Politics & International Relations
Imagined Communities
"Imagined Communities" is a concept introduced by Benedict Anderson, referring to the idea that nations are socially constructed and imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a shared community. Anderson argues that the sense of belonging to a nation is not based on direct interactions with all fellow nationals, but rather on a shared understanding and perception of belonging to a larger community.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
10 Key excerpts on "Imagined Communities"
eBook - PDFNarrating Peoplehood amidst Diversity
Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
- Michael Böss, Michael Boss, Michael Böss, Michael Boss(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Aarhus University Press(Publisher)
2 Thus, one of the questions to be addressed is: What does it take to re-imagine a people? The concept of an imagined community appears to be very attractive here because if a political community is something imagined, then it also should be possible to re-imagine – that is, to re-shape – such a community. However, in this 1. Bernard Eric Jensen, “History and the Politics of Identity: Reflections on a Contested and Intricate Issue,” in Bruk og misbruk av historien , ed. Sirkka Ahonen et al. (Trondheim: NTNU, 2000), 43‑67. 2. Rosalind Brunt, “The Politics of Identity,” in New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s , ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 150‑153. 26 This page is protected by copyright and may not be redistributed CONTENTS INDEX case we not only need to understand its constituent components; we need to have insight into how it is established and functions in everyday life. Benedict Anderson’s achievement and shortcomings It is now more than 25 years since Benedict Anderson (b. 1936) published his influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na-tionalism . It first appeared in 1983, a second revised and enlarged edition came out in 1991, and a third revised and enlarged edition in 2006. It has been published in 33 countries and in 29 languages. Moreover, its publication has been seen at times as a deliberate attempt to make history. For example, George Soro’s Open Society Institute decided to fund translations of this book into Eastern European languages specifically to further the establishment of pluralist democracies in Eastern Europe. Over the past 25 years Anderson’s book has exerted a remarkable influence upon the theoretical frameworks employed in ongoing research on the building of nation-states and the formation of national identities.
eBook - PDFChanging Parties
An Anthropology of British Political Conferences
- F. Faucher-King(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
44 3 Imagined Communities As we have seen in Chapter 2, selective incentives are insufficient to explain high intensity participation such as conference attendance and it is necessary to invoke collective incentives as well. This highlights the need to use varied theoretical approaches to provide a more compli- cated picture of what goes on. It is surprising, for instance, that the insights provided by research on new social movements is so rarely used when dealing with more established organisations. It is as if collective party identities in such cases are taken as given rather than as constantly worked on and reproduced as is assumed in the case of the Green Party or new social movements. One of the challenges of social analysis is the integration of micro- and macro-perspectives and the articulation of the continuities and discontinuities between the individual level and the social context within which actions take place. The institutionalisation of practices contributes to the construction of social structures that influence in return the ways in which an individual behaves and thinks about the world that she inhabits. Political parties, like national communities, are not based upon face-to-face contact. In his discussion of the rise of national identities, Benedict Anderson famously coined the phrase “imagined community” to emphasise the role played by the imagination in the creation of feelings of solidarity between people who will never meet all the other members of their community. The reference to imagination here does not imply that these communities are false or unreal, but rather that a sense of common identity and destiny emerges from emotional connections that are projected through time and space. Parties, like nations, are “Imagined Communities” because in Anderson’s sense their members “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
eBook - PDF- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Policy Press(Publisher)
107 CHAPTER THREE Imagining the ‘communities’ of citizenship In this chapter, we explore the ‘Imagined Communities’ of citizenship. One of the potent qualities of the idea of citizenship is its capacity to serve as a term through which diferent sorts of collectivities of people and connections between people may be imagined, mobilised and brought into being. Such Imagined Communities are constructed and elaborated in many diferent sites and settings, although this diversity is overshadowed by the persistent articulation of citizenship as a national question (both in academic theory and governmental practice). We begin, then, with questions about these national articulations, launching ourselves from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) famous understanding of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.This conception of Imagined Communities guides us in three directions during the chapter. First, we examine the implications of treating the nation as an imagined community for refections on citizenship. This leads us to recent debates about the fate of the national character of citizenship in what has been described as a ‘post-national’ world. Second, we consider the ways in which the nation is equated with the ‘national level’ as a privileged site of citizenship. Here, we encounter arguments that citizenship is both identifcation with the political community of the nation and practised in relation to national-level institutions, processes and issues. In contrast, we consider such nationalising logics to be part of a form of ‘scalar thinking’ that naturalises a specifc ordering of social and political arrangements and, in the process, diminishes the salience of other sites and scales of social organisation (seeing them as encompassed by the national and the global).
eBook - ePub- Clarke, John, Coll, Kathleen, John Clarke, Kathleen Coll, Evelina Dagnino, Catherine Neveu(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Policy Press(Publisher)
THREE Imagining the ‘communities’ of citizenshipIn this chapter, we explore the ‘Imagined Communities’ of citizenship. One of the potent qualities of the idea of citizenship is its capacity to serve as a term through which different sorts of collectivities of people and connections between people may be imagined, mobilised and brought into being. Such Imagined Communities are constructed and elaborated in many different sites and settings, although this diversity is overshadowed by the persistent articulation of citizenship as a national question (both in academic theory and governmental practice). We begin, then, with questions about these national articulations, launching ourselves from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) famous understanding of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. This conception of Imagined Communities guides us in three directions during the chapter. First, we examine the implications of treating the nation as an imagined community for reflections on citizenship. This leads us to recent debates about the fate of the national character of citizenship in what has been described as a ‘post-national’ world.Second, we consider the ways in which the nation is equated with the ‘national level’ as a privileged site of citizenship. Here, we encounter arguments that citizenship is both identification with the political community of the nation and practised in relation to national-level institutions, processes and issues. In contrast, we consider such nationalising logics to be part of a form of ‘scalar thinking’ that naturalises a specific ordering of social and political arrangements and, in the process, diminishes the salience of other sites and scales of social organisation (seeing them as encompassed by the national and the global). In such views, the local is always ‘merely local’. We explore alternative approaches to the politics of scale: asking how scales are imagined and institutionalised, and how they are contested by alternative political projects.
eBook - PDFImagining Communities
Historical Reflections on the Process of Community Formation
- Gemma Blok, Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Claire Weeda, Gemma Blok, Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Claire Weeda(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Amsterdam University Press(Publisher)
The web enabled people to engage in new forms of ‘social solidarity that transcended and encompassed all previous kinds of human association’. Scholars have likewise argued that Anderson’s concept of the imagined community is relevant outside the realm of nationalism studies as well, and can be applied, for instance, to transnational networks of scientists, or school communities. 17 This dovetails with Anderson’s own statement that ‘in fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’. 18 The act of imagining: The intent and content of this volume One underexplored aspect in Anderson’s work, in our view, is the question how the imagining of communities works . Although Anderson’s work discusses the perceived vital building blocks of an imagined community, such as a 15 D.L. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford, 2005), 19-73. 16 H. Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electric Frontier , rev. ed. (Cam-bridge, MA. 2000). 17 M. Broersma and J.W. Koopmans, Identiteitspolitiek: Media en de constructie van gemeen-schapsgevoel (Hilversum, 2010); S. Dorn et al., School as Imagined Communities: The Creation of Identity, Meaning, and Conflict in U.S. History (New York, 2006). 18 Anderson, Imagined Communities , 6. 12 GEMMA BLOK, VINCENT KUITENBROUWER AND CLAIRE WEEDA shared notion of time, the availability of print media and rituals that entice ‘horizontal comradeship’, he of fers little understanding of how these factors relate to one another in the alchemy of community formation. His work thus provides few concrete insights on where and by whom the nation is imagined. This volume of historical case studies aims to explore the possibilities for investigating the crucial processes by which individual citizens imagined their communities, based upon historical source materials.
eBook - PDFCollective Dreams
Political Imagination and Community
- Keally D. McBride(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Penn State University Press(Publisher)
But the ideal of community is some- thing that is palpable to many people; it is a critique that many can and have employed as a response to contemporary life. Constructing ideals of community is one kind of political imagining that a significant portion of the population engages in and therefore it deserves extended consideration. imagination and community in modern life Let me explore a bit further the relationship between imagination, com- munity, and politics. Tönnies developed his still-influential typology of 12 collective dreams community/society by asserting that communities were “real” associations as opposed to the more “abstract” forms of sociality in mass society. “The relationship itself, and also the resulting association, is conceived of either as real and organic life—this is the essential characteristic of the Gemein- schaft (community); or as imaginary and mechanical structure—this is the concept of Gesellschaft” (Tönnies , ). Tönnies has been frequently interpreted as saying that society replaces immediate relationships (com- munity) with more abstract and impersonal ones. Through nation-building, the growth of mass journalism, and industrialization, society comes to re- place community. Rather than association being based on face-to-face rela- tions, society is “mere coexistence of people independent of each other” (). However, if we revisit this passage, we can arrive at a different under- standing with the emphasis that community “is conceived as real and organic.” Hence, rather than a historical movement from association based upon real or concrete association to a larger society based upon abstract or imagined coexistence, we have different forms of belonging that are based upon differently imagined grounds. Benedict Anderson captures this movement quite brilliantly in his book on nationalism, Imagined Communities (Anderson ). The argument is well-known enough not to detail here, but certain aspects of it will elucidate my point.
eBook - PDFThe Making of Southeast Asia
International Relations of a Region
- Amitav Acharya(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- ISEAS Publishing(Publisher)
15 The term “imagined” can be misunderstood. Alex Bellamy reminds us that “to say that a group or community is imagined is not to say that it is ‘false’, ‘fabricated’, or ‘invented’”. 16 By “imagined”, I mean that territorial proximity and functional interactions are by themselves inadequate to constitute a region in the absence of an “idea of the region”, whether conceived from inside or out. By “socially constructed”, I imply that regional coherence and identity are not givens, but result primarily from self-conscious socialization among the leaders and peoples of a region. As Michael Banks puts it, “regions are what politicians and peoples want them to be”. 17 To say that regions are Imagined Communities is not to accept that “questions about the identity of Southeast Asia are implicitly questions about whether Southeast Asia is or can be a nation writ large”. 18 Regions are different from nations or nation-states. Although there may be some parallels, the process of imagining the region is not necessarily the same as the process of imagining the nation. The nation-state is imagined as a sovereign political entity; the region in many if not all cases as a community of sovereign states (at least in the first instance). Moreover, accepting the view of regions as “nations writ large” does not necessarily clarify the relationship between national identities and regional identity. This book argues that a clash between the two is by no means inevitable. As Peter Katzenstein argues in his recent comparative 24 The Making of Southeast Asia study of Asia and Europe, “regional identities complement, rather than replace, evolving state and national identities”. 19 This supports a central claim of this book, that an evolving sense of regional identity need not be negated by the persistence of national identities. What follows is the elaboration of my analytic framework for studying regionness from an ideational, interactionist and social constructivist perspective.
eBook - PDFImagined Democracies
Necessary Political Fictions
- Yaron Ezrahi(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
I have argued that popular conceptions of reality are characterized by unre- flective acceptance of certain aspects of experience as given, compelling facts, as uncontestable parts of commonsense reality that leave no room for choices. I show, however, that while a process of historic change in commonsense imagi- naries of the real has typically involved mere shifts between equally uncritically accepted imaginaries, the most recent transition from modern to postmodern 40 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1996). Modes of Imagining 59 versions of common sense may have produced an unprecedented awareness of the actual possibility of choice between alternative imaginaries of reality as well as an apprehension of their eclectic composition. But popular awareness of the possibility of choice undoubtedly depends on the workings of imaginal clusters or meta-imaginaries that encourage the coexistence of multiple reper- tories of political world-making programs of the kind advanced, for instance, by writers like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. The introduction of alternatives and choices implies the possibility that some such imaginal clusters be considered as particularly emancipatory, that is, as enlarging the range of political possibilities. This will bring us later to the performative imaginaries of freedom, which constitute a major part of the political imagination of democracy. But now I turn to examine the workings of competing strategies of political imagining. 60 4 Naturalization and Historicization as Strategies of the Political Imagination Political worlds are made by human groups layering mostly unconsciously selected self-realizing, self-institutionalizing imaginaries naturalized by the per- formative political imagination.
- Jan Dobbernack(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The following explores this conceptual focus in more detail. Social imaginaries The invention of society as a domain of concerns, and the introduc- tion of factual and normative understandings of ‘the social’, needs to be further examined here for the mechanics of social image-making. The previous section has considered in particular how policy problems draw on background understandings of social conditions. With ‘social imaginaries’, the following introduces a perspective to understand this background and its general relevance for public policy and its appli- cability to the politics of cohesion. It introduces the work of Taylor, Castoriadis and Laclau on imaginaries and suggests that their respective accounts complement each other and offer resources for the study of political agendas in Chapters 3–5. Charles Taylor on imaginary building blocks Taylor (2002, 2004) conceives of social imaginaries as modes of understanding our modern social condition and hence proposes ele- ments of the imaginary form as well as some specific suggestions as to what he considers among the imaginary building blocks of the modern era. Imaginaries refer to the ‘ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (2004, 23). They are thus both descriptive and evaluative and unite a sense of ‘how things usually go’ (2004, 24) with expecta- tions regarding social regularities and rightful demands. They may build on theoretical innovation, yet crucially they become effective in practice (2004, 29, 33, 115): [P]eople take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices. … [A] new understanding comes to be accessible to the participants in 34 The Politics of Social Cohesion a way it wasn’t before.
eBook - PDFClass, Nation and Identity
The Anthropology of Political Movements
- Jeff Pratt(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Pluto Press(Publisher)
In intermediate sections and in the conclusion I will draw out the comparative dimensions and explore their relevance for theoretical work in this field. TWO CLASSIC TEXTS AND THEIR JOKES Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) opens up stimulating questions about the changing representations of time in political action, and on the role of history, memory and the imagination in the formation of identity. The focus is also on political passion: in numerous reviews of the book (starting with Kitching 1985), Anderson’s superiority to Gellner is seen in his ability to explain the passion of nationalism, and it is linked to the claim that nationalism plays much the same part in the life of people as old-time religion. All this is important and extremely valuable, and it is illustrated by a much-quoted and rather bizarre joke. In commenting on the religion-like qualities of nationalism, he remarks that most states instituted a tomb of the unknown warrior, but tombs of fallen liberals or unknown Marxists are rather rare. Anderson knew very well that at the time he was writing, the world was full of much-venerated tombs and statues to known Marxists, even if many have since been exhumed or their statues melted down. You cannot have unknown Introduction 3 Marxists, if by that is intended writers, but you can and did have many commemorations of anonymous workers, who had been martyrs or heroes in the cause of the revolution. There was also a whole Cold-War industry, much of it located in Princeton and Harvard (Shore 1990: 59), saying that communism was just like old-time religion, full of fanatics and prophets, whose faith was immune to argument and who exploited the irrational masses. Does the joke matter? I think it does. It is part of a series of rhetorical moves which digs a ditch around the study of nationalism, and ends up locking the study of class and ethnic politics into incommensurable paradigms.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
