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: This article revisited the notion of community within the field of heritage, examining the varied ways in which tensions between different groups and their aspirations arise and are mediated, and pointed out the conceptual disjunction that exists between a range of popular, political and academic attempts to define and negotiate memory, place, identity and cultural expression.
Abstract: This paper revisits the notion of ‘community’ within the field of heritage, examining the varied ways in which tensions between different groups and their aspirations arise and are mediated. Our focus is a close examination of the conceptual disjunction that exists between a range of popular, political and academic attempts to define and negotiate memory, place, identity and cultural expression. To do so, the paper places emphasis on those expressions of community that have been taken up within dominant political and academic practice. Such expressions, we argue, are embedded with restrictive assumptions concerned with nostalgia, consensus and homogeneity, all of which help to facilitate the extent to which systemic issues tied up with social justice, recognition and subordinate status are ignored or go unidentified. This, inevitably, has serious and far‐reaching consequences for community groups seeking to assert alternative understandings of heritage. Indeed, the net result has seen the virtual disappea...
365 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored representations of the "rainforest" and "nature" in British Columbia, Canada, and traces a series of "buried epistemologies" through which neocolonial relations are asserted in the region.
Abstract: Postcolonial theory has asserted the need to carefully consider how present-day social and cultural practices are marked by histories of colonialism. This paper explores representations of the ‘rainforest’ and ‘nature’ in British Columbia, Canada, and traces a series of ‘buried epistemologies’ through which neocolonial relations are asserted in the region. Drawing upon recent representations of the forest proffered by the forest industry and the environmental movement, and the historical writings of a prominent nineteenth-century geologist and amateur ethnologist, the author shows how ‘nature’ (‘wilderness’) has been constructed as a realm separate from ‘culture.’ He locates in this the possibility for contemporary practices that abstract and displace the ‘forest’ from its cultural surrounds and relocate it within the abstract spaces of the market, the nation, and, in recent ecological rhetorics, the biosphere and the global community. By so doing, the author contests assumptions that colonialism is only ...
363 citations
TL;DR: It is proposed that infrahumanization may be a strategy for people to reestablish psychological equanimity when confronted with a self-threatening situation and that such a strategy may occur concomitantly with other strategies, such as providing reparations to the out-group.
Abstract: The present research examines how awareness of violence perpetrated against an out-group by one's in-group can intensify the infrahumanization of the out-group, as measured by a reduced tendency to accord uniquely human emotions to out-groups. Across 3 experiments that used different in-groups (humans, British, White Americans) and out-groups (aliens, Australian Aborigines, and Native Americans), when participants were made aware of the in-group's mass killing of the out-group, they infrahumanized the victims more. The perception of collective responsibility, not just the knowledge that the out-group members had died in great numbers, was shown to be necessary for this effect. Infrahumanization also occurred concurrently with increased collective guilt but was unrelated to it. It is proposed that infrahumanization may be a strategy for people to reestablish psychological equanimity when confronted with a self-threatening situation and that such a strategy may occur concomitantly with other strategies, such as providing reparations to the out-group.
362 citations
TL;DR: In the quest for building long-term successful brands, many marketers have become increasingly interested in how to create and foster successful communities of brand users as discussed by the authors. But the psychological underpinnings of a customer's perception of community with other users of the brand remain unexplored.
360 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: This paper examined the complex power implications of language policy decisions by looking at three levels of analysis: episodic social interaction, identity/subjectivity construction, and reconstruction of structures of domination.
Abstract: We argue in this paper that corporate language policies have significant power implications that are easily overlooked. By drawing on previous work on power in organizations (Clegg, 1989), we examine the complex power implications of language policy decisions by looking at three levels of analysis: episodic social interaction, identity/subjectivity construction, and reconstruction of structures of domination. In our empirical analysis, we focus on the power implications of the choice of Swedish as the corporate language in the case of the recent banking sector merger between the Finnish Merita and the Swedish Nordbanken. Our findings show how language skills become empowering or disempowering resources in organizational communication, how these skills are associated with professional competence, and how this leads to the creation of new social networks. The case also illustrates how language skills are an essential element in the construction of international confrontation, lead to a construction of superiority and inferiority, and also reproduce post-colonial identities in the merging bank. Finally, we also point out how such policies ultimately lead to the reification of post-colonial and neo-colonial structures of domination in multinational corporations.
360 citations