Nation as an imagined community

WHAT IS NATION? HOW A NATION IS FORMED?

The Nation as an Imagined Community
He defined a nation as "an imagined political community".[1] As
Anderson puts it, a nation "is imagined because the members of
even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-
members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion".[

 Finally, a nation is a community because,

regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail
in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over
the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much
to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.[
Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community
that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign"

A NATION IS CREATED NATION IS A SOCIAL NATIONAL IDENTITY IS

THOUGH A SHARED GROUP CO-EXISTING IMAGINED
HISTORY AND WITHIN A STATE
LANGUAGE MULTINATIONAL STATE?
 • as a cohesive whole
National identity is • as represented by
a sense of a nation distinctive traditions,
culture, and language.

HOW A NATION IS NATION IS A SOCIAL NATIONAL IDENTITY IS

CREATED THOUGH A GROUP CO-EXISTING IMAGINED
SHARED HISTORY AND WITHIN A STATE
LANGUAGE MULTINATIONAL STATE?
How a nation
is formed?
HOW A NATION IS CREATED?

Anderson depicts a nation as a socially constructed community,

imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.

Reproduction
• Imagined of same media • Consuming the
communities are same media,
encouraged by • Books and people perceived
the development pamphlets were that they had
of printing press printed in something in
commonly spoken common
languages.
Spread of the
Printing press
same media
The nation is imagined as limited because even the
largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living
human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond
which lie other nations … It is imagined as sovereign
because the concept was born in an age in which
Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the
legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical
dynastic realm … Finally, it is imagined as community,
because, regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is
always conceived as deep, horizontal comradeship.
Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over
the past two centuries, for so many millions of people,
not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited
imaginings …