Cle14: Created page with "{{Infobox book | name = Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism | image = [[File:Imagined_Communities.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]..."

2019-03-13T14:13:01Z

Created page with "{{Infobox book | name = Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism | image = [[File:Imagined_Communities.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]..."

New page

{{Infobox book
| name = Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
| image = [[File:Imagined_Communities.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]]
| image_caption =
| author = Benedict Anderson
| translator =
| country =
| language = English
| series =
| publisher = Verso
| pub_date = 2006
| pages = 256
| isbn = 9781784786755
| oclc =
| congress =
}}

:The idea or even feeling of belonging to a group of friends, family, or even people might feel natural to some people. Some researchers such as psychologist Seymour B. Sarason present a theoretical framework that belonging to a community is the foundation of defining the self. Other psychologists such as David McMillian and David Chavis have framed community around the shared interactions of people under four categories: membership, emotions, influence, and needs. The categories explained that people are consistently drawn to identifying as a member with influence upon others, or are influenced upon themselves to fulfill needs of livelihood. While this is a powerful framework in psychology, it leaves room for questioning civilization and communities across time and space. Benedict Anderson, a political scientist and historian from Cornell University proposed a different approach in better understanding the creation of community from a historical perspective in his popular book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Unlike psychologists, Anderson avoid the examination of the individual and their internal minds. He instead focused on the products of being together: nation, nationality, and nationalism. According to Anderson, these terms are difficult to define and analyze. Imagined Communities is not a book to answer all questions about such topics, it was written to “offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory interpretation of the 'anomaly' of nationalism” which has existed since the beginning of recorded human history. (Anderson, 4) This review of his book focuses primarily on his theory and arguments presented throughout the text which he supports through enormous historical accounts of different societies.

:While Anderson admits that that “no "scientific definition" of the nation can be devised,” it is possible to begin examine the concept of nationalism through culture. (Anderson, 3) The book argues that “we need to consider carefully how [cultural artifacts] have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy.” (Anderson, 4) Anderson argued that cultural artifacts, or characteristics towards the end of the eighteenth century “was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces” that “became 'modular,' capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness” across various social planes and merged with various “political and ideological” concepts. (Anderson, 4) Anderson identified these cultural artifacts as print capitalism, provincial elites, and formation of empires chronologically moving towards the 18th century and beyond. The book’s primary thesis and title argued that “nation-ness” is “an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. (Anderson, 6) It should also be important to note that Anderson suggests that the “nation is imagined as limited” because over a billion living human have “finite,” and elastic “boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” which argue against a unified global nation of all humans. (Anderson, 7) Community is “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”. (Anderson, 7) 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.” (Anderson, 6) Anderson concludes that “it is imagined as a community because the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” that makes it possible for millions of people to kill and die. (Anderson, 7)

:Returning to Anderson’s argument that the 18th century was the turning point, he defines communities prior to print-capitalism in the 16th century as pre-nationalistic such that they were formed through sacred scripts and languages such as Latin, Arabic, or Chinese. These pre-nationalistic communities were ruled through a divine monarchy that operated an order based on cosmological relations to space and time. National consciousness according to Anderson is a imaginary and a more recent socially constructed idea beginning with print capitalism. Print capitalism “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others. (Anderson, 36) Anderson credits this to Martin Luther who nailed his 95 theses to the church door resulting in the tripling of German books in two decades. Eventually vernacular languages outweighed and outnumbered traditional Latin texts. Anderson credits print capitalism as the foundation of national consciousness in three ways. First vernacular texts “created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. (Anderson, 44) Next, “print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity” which meant that texts could be infinitely reproduced and transcend space and time to provide a tangible connection for future generations. (Anderson, 44) Finally, vernacular print “created languages-of-power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars” by allowing “dialects closer to the print-language” inevitable domination of its final form. (Anderson, 45)

:The domination of vernacular text eventually dispersed into provincial and national rulers, forcing them to adopt vernacular texts over Latin texts. Self identity emerged with the proliferation of print-capitalism resulting in the formation of dynastic trends leading up to “official nationalism.” Anderson explained that “official nationalism” “was from the start a conscious, self-protective policy, intimately linked to the preservation of imperial-dynastic interests.” (Anderson 2006, 159) While Anderson’s arguments and plethora of examples across time and space provide support of his argument, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Admittedly, Anderson mentions that this text is a sampling of scholarship about the idea of community and nationalism. However, it should be pointed out that his argument stems from a hierarchal top-down approach that is typical of global or theoretical theories covering large swaths of time and space. Often unavoidable in this field, expert scholars can pigeon hole examples that contrasts against Anderson’s framework. While scholars and experts can discredit his theories, Anderson’s goal was to provide a framework of understanding the conception of nationalism, nation, and nation-ness through a historical perspective. The dissolution of sacred texts, divine rule, and cosmological order gave way to print-capitalism, self-identification through vernacular language, and the melting of empires into nations demonstrated the means in which people gathered into socially constructed groups.

Imagined Communities - Revision history

Cle14: Created page with "{{Infobox book | name = Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism | image = [[File:Imagined_Communities.jpg|200px|alt=Cover]..."