Imagined community

Imagined community
The concept of the ‘imagined community’ is most obviously
associated with the work of Benedict Anderson on the ‘nation’. For Anderson, the
nation is an ‘imagined community’ and national identity a construction assembled
through symbols and rituals in relation to territorial and administrative categories.
National identities are intrinsically connected to, and constituted by, forms of
communication. The nation is an imagined community because most of its
members will never know most of the other members and yet they consider
themselves to be a part of the same commonality. Despite their physical separation,
members of a nation often regard themselves as sharing in a fraternity with which
they identify.

An imagined community such as a nation is, according to Anderson, intrinsically
connected to communication processes. Thus, it was the mechanized production
and commodification of books and newspapers, the rise of ‘print capitalism’, that
allowed vernacular languages to be standardized and disseminated. This provided
the conditions for the creation of a national consciousness. In particular, the
mechanization of printing and its commercial dissemination ‘fixed’ a vernacular
language as the ‘national’ language and in so doing made a new imagined national
community possible. Communication facilitates not just the construction of a
common language but also a common recognition of time. For example, the media
encourage us to imagine the simultaneous occurrence of events across wide tracts
of time and space, which contributes to the concept of nation.

From a cultural studies perspective Anderson tends to overstate the unity of the
nation and the strength of nationalist feeling and thus covers over differences of
class, gender, ethnicity and so forth. Nevertheless, the whole idea of an imagined
community has wider applicability than the nation. The concept can be utilized in
relation to all forms of collective identity. Thus, just as national identity takes the
form of identification with representations of the nation, so can ethnic groups,
feminists, classes, New Social Movements and other communities of action and
identity be understood as imagined.
(Adapted from The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)