scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Book

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

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.
Citations
More filters
Book
04 Jun 2013
TL;DR: Anywhere or Not at All as discussed by the authors is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical.
Abstract: Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that "contemporary art is postconceptual art," the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism.

196 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue the case for a new approach to the analysis of regions and highlight how a region is constantly being denned and redefined by its members in a permanent discourse with each member attempting to identify itself at the core of the region.
Abstract: This article argues the case for a new approach to the analysis of regions. It highlights how a region is constantly being denned and redefined by its members in a permanent discourse with each member attempting to identify itself at the core of the region. The core is defined in both territorial and functional terms and this definition necessarily involves a manipulation of knowledge and power. This region building approach utilizes the literature on nation-building and the genealogical writings of anti-foundationalists. It does not, however, attempt to place the study of regions in international relations on a new footing or replace what are arguably the two dominant approaches in the existing literature: an ‘inside-out’ approach focusing on cultural integration and an ‘outside-in’ approach focusing on geopolitics. Rather, it aims to extend the ongoing debate by asking questions about how and why the existence of a given region was postulated in the first place, who perpetuates its existence and with what intentions, and how students of regions, by including or excluding certain areas and peoples, help to perpetuate or transform a given region. After sketching the divergent approaches used to analyze regions, the second part of the article identifies how the two dominant approaches have comprehended Northern Europe, and it then uses the region-building approach to criticize and supplement their findings.

195 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors defined language ideology as "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world "(1990: 346) and defined it as a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk, if such static imagery for some very dynamic processes can be forgiven.
Abstract: This special issue of hagmarl'cs derives from a day-long symposium on "l^anguage Ideology: Practice and Theory" held at the annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association in Chicago, November 1991.1 The organizing premise of the symposium was that language ideology is a mediating link between social structures and forms of talk, if such static imagery for some very dynamic processes can be forgiven. Rather than casting language ideology as an epiphenomenon, a relatively inconsequential overlay of secondary and tertiary responses (Boas 1911; Bloomfield 1944),, the symposium started from the proposition that ideology stands in dialectical relation with, and thus significantly influences, social, discursive, and linguistic practices. As such a critical link, language ideology merits more concerted analytic attention than it has thus far been given. In this first attempt to bring form to an area of inquiry, we have adopted a relatively unconstrained sense of "language ideology." Alan Rumsey's definition, based on Silverstein (1979), is a useful starting point: linguistic ideologies are "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world "(1990: 346). We mean to include cultural conceptions not only of language and language variation, but of the nature and purpose of communication, and of communicative behavior as an enactment of a collective order (Silverstein 1987: l-2). I use the terms "linguistic" and "language" ideology interchangeably, although in the articles that follow one might detect differences in their uses, perhaps varying with the degree to which the authors focus on formal linguistic structures or on representations of a collective order. In order to build toward a general understanding of the cultural variability of language ideology and its role in social and linguistic life, the symposium brought

195 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The role of market forces in immigrants' pathways to inclusion in the social and economic system of the host society has been discussed in this paper, focusing on Polish migrants in the UK, where the authors argue that the traditional agents of civil society have, before and after EU enlargement, been less prominent in responding to the immediate needs of recent migrants for information, networks and access to host-society institutions, than the migration industry as such.
Abstract: Focusing on Polish migrants in the UK, this article seeks to emphasise the role of market forces in immigrants’ pathways to inclusion in the social and economic system of the host society. The traditional agents of civil society—voluntary organisations, state policies, the Polish Church or advocacy networks—have, before and after EU enlargement, been less prominent in responding to the immediate needs of recent migrants for information, networks and access to host-society institutions, than the migration industry as such—here understood as a particular sector of the service economy that stimulates mobility and eases adaptation. These profit-driven institutions are also in a position of power over information that is being distributed to migrants, although their sheer outreach has a positive impact on processes of integration overall. The argument in this article seeks to inform debates in political theory that see political and market forces as locked in contradiction over the reception of migrants. In fa...

194 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli "mixed city" is presented, where a dominant group appropriates the city apparatus to buttress its domination and expansion.
Abstract: In this paper we offer a critical analysis of ethnic relations in an Israeli 'mixed city'. Similar to other sites shaped by the logics of settling ethnonationalism and capitalism, the 'mixed city' is characterized by stark patterns of segregation between a dominant majority and a subordinate minority, as well as by ethnoclass fragmentation within each group. 'Mixed' spaces are both excep- tional and involuntary, often resulting from the process of ethnicization prevalent in contested urban spaces. We theorize this setting as an 'urban ethnocracy', where a dominant group appropriates the city apparatus to buttress its domination and expansion. In such settings, conspicuous tensions accom- pany the interaction between the city's economic and ethnoterritorial logics, producing sites of conflict and instability, and essentializing group identities and ethnic geographies. Empirically, the paper focuses on the city of Lod or Lydda, Israel, where the production of contested urban space has been linked to the construction of an exclusionary Israeli-Jewish national identity and to the establish- ment of hierarchical ethnic citizenship. Like other previously Arab cities, Lod has been the target of a concerted strategy of Judaization, which has formed the city's central planning goal since the late 1940s. We analyze in detail various aspects and sites of the Judaization process, and of the ensuing urban conflicts. We point to the chronic instability of urban ethnocracies, and to the need of planning to rise above narrow ethnocentric considerations in order for the 'mixed city' to prosper as the home for all communities.

194 citations