SoLiXG:Imagined community
Imagined community
The idea of "imagined communities" famously stems from Benedict Andersons seminal text Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). At its core lies a historical account of the emergence of the "nation" as the paradigmatic form for political self-determination in modernity. According to Anderson, the nation, is an imagined horizontal affiliation that is pictured as bounded - it has limits beyond which lie other nations - and as sovereign - it aspires to rule itself. It arrives into the space created both by the waning of religious communities and their sacral languages, as well as the idea of political rule through divine authority.
Crucially, Anderson stresses the role of media technologies in the emergence, and in the maintenance of nations. The printing press and its commodities - the novel and the newspaper - allow for a shared sense of time and rhythm to develop across geographical distances. When opening the morning newspaper, each reader "...is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the sligthest notion. (...) Observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, (the reader) is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life."[1] Beyond the conditions of "print capitalism", however Anderson outlines technologies of state power for the maintenance and management of a nation. The Census, allowing for the quantification and categorization of a population, the Map, delineating the borders of the nation and the territory of its sovereignty, and the Museum, the forging and fixing of a mythological past detached from the present.[2]
In line with other authors such as Michel Foucault[3] or James C. Scott[4], he consideres how states draw on technology in order to govern and manage subjects. Anderson does not offer a general theory on the construction of social groups, but a historical account of the emergence and maintenance of one specific form. His work inspires our inquiry into how political and social affiliations and boundaries are created under specific historical and technological conditions.
- ↑ Anderson, B. (2016). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books. PP. 34-35)
- ↑ Ibid. PP. 163-185)
- ↑ Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 (M. Senellart, Hrsg.; Paperback ed). Palgrave Macmillan.
- ↑ Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (Veritas paperback edition). Yale University Press.