Imagined Communities

I would like to post my note on Imagined Communities written by Benedict R.O Anderson. Based on his field work in Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia, Anderson figures out the genesis of nationalism and explains the concept in adequate way. The aim of writing Imagined Communities is to suggest a historical background including the development, evolution, and response for the emergence of nationalism. This book is actually his notorious examination of nationalism. Several chapters in the beginning attempt to connect nationalism and the context in the frame of history. According to Anderson, the nation is an "imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (p.7). The nation is imagined because members might be not familiar each other or with the most of their colleague, but in the mind of each the members there is an imagination of their unity (p.6). This is the way the owner of a particular citizenship imagines the boundaries of a nation, although such boundaries may be not existent physically.

The nation is limited because "even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations" (p7). Although it is limited by boundaries, in fact they can identify their unity by the existent of culture, ethnicity, language, discourse, and social structure among fellow members. The nations 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 . . . nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so" (p.7). The nation is a community because it is "always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (p.7). Although there are the differences and unequal positions and changes among the nation member, the imagination in being the same culture, ethnic, or social structure is physically powerful to initiate people to sacrifice in the name of nation.

I think nationalism now becomes a core issue in many aspects of modern society and united nation where the conflict among sub-nations such as ethnicity, group, and culture tend to emerge. Moreover, people are mostly traveling from one and another country or even their national identities are interchangeable.

Source:
Ben Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso: New York, 2006).
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