The historiography on politicized ethnicities in Southeast Asia has for a long time gone hand in hand with the story of nationalism. Colonial rule was believed to have introduced the kinds of registers that stemmed from the Enlightenment into non-Western societies. Colonial ethnographers divided up populations by languages and culture, sometimes deciding that one or another embodied the genuine national identity. Benedict Anderson, working with indigenous literature and new research on the Southeast Asian geobody, introduced the notion that nationalism was a socially constructed political community. Like religious communities, it was an imagined community, in that any one member felt they were part of a larger, horizontal group whose full membership transcended their personal acquaintance.