Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin And Spread Of Nationalism

An underlying motif of Anderson’s work is that reality is socially constructed. The nation is imagined as a community of citizens sharing certain beliefs, values and an historical identity, yet its members nevertheless are largely anonymous to each other. Social practices and means of communication, such as reading newspapers, singing the national anthem, participating in elections and parades, visiting national monuments, and observing national holidays, reinforce imaginative participation in the national community. Despite the presence within a country of class distinctions, economic inequality, and social hierarchies, its citizens imagine that they exist in a horizontal, egalitarian relationship with each other based on their shared nationality. The fact that the nation is imagined does not make it unreal or false; rather, all communities rely to some degree on the exercise of imagination to cohere as a felt social presence. What interests Anderson is the logic of how that imagination socially constructs a sense of community.

As reality and identity are socially constructed, they can be manipulated by socioeconomic, cultural, and political powers. In the context of state power, official nationalism can suppress or promote the expression of certain national or ethnic identities, or language communities. Anderson emphasizes the complex historical formation of national identities, particularly in postcolonial nation-states which had to negotiate the ambivalent legacy of their colonial exploitation and administration by European imperial powers. This legacy involved institutionalized racism, colonial ethnography, the expansion of education organized on a Western model, substantial innovations in transportation and industry, and the rationalized, and increasingly specialized, apparatus of bureaucracy and administration with which the colonial power asserted its political, cultural, economic, military, and ideological control over its possessions.

Imagined Communities also stresses the important roles of contingency and historical disruption in the social construction of identity. The possibility of imagining the nation, or the national community, arose from the convergence of several discrete factors: the decline of a religious worldview, which supposed the divine right of monarchy; the invention of the technology of printing; the economic aggression of capitalism; and the diversity of vernacular languages. ‘Creole’ nations in the Americas, and postcolonial nation-states in Africa and Asia, reflect the historical accidents, arbitrariness of borders, and differing socioeconomic and political policies of the colonial powers that ultimately shaped the national identities and boundaries of these states.

Moreover, historical awareness profoundly influenced the imagination of national consciousness. The American and French Revolutions were greeted as ruptures in history, ushering in new, unprecedented social orders. The nationalist movements that followed in South America and Europe looked on these predecessors as models, and thus conceived of themselves as participating in an established historical tradition. Nations selectively remember, forget, or reconstruct history, including their pre-national past, in order to define and preserve their national identity.

Anderson argues that fundamental changes in our apprehensions of time and space were crucial for the development of national consciousness. The medieval conception of time was cosmological and dominated by the eschatological doctrines of the Christian Church. Human history was rapidly approaching the biblical end-of-times; the entirety of time itself was but a simultaneous instant in the eyes of God. This view of time as the prophetic fulfillment of divine providence was essentially ahistorical, in that it lacked our modern grasp of history as an endless chain of natural causes and effects.

In contrast to the medieval notion of simultaneity, in which past, present, and future were linked in a system of spiritual correspondences, the modern idea of simultaneity is based on a concept of “homogenous, empty time.” We imagine history to consist of a series of events occurring in causal sequence and filling a uniform, vacant time. Events occur simultaneously around the world in the same calendrical time, occupying the same homogenous chronology. This sense of time enables us to imagine the lives and activities of other members of our community, though we may not know them, as occurring simultaneously with ours. Anderson argues that the narrative conventions of novels and newspapers, which reached mass audiences in the 18thcentury, popularized this modern imagination of simultaneity. This created the temporal framework for imagining the nation as a community living simultaneously, if anonymously, with each other.

Similarly, nationalism involved new conceptions, and manipulations, of space. Anderson uses the term in both its literal and metaphorical senses. In colonial territories, space, in both the physical and social meanings of the word, was measured by the “pilgrimages” that native functionaries were able to undertake. Anderson asserts (somewhat obscurely) that their administrative postings mapped out the contours of the imaginary nation that was coming to take shape in their consciousnesses. In this sense, space also functions as a measure of sociopolitical distance, separating the colonized from the metropolitan dynastic realm against which the struggle for national independence is waged.

More fundamentally, the nation is imagined as spatially limited; it exists in conjunction with other nations that lie beyond its finite borders. In Chapter Ten, “Census, Map, Museum,” Anderson notes the critical role of map-making in historically documenting, defining, and administering colonial possessions. The technology of European map creation with its use of the Mercator projection fundamentally altered the perception of geographical (and political) space in the colonized territories. The continuous boundaries of maps demarcated exclusive sovereignties occupying clearly-defined space between other sovereignties. Maps, like censuses, attempted a totalizing classification facilitating the exercise of administrative and military power. As an instrument rife with ideological considerations, the map, along with the census and the museum, was incorporated into the official nationalisms of postcolonial nation-states. In its most stripped-down form, the map became a national logo, instantly recognizable and forming a powerful image of national identity.