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.[
Rizal and Popular Nationalism
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- IMAGINED
HISTORY AND EXISTING WITHIN A
LANGUAGE STATE
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- IMAGINED
SHARED HISTORY EXISTING WITHIN A
AND LANGUAGE STATE
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 …