k IMAGINED COMMUNITIES IMAGINED COMMUNITIES BIOGRAPHY Benedict Richard

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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

BIOGRAPHY * Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson is Aaron. L. Binen. Korb Professor Emeritus of International studies, Government and Asian Studies at Cornell 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 Ph. D from Cornell's department of government. *He is the brother of the famous historian Perry Anderson.

MAJOR WORKS OF ANDERSON -JAVA IN A TIME OF REVOLUTION(1972) - IMAGINED COMMUNITIES(1983) -LITERATURE AND POLITICS IN SIAM IN THE AMERICAN ERA(1986) -LANGUAGE AND POWER: EXPLORING POLITICAL CULTURES IN INDONESIA(1990) -SPECTRES OF COMPARISON(1998)

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

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.

CONTEX T *Anderson falls into historicist or modernist school of nationalism along with Ernest Gellner and Hobsbawm. *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).

CHAPTER ONE-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 -The objective modernity of nations in the eye of the historian vs their subjective antiquity in the eye of the nationalists. -The formal universality as a socio-cultural concept vs the particularity of its concrete manifestations. -The political power of nationalism vs its philosophical poverty.

IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

*Anderson proposes the definition of nation as an imagined political community and imagined both inherently limited and sovereign. *It is imagined because its members will never know most of their fellow 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 came 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.

CHAPTER TWO- 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. CHAPTERTHREE - ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSIOUSNESS *Capitalism was important as expansion of book market contributed to the revolutionary vernacularization of language.

CHAPTER FOUR- 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 FIVE- 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 SIX- OFFICIAL NATIONALISM AND IMPERIALISM *They were responses by power groups threatened with exclusion from popular imagined communities. The model of official nationalism was followed by states with no serious power pretensions.

CHAPTER SEVEN –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 EIGHT –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 NINE-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 conceivable contemporary society

CHAPTER TEN-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 ELEVEN- 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.

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

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.