Afterlife

In his work on the phenomenon of nationalism, Benedict Anderson coins the concept of ‘Imagined Communities’. The concept is used to name the historical rise of the nation as a social unit ‘in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained hierarchical dynastic realm’. ¹ Unlike the village or other diminutive communities like the tribe, a face-to-face knowledge of all members of the community is impossible for even for the smallest nation. The ‘imagined community’ of the nation is thus socially constructed such that for members, ‘in minds of each lives the image of their communion’. Anderson believes that the nation as an imagined community is a technological product of modernity which is possible because of print capitalism. In other words, it is through the medium of large-scale printing and dissemination of books and other material in a common vernacular language that the nation is constituted by the existence of its printed discourses. Hence for Anderson the nation is not an ethnic unit as this provenance through print culture ‘shows that from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood’. ² He is not suggesting that nationalism supersedes religion either, but it is the mode in which a created (or ‘distorting and deceptive’ as a more cynical Gellner might put it ³ ) large-scale social unit enables the working of industrial society through shared vernacular, education and so on.