shared schools allow children to learn about one another within the same institutional space; and mixed communities allow ways of life gradually to adapt in streets and markets. Kin across localities, migration routes, border traders, translators, and experiences of shared defense may also reconnect relational chains that were previously dispersed.
The child translating for his parents in the small border town is a tiny bridging node. He has not eliminated differences; he merely allows them still to pass through. He understands his grandmother's speech and can use the written language required at school. He knows the silences in family commemorations and the standardized accounts used in public rituals. When bridging works, different languages can be translated into one another, different rites and customs can accommodate one another, historical memories that do not fully coincide can temporarily coexist, and marriage networks still leave room for negotiation among kin. Connections between communities do not require their members to become the same kind of people.
The boundaries of national communities do not arise directly from abstract definitions. The generation and hardening of boundaries are consequences that call for explanation; they carry no inherent legitimacy. While languages remain mutually translatable, forms of address, jokes, rites, and stories still have a chance of being understood. After mutual translation fails, misunderstandings accumulate, forms of address become insults, stories can no longer be shared, and differences may acquire greater weight. Shared memories, too, may fail to gain mutual recognition: the harm remembered by one side is denied by the other, and the sacrifices commemorated by one side are mocked. The past then re-enters the present through historical indices.
When bridging nodes come under suspicion or attack, are severed, or are forced to declare a position, this makes it easier for differences to turn into hard boundaries. In ordinary times, trade can take place in markets, people can coexist in schools, and local mediators can still speak. After conflict arises, translators may be viewed with suspicion over where they stand, intermarried families may face pressure from both sides, and previously overlapping networks of life may be forced to choose sides. Whether differences lead to exclusionary consequences cannot be assessed merely by comparing the magnitude of the differences themselves. One must also examine whether mutual translation continues, whether bridging remains effective, and whether everyday relational chains still allow members to maintain multiple connections.
When demands of responsibility cannot extend further, boundaries are redrawn as well. When the same event occurs, some consider protection necessary, while others regard it as none of their concern; some understand it as shared humiliation, while others recognize only victimization within a limited scope. Once the joint bearing of responsibilities goes unrecognized, the existing "we" may shrink or split. Pressures such as external insults, expulsion, prohibitions on language use, and deprivation of commemorative space do indeed rapidly draw a normally loose community tighter. Yet what these pressures extract is still memory, experiences of protection, and boundary differences preserved within existing networks.
Boundary hardening cannot be summed up in a single phrase about collective emotion. What pushes differences toward different consequences may be school procedures, state registration and enforcement procedures, local mediators, family members, and the people and organizations that enforce language bans, carry out attacks, exclude, or protect. These actions sometimes amplify one another and sometimes offset one another. Only by tracing who made which decisions and how those decisions traveled to the next node can we adequately explain why soft boundaries turned into real exclusion. People who are expelled, members whose romantic relationships and marriages are obstructed by boundary evaluations, and students forbidden to use their language experience boundary hardening as a contraction of their concrete action spaces.
The rupture of bridging nodes makes the processes described above harder to buffer. Once the aforementioned bridging nodes cease to function, differences that could previously be negotiated may become boundaries requiring a declaration of position. Boundary hardening can sometimes provide necessary protection; it can also produce exclusion, misrecognition, and new illusory explanatory constructions. Explaining how boundaries form does not mean accepting every boundary as reasonable. Analysis must also examine which real harms a boundary has extracted, and which internal differences and still-existing bridging relations it has downweighted.
Acknowledging that a national community really exists must not be turned into the claim that a nation is completely homogeneous internally. Differences of social stratum, gender, region, language, religion, political position, and generation may coexist within a community. Under external pressure, "solidarity" may become a demand carrying high weight, while women's circumstances, differences between rich and poor, local conflicts, internal domination, and young people's dissent are downweighted. These differences do not disappear because the community faces an external threat; it may simply be temporarily difficult for them to enter public accounts.
Nor can the existence of internal differences prove, conversely, that a national community is false. The reality of a community does not require its members to have the same interests, memories, or positions on every issue. It depends on whether long-term relational chains, shared memory, recognition and boundaries, demands of responsibility, and the capacity for write-back can be extracted in concrete events and change consequences for members. A community can be deeply divided internally and still form real connections through external harm, shared protection, or disputes over commemoration. The same member may also move closer to or farther from the community's center in different relational fields.
Calibration must resist two forms of compression at once: one swallows internal differences because it sees the community; the other cancels the community because it sees internal differences. The former readily treats representatives' voices as those of all members. The latter reduces to fiction relations that can be transmitted across generations and enter into consequences. A more reliable judgment should trace concrete nodes: which differences find expression, which members can participate in certification, which responsibilities are distributed unequally, and which dissenting views are preserved or erased. A national community is a real network. Explanations of that network, and judgments of certification and responsibility within it, must also remain subject to calibration through internal counterexamples.
National communities depend heavily on the preservation of past differences. Migration, war, humiliation, protection, alliances, turning away, disasters, heroes, failures, language bans, boundary conflicts, and shared commemorations may ordinarily be scattered across language, stories, place names, burial grounds, festivals, family education, school teaching materials, local rumors, and state archives. These aspects of the past do not carry forward automatically. They acquire present weight only when located and extracted anew through historical indices in new events.
A language dispute may extract memories of prolonged suppression; a boundary conflict may bring ancestral experiences of victimization back into judgment; a dispute over commemoration may evoke shared humiliation and shared protection; and a choice about romantic relationships or marriage may trigger boundary evaluations preserved in kinship networks. A historical index is not history itself, still less the past's automatic domination of the present. Different nodes can extract different parts of the same past and give them different weights. Some memories become public, some circulate only within families, and others may remain silent for a long time.
If the results of present handling are preserved by members, families and those who pass things on across generations, recorders, educators, organizers, or institutional personnel as differences that can be extracted again in the future, write-back has already formed. Preservation does not guarantee that they will take effect in the future. Conflict may change the next generation's understanding of boundaries, and protection may become grounds for later demands of responsibility. Turning away may leave lasting distrust, while adjustments to registration or the cancellation of commemorations may form new shared memories. Individual positions change in this process as well. A person's declaration of position in a dispute, silence, protection, romantic relationships or marriage, or identity registration may all be preserved and reevaluated by these specific people. Those involved thus not only inherit the past but also continually leave behind new pasts.
Only when specific people or procedures identify, extract, interpret, or assign weight to these contents anew in later events does the content of write-back take effect again, bringing today's determinations into tomorrow's qualifications, risks, recognition, and action spaces. It is not the abstract noun "community" that accomplishes write-back. Family members tell children about experiences of protection; local community members and commemorative organizers preserve names; school procedures handle public accounts; registration personnel adjust identity records; and marriage and kinship networks preserve who once stepped forward to mediate.
Deleting a name, rejecting a document offered as proof, or interpreting silence as turning away also narrows the recognition and action space available to the person concerned later. Versions left by different nodes may not agree. What future events extract is then not a single past, but competing historical indices. Someone remembered as a protector may acquire standing to speak; someone remembered as having turned away may encounter distrust when seeking help, pursuing romantic relationships or marriage, or when public representatives are selected. If new testimony, mediation, or shared cooperation emerges later, old evaluations may also be recalibrated. Write-back can reinforce positions while also preserving the possibility of changing them.
The image of a bloodline essence writes the nation as a natural, eternal whole defined by descent, occluding language, education, migration, shared memory, demands of responsibility, and experiences of boundaries. The image of state registration treats classifications on forms as the community itself. Interpreters who adopt this image can see institutional consequences, yet may overlook long-term interaction before and beyond registration. Interpreters who adopt the pure-victim image can extract real harms, but if they write the community as an eternal victim, they downweight internal domination, differences among members, harms inflicted on others, and the possibility that members, organizers, or narrators within the community produce illusory constructions. Fixed images also erase actors from the account, as if "the nation" itself remembered, demanded, excluded, or suffered harm. One then need no longer ask which registration officer handled the fields, which elder downweighted dissent, which organization chose what to commemorate, or which members refused to harm others. Restoring actors to the account does not mean reducing consequences to individual intentions. What must be traced is how individual decisions draw on institutional, kinship, language, and ritual nodes to acquire force beyond the individual.
Real and weighty differentiating units such as labor, wages, employment, property, debt, housing, risk, relations of domination, and the width of available exits provide a material basis. The processes of extracting, assigning weight to, connecting, and compressing them produce explanatory power within a limited scope. The class image is only the output of this process after low-dimensional compression, projection, and naming, and derives its explanatory appeal from this. What is formed is a class image, not class itself. Class does not exist; this does not deny real labor, relations of domination, or community structures. Class theory is Model C in its total-image-subsumption form from the outset. It elevates a limited image into society itself, reducing language, rites and customs, shared harm, shared protection, migration memory, experiences of boundaries, commemorative rituals, and demands of responsibility to subsidiary materials of the total class image. The explanatory power within a limited scope described above cannot change this Model C structure.
Grouping people in similar circumstances into the same class image can form an abstract sameness of category. It cannot thereby generate sustained interaction or interaction that can be relayed, shared memory, mutual recognition, demands of responsibility, and a long-term capacity for write-back. Belonging to the same abstract category does not mean belonging to the same network. Model C in the other direction uses complexity to cancel judgment, placing valid models, limited models, erroneous models, and junk models on the same level and producing an erasure of distinctions between explanations. The two mechanisms work in opposite directions, yet both destroy comparison, revision, and calibration. Acknowledging the complexity of nations, the limits of explanation, and the need to attend to counterexamples does not belong to this erasure of distinctions. The move into Model C occurs only when complexity is used to cancel valid comparison.
The fact that language, history, registration, internal differences, and external pressures all enter into questions concerning nations does not mean that they carry the same operative weight in every event. Even when an explanation cannot exhaust everything, it can still distinguish which differences enter into consequences, which nodes have effects, and along what relations pressures are transmitted. It is only by making boundaries public and accepting counterexamples that comparison can continue and materials can revise the original judgment.
The child in the border town bears different burdens in the family, at service counters, and in the streets and markets. Judgments about community, too, must be examined in relation to events. A language dispute may give greater weight to language nodes, schools, family education, state policies, and shared memory. In a boundary conflict, shared harm, shared protection, external pressures, state enforcement, and local networks may transmit consequences more directly. Disputes over commemoration involve historical indices, public space, state recognition, and demands of responsibility; disputes over romantic relationships and marriage may unfold along kinship networks, rites and customs, local evaluations, and experiences of boundaries. In dealing with state registration, schooling, conflicts involving migration, or external insults, one must likewise determine the relational-field window according to the circumstances. The same set of weights cannot cover every question concerning nations.
Once the event has been identified, valid comparison requires assessing which key differences an explanation has extracted, which nodes and relational chains it has traced, and what it has downweighted. It must explain how differences are preserved, translated, certified, and written back: who extracts which differentiating units, which nodes preserve or certify them, and along what relational chains consequences travel; which historical indices are gaining weight again in the present; and which evaluations within the community are being preserved by members, recorders, organizers, or procedures for future extraction. When existing evaluations are retrieved, interpreted, or assigned weight anew in the present, interpreters must also explain who thereby receives protection and who pays the price of being downweighted or forced to declare a position.
Testing an explanation means examining how it calibrates itself against its own scope when faced with counterexamples. If an explanation claims that everyday interaction between two groups has ceased completely, yet bridging nodes such as bilingual translation or intermarriage continue to function effectively, that counterexample requires a revision of the inference of complete separation. If an explanation assumes that a community has a unified will in a crisis, yet opinions within it have split, its assertion of overall unity must be reexamined. If an explanation directly equates institutional classifications with actual relations, yet the boundaries of state registration and lived networks do not coincide, the explanatory weight of administrative labels must be adjusted. The appearance of a counterexample does not require rejecting an entire explanation wholesale. It requires comparing the counterexample with the boundaries within which the specific proposition is valid, and revising the relevant weights, connections, or scope of judgment on the basis of the materials. Equally, maintaining one's judgment on sound grounds does not amount to rejecting counterexamples.
Among ordinary limited explanations, an explanation in terms of bloodline can address certain kinship accounts, but it must not swallow long-term interaction networks. An explanation in terms of state registration can account for institutional positions, but shared memory and demands of responsibility beyond registration must still be retained. A cultural explanation can extract language, rites, and customs; if it writes a nation as a static display of customs, it oversteps its own boundaries. A narrative of victimization can preserve real harms, but it cannot dismiss internal differences, internal domination, or the risk of illusory construction within the community. These ordinary limited explanations must all make their boundaries public and accept counterexamples.
The real weight of differences in resources, labor, and domination must likewise be examined within the relations described above. Even when interpreters using class theory extract these materials, the explanatory power they gain within a limited scope still comes from differentiating units and their extraction, weight assignment, connection, compression, and testing. Reducing a national community to something that conceals class contradictions cannot be inferred from these materials. Class theory's structure of total-image subsumption distinguishes it from ordinary limited explanations. This criticism must itself also undergo testing against materials; invoking the name of Model C cannot dispense with argument. No image may occupy the place of the community itself.
Explanations of nations must ultimately uphold both reality and non-essentialization. Reality requires acknowledging the community consequences formed through long-term interaction, multiple layers of relaying, language, rites and customs, shared memory, shared harm, shared protection, demands of responsibility, experiences of boundaries, and intergenerational write-back. Non-essentialization rejects the confinement of differences among members within total images of descent, registration, culture, victimization, or class; at the same time, it does not permit non-essentialization to be used to deny the community's real existence. Demands of responsibility must be traced to their relational sources and kept within boundaries. History can enter the present only through historical indices. Nor can boundary generation be directly converted into legitimacy. Only by proceeding according to these standards can we understand how a community is established, how its members, organizers, and related procedures provide protection or cause oppression, how community relations split, and how they are revised in new events.