Book•
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
01 Jan 1983-
TL;DR: In this paper, Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time.
Abstract: What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality - the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to the nation - has not received proportionate attention. In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality. Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa. This revised edition includes two new chapters, one of which discusses the complex role of the colonialist state's mindset in the development of Third World nationalism, while the other analyses the processes by which all over the world, nations came to imagine themselves as old.
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TL;DR: Barbershops in the Black community are discursive spaces in which the confluence of Black hair care, for and by Black people, and small talk establish a context for cultural exchange as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Barbershops in the Black community are discursive spaces in which the confluence of Black hair care, for and by Black people, and small talk establish a context for cultural exchange. This interpretive ethnography describes the barbershop in a Black community as a cultural site for ethnographic exploration and description. The article defines a cultural site not only as the chosen geo-social locale of the ethnographic gaze but also as a centralized occasion within a cultural community that serves at the confluence of banal ritualized activity and the exchange of cultural currency. It is the social experience of being in the barbershop that the article focuses on, knowing that social experience meets at the intersection of culture and performance, and at the confluence of reflection and remembrance.
100 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The authors conducted a qualitative case study of youth in a western metropolitan area in the United States and found that these youth expressed a historicized affinity that was constructed, contingent, and impermanent.
Abstract: Background: Cosmopolitans and their critics often imagine a spectrum of affinities—concentric circles of belonging reaching from the self and family to the ethnic group, the nation and, finally, to all humanity. Debates over the role schools should play in educating “world citizens” versus national patriots follow suit: Should educators work to maintain the reputedly natural, warm, and necessary scale of national allegiance, or should they attempt to produce new subjects oriented to Earth and the human family? Purpose: In this paper, we critique the spatial assumptions that underlie this discourse. We question the assumption that affinity is attached to particular scales, that these scales are fixed rather than flexible, and that they are received rather than produced. Our examination focuses on Nussbaum’s celebrated proposal that civic education be freed from its national tether and allowed to embrace the whole world. Research Design: In order to trouble the nation/world binary that is central to both Nussbaum’s proposal and the arguments of its many critics, we undertook a qualitative case study of youth in a western metropolitan area in the United States. Working with a theoretical sample of public and private middle and high school teachers who wanted to learn what and how their students were thinking about patriotism, citizenship, and allegiance in the year following the events of September 11, 2001, we conducted focus group interviews in their classrooms in early 2003, as the invasion of Iraq was imminent. Findings: These youthful citizens-in-formation generally expressed a historicized affinity— constructed, contingent, and impermanent. Some of them already, in advance of the proposed civic education reform, were imagining and producing allegiances that were multiple, flexible, and relational. These allegiances do not fit neatly into the spatial models of affinity that have been constructed in some contemporary and ancient literatures, especially those
100 citations
Book•
09 Feb 2012TL;DR: Securitizing Islam as mentioned in this paper examines the impact of 9/11 on the lives and perceptions of individuals, focusing on the ways in which identities in Britain have been affected in relation to Islam.
Abstract: Securitizing Islam examines the impact of 9/11 on the lives and perceptions of individuals, focusing on the ways in which identities in Britain have been affected in relation to Islam. 'Securitization' describes the processes by which a particular group or issue comes to be seen as a threat, and thus subject to the perceptions and actions which go with national security. Croft applies this idea to the way in which the attitudes of individuals to their security and to Islam and Muslims have been transformed, affecting the everyday lives of both Muslims and non-Muslims. He argues that Muslims have come to be seen as the 'Other', outside the contemporary conception of Britishness. Reworking securitisation theory and drawing in the sociology of ontological security studies, Securitizing Islam produces a theoretically innovative framework for understanding a contemporary phenomenon that affects the everyday lives of millions.
100 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that some sort of virtuality is a normal aspect of community life, regardless of the nature of the medium on which it relies.
Abstract: NEW MEDIA, NEW COMMUNITIES Thirty-five years after Licklider and Taylor (1968) first envisioned virtual communities, and exactly 10 years after Rheingold (1993) popularized the concept, online sociability is a fact of everyday life. According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report (2001), 84 percent of all American internet users contacted an online group at least once and 79 percent of these users remained in regular contact with at least one group. Pew noted that more people participated in these groups than bought things online. Are all online groups virtual communities? The answer depends of course on the definition of community. If face-to-face contact is required by definition, then obviously no community can form online. We prefer to approach the question from the standpoint of Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined community: ‘All communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined’ (1983: 18) Thus, some sort of virtuality is a normal aspect of community life, regardless of the nature of the medium on which it relies. Anderson argues that communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Communication media play a central role in determining the different styles in which communities have been imagined throughout history. The great sacred communities of the past (Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, the Middle Kingdom) were imagined through the medium of a sacred language and script. The birth of the imagined community of the nation involved two ‘new media’, the novel and the newspaper, that flowered in Europe in the 18th century (see Anderson, 1983). Broadcast media added a new dynamic to the imagined community new media & society
100 citations
TL;DR: In this article, an approach to the analysis of discursive intercontextuality is advanced through theories of space-time production, and the management of multiple contexts within school-related discourse is argued to be an important means of discursively producing identity, agency, and power relations.
Abstract: Contexts of school-related discourse are not static backgrounds; rather, contexts are produced, negotiated, and hybridized within the flow of dialogue. In this study, an approach to the analysis of discursive intercontextuality is advanced through theories of space-time production. In addition, the management of multiple contexts within school-related discourse is argued to be an important means of discursively producing identity, agency, and power relations. Data are drawn from an ethnographic and discourse-based study of students and sponsors on an extended school field trip. Drawing upon Bakhtin, the first part of the analysis compares the production and hybridization of space-time in two segments of pedagogical discourse. Whereas one segment suggests the imaginative possibilities of discourse to expand identity across hybridized contexts, another segment suggests how school contexts are bracketed and privileged. The analysis turns to work in conceptual integration networks for a method of closely anal...
100 citations