The Community you Don’t See Face to Face Every Day

For Benedict Anderson an imagined community is different from an actual living community because it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members.

Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity—for example, the nationhood you feel with other members of your nation when your “imagined community” participates in a larger event such as the Olympics.

Anderson argued that: Even though we may never see anyone in our imagined community, we still know they are there through communication and this is established through a series of rules that govern belonging.

He stresses that a nation is an imagined community because “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.[…] Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

According to Anderson, creation of our contemporary imagined communities became possible because of “print-capitalism”. As a result, readers speaking various local dialects became able to understand each other, and a common discourse emerged. Anderson argued that the first European nation-states were thus formed around their national print-languages. Capitalist entrepreneurs printed their books and media in a language that was accessible, in a more common vernacular (instead of a language such as Latin) in order to maximize circulation.

Despite Anderson’s critique of nationalism and his deconstruction of the more romaniticized definitions of the nation, Anderson is not hostile to the idea of nationalism nor does he think that nationalism is obsolete in a globalizing world.