Imagined communities

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

1 Overview
2 Context of Anderson's theory
3 References
4 See also

[edit] Overview

An imagined community is different from a small group 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 to understand 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".^[2]

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."^[3]

The main causes of the nationalism that derives from the existence of imagined community are the reduction of privileged access to particular script languages (such as Latin) due to mass 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.

[edit] 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 constructivism on a par with Edward Said's concept of imagined geographies.

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 to 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. As Smith considers nations as the product of modernity, he falls into the "modernity" school.

Thus, Eric Hobsbawm shows 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.