Imagined communities
From Free net encyclopedia
The Imagined Community is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson which states that a nation is socially constructed and ultimately imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Benedict Anderson falls in 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 led by Anthony Smith, 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 par with Edward Said's concept of imagined geographies.
Thus, Eric Hobsbwam shows that the nation is the product of nationalism, instead of nationalism 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.
According to Benedict Anderson, the main causes of the nationalism which derives from the 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, as well as the emergence of printing press capitalism - all phenomena occurring with the start of the Industrial Revolution.
As Anderson puts it, an imagined community...
...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. . . . The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. It 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. Finally, 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. (pp. 6-7)
References
Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities ISBN 0860913295
See also
- Nation-building
- Ethnogenesis
- Nationalism
- Benedict Anderson
- Ernest Gellner
- Eric Hobsbawm
- Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community (1983)