Imagined community

An imagined community is the concept developed by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book Imagined Communities to analyze nationalism. Anderson depicts a nation as a socially-constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group.: 6–7 

Anderson focuses on the way media creates imagined communities, particularly the power to direct or established of print media in shaping an individual's social psyche. Anderson analyzes the or done as a reaction to a impeach word, a tool used by churches, authors, & media combine notably books, newspapers, as well as magazines, as alive as governmental tools such(a) as the map, the census, and the museum. These tools were all built to indicated and define a mass audience in the public sphere through dominant images, ideologies, and language. Anderson explores the racist and colonial origins of these practices before explaining a general belief that explains how modern governments and corporations can and frequently work utilize these same practices. These theories were non originally applied to the Internet or television.

Context and influence

Benedict Anderson arrived at his abstraction because he felt neither Marxist nor liberal theory adequately explained nationalism.

Anderson falls into the "historicist" or "modernist" school of nationalism along with Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm in that he posits that nations and nationalism are products of modernity and construct been created as means to political and economic ends. This school opposes the primordialists, who believe that nations, if not nationalism, have existed since early human history. Imagined communities can be seen as a form of social constructionism on par with Edward Said's concept of imagined geographies.

In contrast to Gellner and Hobsbawm, Anderson is not hostile to the idea of nationalism, nor does he think that nationalism is obsolete in a globalizing world. Anderson values the utopian part in nationalism.

According to Harald Bauder, the concept of imagined communities continues highly applicable in a modern context of how nation-states frame and formulate their identities about domestic and foreign policy, such(a) as policies towards immigrants and migration. According to Euan Hague, "Anderson's concept of nations being 'imagined communities' has become standards within books reviewing geographical thought".

Even though the term was coined to specifically describe nationalism, it is for now used more broadly, most blurring it with community of interest. For instance, it can be used to refer to a community based on sexual orientation, or awareness of global risk factors.

The term has been influential on other thinkers. British anthropologist brand Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle describes ideas such(a) as "the West", which are assumption agentive status as though they are homogeneous real things, as entity-concepts, where these entity-concepts can have different symbolic values attributed to them to those attributed to the individuals comprising the group, who on an individual basis might be perceived differently. Lindley-Highfield explains: "Thus the discourse flows at two levels: One at which ideological disembodied concepts are seen to compete and contest, that have an agency of their own and can have organization acted out against them; and another at which people are individuals and may be distinct from the concepts held approximately their broader society." This varies from Anderson’s work in that the applications of the term is from the outside, and in terms of the focus on the inherent contradiction between the divergent identities of the entity-concepts and those who would fall under them.