Lecture
Imagined Communities — is a concept within the theory of the nation, developed by Benedict Anderson in the book of the same name, in which he examines the nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of it. The first edition of Anderson's book “Imagined Communities” was published in 1983. The second edition — in 1991. The work was translated into Russian in 2001.
Anderson notes the difficulty of defining the nation as a concept and offers the following definition in his work: “an imagined political community, and imagined as inherently limited, yet at the same time sovereign”.
An imagined community differs from a real community because it cannot be based on the everyday communication of its members. All communities larger than primordial villages united by face-to-face contact (and perhaps even they) — are imagined. The members of a community hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. The 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”, notes Anderson.
These communities are imagined as something limited and at the same time sovereign. Limited — because the nation always presupposes the existence of other nations. The nation — is not all of humanity, and the specificity of its phenomenon lies precisely in its being set against other nations. Sovereign — because nations always strive for autonomy. The guarantee of this autonomy — is the sovereign state.
Moreover, nations are a community because “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may exist within each nation, 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”.
“Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined”, concludes Anderson. In the main part of his work he explains the nature of the formation of nations. At the turn of the 18th—19th centuries, there was a crisis of religious world-view in America and Europe, and the idea of the nation became an alternative for people. The printing of books began to unite languages and people, which also allowed the ideas of separate nations, speaking different languages, to take hold. “And it was these fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, who formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community”, writes Anderson.
According to Anderson's theory of imagined communities, the main causes of the emergence of nationalism are the declining importance of privileged access to certain languages (such as Latin) owing to the mass increase in literacy; a movement directed at eradicating ideas of rule by divine right, such as hereditary monarchy; the use of the printing press to advance capitalism (“the convergence of capitalism and print technologies … the standardisation of national calendars, clocks and language was embodied in books and the publications of daily newspapers”) — all these are phenomena occurring with the start of the industrial revolution.
According to Anderson, the emergence of nations became possible as a result of a changed perception of time (Anderson refers to the concept of “homogeneous, empty time” from Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History”) and the appearance of print capitalism.
In chapter 3, "The Origins of National Consciousness", Benedict Anderson examines this in more detail.
Being one of the earliest forms of capitalist enterprise, book publishing experienced to the full the restless search for markets inherent in capitalism. The first printers established branches throughout Europe: “thereby a veritable “international” of publishing houses was created, which scorned national [sic] boundaries”.
And in this transformation Martin Luther was a central figure. His writings made up no less than a third of all the books in German sold between 1518 and 1525. In the period from 1522 to 1546, 430 complete or partial editions of his translations of the Bible were published. “Here, for the first time, we encounter a truly mass reading public and a popular literature accessible to everyone”. As a result, Luther became the first best-selling author known as such. Others quickly followed in the direction indicated by Luther; they unleashed a colossal religious propaganda war, which engulfed the whole of Europe in the following century. In this titanic “battle for the souls of men”, Protestantism always conducted itself on the offensive, since it knew what benefit could be derived from the growing market for printed matter in the vernacular, which was being created by capitalism.
In chapter 4 of the book, Benedict Anderson examines the role of the new American states of the late 18th — early 19th centuries. The role of these countries aroused interest in Anderson, since it is apparently almost impossible to explain their emergence by those two factors which — probably because of their direct derivation from the European nationalisms of the mid-century — to a considerable extent determined the provincial European understanding of the rise of nationalism. Firstly, whether we speak of Brazil, the USA, or the former colonies of Spain, in all these cases language was not the element differentiating them from their respective imperial metropoles. All of them, including the USA, were Creole states, which were created and led by people who shared a common language and common origin with those against whom they fought.
The development of Anderson's theory of nationalism is connected with his view that neither Marxist nor liberal theory is able to give an adequate explanation of this phenomenon. Criticising the theory of nationalism as a theory resting on fiction, Benedict Anderson began work on the book, wishing to understand the nature of the armed conflicts between the communist regimes of China, Vietnam and Kampuchea/Cambodia in 1978—1979.
Benedict Anderson arrived at his theory because he believed that neither Marxist nor liberal theory gives an adequate explanation of nationalism.
Anderson falls into the “historical” or “modernist” school of nationalism together with Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, since he argues that nations and nationalism are products of modernity and were created as means for achieving political and economic goals. This school stands opposed to the primordialists, who believe that nations, if not nationalism, have existed since early human history. Imagined communities can be regarded as a form of social constructionism on a par with Edward Said's concept of imagined geographies.
Unlike Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson is not hostile to the idea of nationalism and does not believe that nationalism has become obsolete in a globalising world. Anderson values the utopian element in nationalism.
According to Harald Bauder, the concept of imagined communities remains highly relevant in the contemporary context of how nation states shape and articulate their identity in relation to domestic and foreign policy, for example, policy regarding immigrants and migration. According to Euan Hague, “Anderson's concept that nations are “imagined communities” has become standard in books examining geographical thought”.
Although this term was coined specifically to describe nationalism, it is now used more broadly, almost blurring it together with common interest. For example, it can be used to denote a community based on sexual orientation, or awareness of global risk factors.
The term has influenced other thinkers. The British anthropologist Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle describes such ideas as the “West”, to which agentive status is ascribed, as though they were homogeneous real things, as entity-concepts, where these entity-concepts may have various symbolic meanings attributed to them compared with those attributed to the individuals making up the group, who, on an individual basis, may be perceived differently. Lindley-Highfield explains: “Thus, discourse proceeds on two levels: on one, where ideological disembodied concepts are treated as competing and contesting, possessing their own agency and capable of having agency acting against them; and on another, where people are individuals and may differ from the concepts existing in relation to their broader society”. This differs from Anderson's work in that the application of the term takes place from outside and from the point of view of focusing on the inherent contradiction between the diverging identities of entity-concepts and those who fall under them.
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