Globalization and Imagining Communities

A nation exists only if a significant number of people in a community consider or instead imagine themselves as to form or a nation or behave as a formed one. This concept gives birth to an imagined community. An imagined community never knows their fellow members or even has physical contact with them; however, their minds are connected in such a way they imagine themselves as a communion. The Internet has created a pathway or rather a new media and style in which communities can be supposed.  This part of the imaging medium is considered more flexible and gives an open platform for every community member; thus, it is participatory and democratic—Anderson’s account of the imagined community, its benefit, and some critical flaws.

One of the advantages of an imagined community is that it reshapes the study of nations and nationalism. Benedict Anderson argues that the previous over-emphasis on a nation established by the European continent is a false polarized argument of the mere existence of the nation (Calhoun, 2016). The concept of sharing the same language as the ancestor or having corresponding and experience in the European continent bring out the sense of collective identity.  the European descent metropolis increased the upper echelons remotely and brought discrimination on its members. However, the imagined community has a new style of limited and sovereign.

Limited in that the community members may not know each other because other nations externally bind it. Sovereign is founded on the historically rooted idea of internal and external freedom (Calhoun, 2016). This nation with an imagined community is always conceived under deep horizontal comradeship.  Although these communities have no idea what they are up to at a particular time, they have complete confidence that the process is steady, anonymous and performing activity simultaneously. Therefore, it is an emotional resonance that forms the nation stem in that it replaces the kin and religion concept as its primary loci for each individual (Calhoun, 2016). This impacts by promoting individual loyalty and self-sacrifice in the modern era.

The other advantage of a nation is that the emergency of a nation as a new type of imagined community is predicted and set on a specific actual cultural and material condition. These conditions include the linguistic diversity is bringing out the relevancy of vernacular languages and literacy, which is seen as a fortuitous alignment of capitalism. The second is increasing the relevance of vernacular literacy after the protestant reformation (Calhoun, 2016). Third is print capitalism that gives a new way of fixity to those languages previously unattainable in the era using the copied manuscript. Therefore, imagined communities focus on the dynamic of socially and culturally collocated group imagination. The process that forms imagined community includes political culture, self-understanding and solidarity of people’s hearts (Calhoun, 2016). Consequently, it has a more significant influence that goes beyond the mere study of nationalism as the leading innovation towards discovering and understanding social imaginaries, thus facilitating nation reproduction.

The concept of imagined community has several flaws. Anderson’s argument is based on the assumption that people know what he is talking about. Although one accepts that the nation is conceived to provide a better account of this image, the question is how it actually works. This is because besides rethinking the imagination, one has to review nationalism (Ringmar, 2021). An imagination of something following received wisdom is the mental picture of something, which can also be regarded as a perception. A picture is like a photo stored in a human brain, and imagining means the process of retrieving that photo to have a look at it. We can consider this as the picture theory (Ringmar, 2021). A human being imagines things in other sensory modalities, including smell, touch, pain or sound, which are not pictures.

Nonetheless, imagination is a creative force that allows a human mind to develop a new thing or innovation no one has ever seen or heard before. Therefore, this picture theory is not able to explain what people see when they see a nation (Ringmar, 2021). Nations are not a thing, and no photo can be taken of them. Rather than showing the actual features of a person, imagining is like trying to detail an account of the person how they look without the evidence, whether it is real or mere illusion.

The other challenge concerns the collective imagination. In this concept, people imagine things together with others, for instance, a nation. This does not happen to imagine the same thing with the other person (Ringmar, 2021). Everyone has their imagination and perception; therefore, the question is that how and what can help people to imagine the same thing and do it together (Ringmar, 2021). This imagination concept, therefore, confines the imagination of an individual mind. Thus for people to imagine something together, they have to understand the collective experience. This makes Anderson’s account more sophisticated and challenging to comprehend since imagination is too cerebral and comprises mental representation and cultural interpretation.

In conclusion, imagined communities never know their fellow members or even have physical contact with them; however, their minds are connected in such a way they imagine themselves as communion. One of the advantages of an imagined community is that it reshapes the mode of study of nations and nationalism. The other advantage of a country is that the emergency of a nation as a new type of imagined community is predicted and set on a specific actual cultural and material condition. The main challenge of Anderson’s account is that it is sophisticated and difficult to understand since imagination is too cerebral and comprises of mental representation and cultural interpretation.