IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

1. IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
1. Parmar Krupa
2. Sheikh Nusaratjaha
3. Bambha Kajal
4. Solanki Alpa

2. GENERAL
INTRODUCTION TO
BENEDICT
ANDERSON'S WORK ‘
IMAGINED
COMMUNITIES ’

3. BENEDICT
ANDERSON

4. IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

5. BIOGRAPHY
 Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson is Aaron. L.Binenkorb Professor
Emeritus of international studies, Government and Asian studies at
Cornell university university and is best known for his celebrated book
‘IMAGINED COMMUNITIES’ which was first published in 1983.
 He was born in 1936 in Kunming , China to James O’Gorman
Anderson and Veronica Beatrice Begum .
 In 1957 Anderson received a BA in classics from Cambridge university
and later he earned a PhD from Cornell’s department of government.
 He is the brother of the famous historian Perry Anderson.

6. MAJOR WORKS OF ANDERSON
1. Java In a Time of
Revolution (1972)
2. Imagined
Communities (1983)
3. Literature and Politics
In Siam in the
American Era (1986)
4. Language and Power :
Exploring Political
Cultures in Indonesia
(1990)
5. Spectres of
Comparison (1998)

7. IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
 The armed conflicts of 1978-79 in Indo-china-provided occasion for
the text Imagined Communities.
 Imagined communities is a concept coined by Anderson.
 He believes that a nation is a community socially constructed and
imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that
group.
 He explains the concept in depth.

8. OVERVIEW
 Anderson defined a nation as an imagined political community and
imagined both inherently limited and sovereign.
 Imagined community is different from actual community because it is
not based on everyday face to face interaction between its members.
 Thus communication is both limited and sovereign ( since no dynastic
monarchy can claim authority over them in modern period).
 According to Anderson creation of imagined community become
possible because of print capitalism.

9. CONTEXT
 Anderson falls into historical or modernist school of nationalism
along with Ernest Gellner and Hobsbawn.
 Imagined communities can be seen as a form of social
constructionism on a par with Said’s concept of imagined
geographies.
 Anderson values the utopian element in nationalism.
 According to his theory of imagined communities main causes of
nationalism are the declining importance of privileged access to
particular script language ( Latin).

10. CHAPTER : 1 : INTRODUCTION
 The aim of this book is to offer experimental suggestions for a satisfactory
interpretation of the irregularities concerned with the term nationalism .
 According to Anderson, nationality, nationness etc are cultural artefacts of a
particular kind .
 Theorists of nationalism have encountered three paradoxes :
1. The objective modernity of nations in the eye of the historian vs. their subjective
antiquity in the eye of the nationalists.
2. The formal universality as a socio – cultural concept vs. the particularity of its
concrete manifestations.
3. The political power of nationalism vs. its philosophical poverty.

11.  Anderson proposes the definition of nation as an imagined politics community and
imagined both inherently limited and sovereign.
 It is imagined because its members will never know most of their fellows members,
yet in the minds lives the image of their communion.
 It is limited because it has finite though elastic boundaries beyond which lies other
nations.
 It is sovereign as it come to maturity at a stage of human history when freedom was
a rare and precious ideal.
 It is imagined because in spite of many inequalities the nation is always conceived
as a deep , horizontal comradeship.

12. CHAPTER : 2 : CULTURAL ROOTS
 Nationality represented a secular transformation of fatality into continuity and
contingency into meaning.
 There were changes in the dynastic realm .
 There was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were
indistinguishable .
 These three changes lead to a search for a new way of linking fraternity, power and
time together.
CHAPTER : 3 : ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSIOUSNESS
 Capitalism was important as expansion of book market contributed to the
revolutionary vernacularization of language.

13. CHAPTER : 4 : CREOLE PIONEERS
 Tightening of Madrid’s control spread of liberalizing ideas of enlightenment, etc were
factors of Creole history that contributed to the high level of Creole.
CHAPTER : 5 : OLD LANGUAGE , NEW MODELS
 National print language were of central ideological and political importance and the
nation became something capable of being consciously aspired to form early on due
to the models set forth by the Creole pioneers.
CHAPTER : 6 : OFFICIAL NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM
 They were responses by power group threatened with exclusion from popular
imagined communities. The model of official nationalism was followed by states with
no serious power presentations.

14. CHAPTER : 7 : THE LAST WAVE
 It was a transformation of colonial state to a national state. This was facilitated by
an increase in physical mobility, bureaucratization and spread of modern style
education.
CHAPTER : 8 : PATRIOTISM AND RACISM
 Nationalism is natural in the sense that it contains something that is unchosen. It
has an aura of fatality embedded in history and is not the source of racism and anti
– Semitism .
CHAPTER : 9 : THE ANGEL OF HISTORY
 Revolutions are contemporary exhibits of nationalism but this nationalism is heir of
two centuries of historic change. Imagined communities has spread to ever
communities has spread to ever conceivable contemporary society.

15. CHAPTER : 10 : CENSUS, MAP AND MUSEUM
 They shaped the way in which colonial states imagined its dominion.
 Census created identities by the classifying mind of colonial state .
 Maps were designed to demonstrate the antiquity of specific, tightly bound territorial
units.
 Museums allowed the state to appear as a guardian of tradition.
CHAPTER : 11 : MEMORY AND FORGETTING
 Awareness of being embedded in secular , serial time with all its complications of
continuity yet of forgetting the experience of this continuity engenders a need for a
narrative of identity.

16. SOME CRITICISMS ON IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
 The theory concerning anti – colonial nationalism seem flawed.
 Arguing theory that nationalism and religion do not hold in some cases.
 Thesis that nationalism was born in Americas run counter to the available evidence.
 Anderson's definition do not recognize nationalism as a lived idea, or an experience
- Niels Kayser Nelson
 Lack of representation of the Arab world
- Fadia Rafeedie

17. CONCLUSION
 According to Anderson a nation is an imagined , political community that is
imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign .
 The basic decline of religion made possible the new concepts of time which made
possible to imagine the nation.
 Thus the main aim of this work is to offer clarifications for the irregularities
concerned with Nationalism.