A imagined community is a concept developed by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 Imagined Communities, to analyze nationalism. Anderson describes a nation as a socially constructed community, envisioned by people who consider themselves part of the group.
The media also creates an imagined community, through usually targeting a mass audience or generalizing and addressing citizens as public. Another way that the media can create an imagined community is through the use of images. Media can capture stereotypes through images and certain languages. By displaying certain images, the audience will choose which images are most related to them, furthering the relationship with the imagined community.
Video Imagined community
Origin
According to Anderson, the creation of a imagined community becomes possible because of "print capitalism". Capitalist entrepreneurs print their books and media in everyday language (not an exclusive script language, like Latin) to maximize circulation. As a result, readers who speak various local dialects become able to understand each other, and a common discourse arises. Anderson argues that the first European countries formed around their "national print language".
Maps Imagined community
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.
While trying to define nationalism, Anderson identifies three paradoxes:
"(1) The objective modernity of nations for the eyes of historians versus their subjective eunuchs in the eyes of nationalists (2) universal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept [and] (3) the 'political' power of such nationalism vs. philosophical poverty them and even incoherence. "
Anderson spoke of the Unknown Soldier's grave as an example of nationalism. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers is empty or has unidentified remains, but each country with such warnings claims that these soldiers are their own. No matter what the true origins of the Unknown Soldier are, these countries have put them in their own imaginative community.
Nation as imagined community
He defined a nation as "the imagined political community". 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 identities 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.
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.
Context and effect
Benedict Anderson arrived at his theory because he felt that neither Marxist nor liberal theories explain enough of nationalism.
Anderson falls into the nationalism or "modernist" school of nationalism along with Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm in that he argues that nation and nationalism are the product of modernity and have been created as a means for political and economic purposes. This school stands in opposition to the primordialists, who believe that the nation, if not nationalism, has existed since the beginning of human history. The imagined community can be seen as a form of social constructionism that is equivalent to Edward Said's concept of imagined geography.
In contrast to Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson was not hostile to the idea of ​​nationalism nor did he think that nationalism was obsolete in a globalizing world. Anderson appreciated the utopian element in nationalism.
According to Harald Bauder, the concept of an imagined community is still highly relevant in the contemporary context of how nation-states frame and formulate their identities in relation to domestic and foreign policies, such as policies on immigrants and migration. According to Euan Hague, "The concept of the Anderson countries is 'imagined society' has become the standard in books that cover geographical thinking".
Although the term was coined to describe nationalism in particular, the term is now used more widely, almost obscuring it with a community of interest. For example, it can be used to refer to communities based on sexual orientation, or global risk factor awareness.
See also
- Tradition created
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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