AT the tomb of the unknown soldier, we are told: there is someone extraordinarily meritorious, but he has no identity. To all practical purposes, he is an empty signifier. Yet almost every nation, or more correctly every idea of nationhood, gives special status to nameless figures buried at these tombs.

The first person to look at this phenomenon was Benedict Anderson. In his famous book, Imagined Communities, he wrote: “Void as these tombs ar