Communities Imagined: Reflections on the Origin and Spreading of Nationalism is a book by Benedict Anderson. It introduces a popular concept in political science and sociology, a community that is imagined by its name. It was first published in 1983, and reissued with additional chapters in 1991 and a further version was revised in 2006.
Eric G.E. Zuelow describes this book as "probably the most widely read book on nationalism".
Video Imagined Communities
Imagined nationalism and community
According to Anderson's theory of the imagined society, the main cause of nationalism is the increasing importance of privileged access to certain script languages ​​(such as Latin) because of the vernacular literacy of the masses; movements to abolish the ideas of government with divine rights and hereditary inheritance; and the emergence of print capitalism ("the convergence of capitalism and printing technology... the standardization of national calendar, clock and language embodied in the books and publications of daily newspapers") - all phenomena that occurred with the commencement of the Revolution Industry.
Maps Imagined Communities
Nation as imagined community
According to Anderson, countries are socially constructed. For Anderson, the notion of "nation" is relatively new and is the product of various socio-material forces. He defined a nation as "a conceivable political community - and envisioned as both inherently limited and sovereign". As Anderson says, a nation "is imagined because even the smallest member of the state will never know most of its members, meet them, or even hear them, but in the minds of every life the image of their fellowship." Community members may never know each other directly; However, they may have similar interests or identify as part of the same nation. Members hold in their minds a mental picture of their affinity: for example, nationality feels with the members of your other country when your "imaginary community" participates in larger events like the Olympics.
Countries are "limited" because they have "limited, if elastic boundaries, outside of which lies other countries". They are "sovereign" because no dynastic monarchy can claim authority over them, in the modern period:
... [T] the concept was born in an age in which the Enlightenment and the Revolution destroy the legitimacy of the hierarchical dynasty of the divinely conquered. It comes to maturity at the stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of the universal religion are inevitably confronted with the pluralism of the religions, and alomorphism, between the ontological claims of faith and the stretching of territories, the dreams of the nations. free, and, if under God, directly so. The size and symbol of this freedom is a sovereign state.
Although we may never see anyone in our imaginary community, we still know they are there through communication.
Finally, a nation is a community because,
Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each country, the nation is always understood as a deep horizontal brotherhood. It was finally the brotherhood that made it possible, for the last two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to be killed, willing to die for such a limited imagination.
References
External links
- Reviews about the 2006 edition of the London Review of Books, Vol. 28 No. 18 Ã, Â · September 21, 2006, page 6-8
- A 1983 edition review by Anthony Reid published Pacific Affairs , Vol. No. 58, No. 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 497-499
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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