Benedict Anderson has me wondering how much of a "community" like the nation is in fact "imagined", that is, related to my presumption or belief that I have historical or social affinities with people whom I will never see. I find it hard to conceive of the "Nation" (the capital "N" is intentional"), a seemingly enormous and somewhat ambiguous entity, as a "community" in the first place, since the latter term carries with it connotations and associations of the local, of smaller, more focused boundaries and perhaps a different kind of social participation than the national, semi-abstracted scale of a representative democracy.
We see national symbolism around us, and systems of representation that reach into our personal and political identities. Even I choose not to call myself American for whatever reason, I can't escape the fact that identity by way of country of origin is linked to how other people perceive me and how I am recognized by my government (if I want to be legally recognized with attendant Constitutional rights.) Is national awareness a matter of social conditioning and construction like we said in class? Aren't nations a little too gigantic to be functional communities, if even imagined ones? Clearly Anderson is trying to do is change existing anthropological and sociological ideas of "community" from their roots in observed and rule-based structural analyses to something more psychological, attitudinal, and even technologically defined.
On another note, when I think about all of our discussions about technology, education, and life and literacy in the past versus the present, I always return to the same head-scratching paradoxes. We are living in a world where depending on the scope of our investigations of human patterns we can find elements (to name just a few) supporting the predominance of globalizing forces that reach beyond traditional "imaginings" of the nation, like the force of stock market, trading, and extensive trans-national currency systems and forms of governance/justice. On the other hand we are right to believe that the governments of nations instrumentalize the idea of the "nation" as imagined community to shape themselves and wield sovereignty over other nations or disputed territories.
It's so difficult to think about the importance of nationalism without thinking about globalization (and capitalism and colonialism) and all of these ideas turn into one giant historical game of Chicken and Egg, at worst. I do like how we are discussing these ideas from the lens of communication and media, and the entryway of print and language as central to the process of nation-building, identity politics, and popular culture. I also think our discussion about generational attitudes towards media is worth returning to for the last part of this blog: There is definitely a push and pull of different generations, from inside the family, to the makeup of institutions like schools and government throughout the world, to negotiate the influence of popular culture through music, television shows, movies, video games, and the technologies that transmit or mediate these elements. Do these products represent their home nations (or not), and how critical are they to establishing an imaginary collectivity and sense of "community" in their dynamics of language, space and time along the lines of what Anderson sees in print media? I see a strong demographic and ideological segmentation in the "imagined-ness" of the nation, and that even within one nation different groups will embrace or reject cultural products as representative of their nation. And because people have migrated and settled all over the world at this point, it makes analysis even more difficult. Think of the rejection of "Slumdog Millionaire" by many Indians all over the world and also in India- it was passed off by many for portraying India in a negative light, as an impoverished nation and full of the standard cliches pertaining to countries with regions and people in different stages of development. Yet what do the statistics of recent urban Indian poverty show? If the film was directed by an Indian person would it have been portrayed and received differently internationally, as "authentic"? Who can criticize national identity- the insider or the outsider? How do we imagine our nationality now in a world that is both nationalist and post-national, depending on who you ask and where you are and what angles you are comparing? Just some thoughts.
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I think you're right, that perhaps Anderson's take on what constitutes a community is a little different than the traditional anthropological one, which seems to assume a smaller size. I also agree that he is more interested in the psychological aspect of community - as he puts it, a sense of "communion" with others. The most remarkable aspect of nationalism may be this sense of having something in common with such an enormous group of people, with whom we may have absolutely nothing else in common.
ReplyDeleteI also think you're right that this is a strange time - debates abound as to whether the Nation is decreasing in importance as financial, communication, and migratory flows increasingly disregard national boundaries. On the other hand, when we face economic crises, it is our national governments that step in to address these problems - which seems to suggest that they continue to trump many other forces.