Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [Paperback]

 

 

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Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is one of the most important and influential books on the phenomenon of nationalism currently in print. The primary contribution he makes concerns the notion of the development of a community with shared or common cultural media that generate a sense of communal self-awareness or consciousness. Although he uses as his primary example the experience of reading a newspaper (which makes readers conscious of others who share their values, concerns, and experiences, even if they have no direct contact with those people, often over a great distance), the imagined community has broader implications.

This book will make you think about how you conceive of the communities you belong to, and how these communities are created and reproduced. Beyond the obvious importance of broadcast media, in modern American culture, the mall, with its ubiquitous chain stores, is an important motor of our imagined American community: you will find the same basic stores, carrying the same basic styles, in every town in America, creating a sense of common tastes and culture.

While some may complain that the book is dry and boring, it is a scholarly work intended for an educated audience. It is not a popularization intended for the general public. Nevertheless, if you are up for it, it is more than worthwhile.

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson seeks to explain the seeds of what he terms "imagined communities," which are for the most part "nations". It is also a careful chronological account of how these seeds grew into actual policies through the breaking apart of the Latin language, the dissemination of mass-media into new ideas of national history, and ultimately how history and language served to preserve national identity. In the first chapter, "Cultural Roots," Anderson claims that the birth of the imagined community is directly linked to Industrialization and its two byproducts, the novel and the newspaper. The novel and the newspaper first made the public aware of simultaneous experiences that allowed them to conceive of themselves as not alone, but rather an entity that worked together. The concept of time as a linear, progressive notion was another result of Industrialization, and Anderson argues that this "calendrical" way of looking at the past was another important factor in imagined communities as it allows groups of people to think of a historic root in national identity. In the following chapter, "Origins of National Consciousness," Anderson takes his point further by arguing that print-capitalism and capitalism in general sought to benefit from growing literacy among "laypeople." In this way it was self-perpetuating in that it created more of a consuming public that, because of its expansion, began to create and shape a national consciousness of its own. Growing population in general led to the development of new languages from Latin, and the new languages thereby helped shape national consciousness as well. In the fourth chapter, "Creole Pioneers," Anderson explains how colonialism, particularly in respect to the United States of America, also contributed to growing populations who were a mix of the colonized and the colonials. In addition to expanding the public further, these "Creoles" also developed separate understandings of nationalism based on the model those who first came to the colonies. From here, author Benedict Anderson explains how, once established, new colonies such as the Americas "pirated" ideas of modernity and antiquity and used them for their own distinct national purposes. Languages were no longer the basis of national identity, but rather these pirated models gained momentum through administrative and educational institutions. In the chapter "Official Nationalism and Imperialism," Anderson explains how this idea of individual/national antiquity and modernity was adopted as a policy for the first time by various ruling classes: "Such official nationalisms were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them." (110) In the chapter "The Last Wave," the idea of this centralizing or "Russifying" of schools and administrative facilities is presented as already established within most of the European and colonized nations, and is shown as well underway in the case of Indonesia. This chapter also explores how "Russifying" of nations also led to another unintentional but financially beneficial necessity, bilingualism. Bilingualism was important at this point because it further explained how language was not the sole root of national consciousness, and also because it allowed for the proliferation of more print-capitalism (and at this stage, other new forms of media) which led to a wider understanding of nationality on the part of the reader. At this point, the idea of nationality and the implementation of imagined communities were firmly in place, but policies were necessarily shifted in order to preserve national identity. In "Patriotism and Racism," Benedict Anderson seeks to explain what motivated already-formed imaginary communities was the future. This look toward the future of individual nations in part explains the use of racism in nationalism, because "The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destines, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations." (149) Alongside racism, patriotism was also necessary to ground national consciousness, and only at this point is language instrumental in preserving national identity because it is now the link to the past and is a vehicle for people to understand the history of their nationality. The last three chapters of Imagined Communities explain how nations preserve their histories in different ways. Benedict Anderson shows how the legacies of dead regimes are actual models upon which revolutionary governments take over and continue to use. In "Census, Map, Museum" we are shown how each of these ways of classifying different nationalities in physical terms "illuminate the late colonial state's style of thinking about its domain." (184) And finally, in memory and forgetting, Benedict Anderson explains how staples of the "imaginary community" are further preserved by the illumination and glorification of certain aspects of history, and the deliberate "forgetting" of incriminating remnants of the past (i.e., the Civil War in America.) Imagined Communities is an straightforward account of how ideas of nationality were first born through print-media and language, how they later became policies, and how they ultimately sought self-preservation through different means.

Benedict Anderson's *Imagined Communities*, perhaps the most important work of political science published in the last 20 years, brings historical good sense and a panoply of meticulously organized facts to bear on the central problem of 20th-century history: namely, the growth and spread of nationalist sentiments in places that did not previously permit such for *several* reasons. Anderson's analysis "undoes" several commonplaces about the nation-state, chief among them that the concept originated in Europe: he locates the critical "fusion" of people and state as occurring with the anti-colonial movement around Simon Bolivar in 19th century Latin America, rather than the earlier movement for independence of the British colonies which formed the United States.

However, to Anderson's mind the character of one of the modern world's more curious institutions is not entirely without import for understanding nationalist movements, as they almost without exception employ concepts of territorial and cultural integrity which did not exist prior to colonial regimentation: the scope and extent of today's India has more to do with the British Raj than the Moghuls. But perhaps this displacement is in truth somewhat not to the taste of contemporary "interrogators" of the intersection to truth and power, and the art of Anderson's book consists in his leaving the question of national unity unsolved. To my mind one of the most telling instances of democratic sentiment on hand, and a book whose way with you is so short on account of its often-tortured verbiage: gems such as this have other uses, and I can imagine almost no use for this book.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Really important, but really poorly written
This is one of the modern classics on nationalism, and should be required reading for anyone interested in politics, culture (since issues of nationalism permeates absolutely... Read more

Published on Dec 13 2003 by Richard Wright

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but very mediocre
Here is a review of the book that I wrote for my history-writing class.

Benedict Anderson, a professor of International Studies at Cornell University, uses his knowledge and... Read more

Published on Sep 22 2002 by christianwriter

1.0 out of 5 stars An awful book
I think the writing style is pretentious, ostentatious, and rambling. Anderson seems to belittle people and communities who are willing to die for their beliefs- who is he to... Read more

Published on Sep 3 2002

4.0 out of 5 stars Important book
This is an excellent book for understanding the present "state" (no pun intended) of the world. Read more

Published on Aug 7 2002 by A reader

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a great book
I read this book for a college course and I didn't find anything extremely enlightening about it. His arguments were obvious and others were confusing. Read more

Published on Nov 26 2001 by malcolmxxx

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Work in Nailing down Nationalism
In Imagined Communities, Anderson gives a detailed analysis of nation building projects and their relationship to print media. Read more

Published on Nov 23 2001 by Charlotte A. Hu

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent book on nationalism
although i don't proscribe to the ideals of nationalism, being a socialist, this book delves deeply and thoughtfully on an intriguing topic. Read more

Published on Oct 9 2001 by D. Dubei

5.0 out of 5 stars amazing
I was fortunate enough to take a class taught by Ben Anderson (Professor Anderson) at Cornell. And I was introduced to this book in his class. Read more

Published on Sep 13 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterful essay critiques central issue of modern age
Mr. Anderson does not promise or provide answers. If you're looking for a quick answer to the hard questions your professors are asking, you're in the wrong place - and perhaps... Read more

Published on Sep 10 2000 by S. Sturtevant

4.0 out of 5 stars A must for students of nationalism
Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities is an intriguing attempt at explanation of the phenomenon of nations and nationalism. Read more

Published on Feb 14 2000 by stoyan

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