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Information about Imagined Communities

The imagined community is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson which states that a nation is a community socially constructed and ultimately imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.

Overview

Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign".[1] An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. As Anderson puts it, a nation "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".[1]

According to Benedict Anderson, creation of imagined communities became possible because of what he calls "print-capitalism". Capitalist entrepreneurs printed their books and media in the vernacular (instead of exclusive script languages, such as Latin) in order to maximize circulation. As a result, readers speaking various local dialects became capable of understanding each other, and a common discourse emerged.

Anderson argued that the first European nation-states were thus formed around their "national print-languages". This is also a reason that nations have "finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations".[1]

Anderson also tried to explain why nations aspire to have their own states:
[The nation] is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the [direct relationship] between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. (pp. 6-7)


Finally, a nation is not only "imagined", it is imagined as a community because "regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."[1]

The main causes of the nationalism that derives from the existence of imagined community are the reduced import of privileged access to particular script languages (such as Latin) because of mass vernacular literacy; the movement to abolish the ideas of rule by divine right and hereditary monarchy; and the emergence of printing press capitalism — all phenomena occurring with the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Context of Anderson's theory

Benedict Anderson falls into the "historicist" or "modernist" school of nationalism along with Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm in that he posits that nations and nationalism are products of modernity and have been created as means to political and economic ends. This school stands in opposition to the primordialists, who believe that nations, if not nationalism, have existed since early human history. Imagined communities can be seen as a form of social constructionism on a par with Edward Said's concept of imagined geographies.

In contrast to Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson is not hostile to the idea of nationalism nor does he think that nationalism is obsolescent in a globalizing world. Anderson values the utopian element in nationalism.[3]

Anthony D. Smith states that even when nations are the product of modernity, it is possible to find ethnic elements that survive in modern nations. Ethnic groups are different from nations. Nations are the result of a triple revolution that begins with the development of capitalism and leads to a bureaucratic and cultural centralization along with a loss of power by the Catholic Church. Since Smith considers nations as the product of modernity, he falls into the "modernity" school.

Eric Hobsbawm argues that the nation is the product of nationalism, instead of nationalism's being an effect of the nation's mythical original existence. The modern nation was created by the unification of various people into a common society or community, which takes the 19th century nation-state form, forged out of disciplinary institutions such as the school, the army or the factory.

References

1. ^ Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, p. 6. ISBN 0-86091-329-5
2. ^ Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, p. 6-7. ISBN 0-86091-329-5
3. ^ Interview with Benedict Anderson by Lorenz Khazaleh, University of Oslo website

See also

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (born August 261936 in Kunming, China) is a scholar of nationalism and international studies.

Biography

Anderson was born in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and English mother.
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A nation is a form of cultural or social community. Nationhood is an ethical and philosophical doctrine and is the starting point for the ideology of nationalism. Members of a "nation" share a common identity, and usually a common origin, in the sense of ancestry, parentage or
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A community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and
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Imagination is the ability to form mental images. It helps providing meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world,[1][2][3]
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People denotes a group of humans, either with unspecified traits, or specific characteristics (e.g. the people of Spain or the people of the Plains).

The term people is often used in English as the suppletive plural of person.
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A community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and
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Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or locality. In general linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to linguae francae, official standards or global languages. It is sometimes applied to nonstandard dialects of a global language.
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Latin}}} 
Official status
Official language of: Vatican City
Used for official purposes, but not spoken in everyday speech
Regulated by: Opus Fundatum Latinitas
Roman Catholic Church
Language codes
ISO 639-1: la
ISO 639-2: lat
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Nationalism is a term that refers to a doctrine[1] or political movement[2] that holds that a nation—usually defined in terms of ethnicity or culture—has the right to constitute an independent or autonomous political community based on a shared
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Latin}}} 
Official status
Official language of: Vatican City
Used for official purposes, but not spoken in everyday speech
Regulated by: Opus Fundatum Latinitas
Roman Catholic Church
Language codes
ISO 639-1: la
ISO 639-2: lat
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Industrial Revolution was a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation had a profound effect on socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain and subsequently spread throughout the world, a process that
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Historicism is the theory that claims:
  1. that there is an organic succession of developments (also known as historism or the German historismus), and
  2. that local conditions and peculiarities influence the results in a decisive way.

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Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the three decades before 1914.
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Ernest André Gellner (December 9, 1925 – November 5, 1995) was a philosopher and social anthropologist, cited as one of the world's "most vigorous intellectuals" [1] and a "one-man crusade for critical rationalism,"[2] whose first book,
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Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH (born June 9, 1917) is a British Marxist historian and author. Hobsbawm was a long-standing member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain and the associated Communist Party Historians Group. He is president of Birkbeck, University of London.
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Modernity is a term used to describe the condition of being related to modernism. Since the term "modern" is used to describe a wide range of periods, modernity must be understood in its context, the industrial age of the 19th century, and its role in sociology, which since its
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Primordialism is the argument—put forward by both scholars and activists—which contends that nations are ancient, natural phenomena; that one has a nation as obviously as one has a measure of height.
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For the learning theory, see .
Social constructionism or social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge that considers how social phenomena develop in particular social contexts.
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Edward Saïd

Edward Wadie Said
Born: November 1 1935(1935--)
Jerusalem
Died: September 25 2003 (aged 69)
New York City, U.S.
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The concept of imagined geographies has evolved out of the work of Edward Said, particularly his critique on Orientalism. In this term, ‘imagined’ is used not to mean ‘false’ or ‘made-up’, but ‘perceived’.
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Anthony D. Smith (born 1928) is Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicty at the London School of Economics, and is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.
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ethnic group or ethnicity is a population of human beings whose members identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry.[1] Ethnicity is also defined from the recognition by others as a distinct group[2]
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Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH (born June 9, 1917) is a British Marxist historian and author. Hobsbawm was a long-standing member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain and the associated Communist Party Historians Group. He is president of Birkbeck, University of London.
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The word mythology (from the Greek μύθολογία mythología, from μυθολογείν mythologein
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school is an institution where students (or "pupils") learn while under the supervision of teachers. In most systems of formal education, students progress through a series of schools: primary school, secondary school, and possibly a university ,
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An army (from Latin armata "act of arming" via Old French armée), in the broadest sense, is the land-based armed forces of a nation. It may also include other branches of the military such as an air force.
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factory (previously manufactory) or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where workers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another.
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