On Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities'

Kigan Chang
<siutao@aol.com>

The contemporary world we live in is one made up of nation-states. People who watch the Olympic Games every four years or who occasionally tune their TV set to United Nations conference cannot help but marvel at the number of nation-states with their delegates, their flags, their athletes or diplomats and their national anthems backed by armies and navies celebrating the same themes -- those of pride and strength, and unity and loyalty to the motherland.

Nationalism has become one of the most tenacious ideological bonds binding human beings together into separate political communities. There is no doubt that its value may vary, its particular content may change, but fundamentally the nationalist feeling is described in terms of a shared feeling of togetherness that defines the "we" against the "they." Nations are invariably defined in terms of a community and in terms of the loyalty of its citizens to the community. It is indeed a community of values shared by all of its citizens having a common heritage, a common history, a common character, a common race and a common will.

While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality -- the idea of a personal and cultural feeling of belonging to a nation -- has not been addressed with proportionate attention. In this respect, Benedict Anderson has helped fill this void with his widely acclaimed work Imagined Communities, considered as one of the most original among the scholarship on nationalism, by offering us a novel formulation of the concept of 'nation' as something which is given a workable definition he termed the 'imagined community.'

Concerned with the question of the origin and dissemination of national consciousness, Anderson demonstrated that, in the framework of a universal history, nations were not to be construed as the determinate products of given sociological conditions such as language, race or religion. In his own formulations, these nations had been, in Europe and everywhere else in the world, imagined into existence. For Anderson, the nation is an "imagined political community -- and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." Anderson then goes on to give an elaboration of various parameters of this formulation: the nation as (1) imagined (" because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion," (2) limited ("because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations," (3) sovereign ("because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm") and (4) community ("because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as deep, horizontal comradeship.")

Anderson also described some of the major institutional forms through which this imagined community came to acquire concrete forms, especially the institutions of what he called 'print-capitalism.' He then argued, quite ingenuously, that the historical experience of nationalism in Western Europe, in the Americas, and in Russia had provided for all subsequent nationalist political movements a set of modular forms from which nationalist elites in Asia and Africa had chosen the ones they saw applicable.

Anderson's book has been the most influential in the last few years in generating new theoretical ideas on nationalism. However, as in all other socio-political theories, his arguments have not been immune to criticism. A critique of Anderson's 'imagined community' thesis has been offered by Partha Chatterjee, one of the leading members of the Subaltern Studies collective of scholars, in his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Anderson's formulation on the national question, in Chatterjee's view, is regarded as 'highly unorthodox' in the sense that Anderson "refuses to 'define' nation by a set of external and abstract criteria' from a perspective of the traditional Marxist orthodoxy and therefore "subverts the determinist scheme by assembling that the nation is 'an imagined political community.'" In other words, instead of conceptualizing the nation in relation to a set of objective facts and social relations in particular social formation, the nation is something that is 'thought out' or 'created' in a universal scheme. As Chatterjee remarks in his book The Nation and its Fragments: "contrary to the largely uninformed exoticization of the nationalism in the popular media in the West, the theoretical tendency represented by Anderson certainly attempts to treat the phenomenon as part of the universal history of the modern world."

The next critique of Anderson's argument arises out of an objection to 'modular forms' thesis, having to do with the way in which the nationalist imagination is fashioned in the postcolonial states. Arguing that the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa are not necessarily posited on identity but on difference with these modular forms of nationalism perpetrated by the West, he shows how anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within the colonial society even when the state is still in the hands of the imperial power. These nationalists do this by dividing their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staking an early claim to the spiritual domain as its territory. Chatterjee shows how middle-class nationalist elites, using examples drawn from colonial history in India, first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political struggle with the colonial power in fashioning a "modern" national culture that is not Eurocentric. Chatterjee remarks that " if the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being." In the following passage, Chatterjee laments:

"If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined communities from certain "modular" forms readily available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized." (The Nation and its Fragments, p5)

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