Table of Contents
Imagined Communities functions primarily as a text on the creation and experience of what is considered modern nationalism. Anderson begins by emphasizing the remarkable political durability and emotional appeal of the idea of the nation before moving into an analysis on the imagined projection and eventual realization of “nation.” One of the critical tenets of Anderson’s thesis is the fact that nationalism is not something material or even natural, as is often posited, but rather an idea that exists at the intersection of culture and psychology.
The national community has to be imagined because every member cannot know each other personally, so there has to be a level of an imagined community so that a population can bear in mind the thought of mutual connection. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson posits that the nation is a relatively new reality. He discusses how the 17th and 18th century saw the dissolution of earlier structures of political bodies that were heavily influenced by a sacred linguistic expression, sacred ontology and dynastic control, and sense of historical ephemerality shaped by cosmology. Concrete conditions and a rationalist interpretation of ‘homogenous empty time’ built the framework where people could mentally visualize themselves as part of an ‘imagined community.’ It is through the development of print-capitalism—the professional, mass production of newspapers and the novel and the spread of colloquial print languages—that people could think of themselves and relate to others in diverse manners.
No longer were physical boundaries so confining. This potential to realize complementary and multiple realities linked people to one another and created this concept of an ‘imagined community.’ Anderson’s analysis argues that nationalism supplanted fresh perceptions of secular prestige for these earlier theological and dynastic aspirations, and to that point, nationalism is less of a youthful structure of thought than an explicit result of the recent geographical and technological redistribution of human ability.
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Benedict Anderson’s Fundamental Work on the Idea of “Imagined Communities”
displayed how emphatically collective impressions of belonging determine the development of compelling nationalisms. That the imagination explicitly engages in this process is powerful; the predictions governed by imagination can span generations and differences. This aspect of Anderson’s work is foundational in relation to the modern diaspora, which constructs its sense of identity through imagination and memory, thereby creating a new nation completely defined by their imagined community. Imagined Communities stimulated attention to the dynamics of socially and culturally organized imagination as processes at the heart of political culture, self-understanding, and solidarity.
This has an influence beyond the study of nationalism as a significant innovation in understanding ‘social imaginaries.’ Anderson’s approach, however, maintained strong emphases on material conditions that shape culture, and on institutions that facilitate its reproduction. For Anderson, the question was how commonality—or identity or society itself—was critically imagined and through this conception given shape and solidity. Part of what he wanted to show was that while nationalism and national identity were created in a psychological realm, they had underpinnings in real, material conditions.
Anderson’s argument find finds its footing in Rousseau’s theoretical work regarding the political psychology of this national subconscious, the imagined community. He, like Anderson, primarily argues for the crucial role that the imagination plays in political identity. While he tends to favor small, tightly knit communities, his psychology of citizenship allows for the development of larger cooperative bonds, which includes the possibility of modern nationalism, though he would not consequently have approved of the ideology. Anderson departs from Rousseau’s depiction in that his approach that nations are imagined communities allows people to move beyond some fixed characteristics in defining a nation, like race or ethnicity, or religion.
This sort of imagined community does not necessarily demand that people are “like us” in an objective sense, which can subsequently allow one to conceptualize a more comprehensive community that is not fundamentally a race-based or ethnically “pure” society. Ernest Gellner also provided some work on the ideas of nations, but he notes that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist”, equating this creation with fabrication. Anderson counters this idea by discussing that the nation is imagined makes it no less authentic or legitimate. Because modern communities larger than the pre-modern villages composed direct contact are intrinsically imagined to some degree, communities are distinguished not by their illegitimacy/authenticity, but by the way in which they are imagined by the people.
Because of this, Anderson has not only contributed to the fields of politics and international relations, but also has opened up a new area of inquiry that is closer to the concerns of cultural criticism than to those of traditional social sciences. The fact remains that nationalism is an idea powerful enough to have induced millions to die in its name. How such an imagined reality came to be a lived reality is Anderson’s chief goal and main concern, though it seems that some of his overarching questions go unanswered and fall to some degree of over-generalizations.
Works Cited
- Calhoun, Craig. ‘The Importance of Imagined Communities – and Benedict Anderson.’ Annual Review. Debats. Revista De Cultura, Poder I Societat 1 (2016): 11-16.
- Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Wong, Cara J. ‘The Boundaries of Imagined Communities.’ Boundaries of Obligation in American.
