Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

imagined communities: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

● anchor · a standalone construct Nearest construct by meaningsocial capitalcompare the meanings
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imaginedcommunities1 CONSTRUCTImagined communityANDERSON · IMAGINED NATION

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Political science

The nation understood as a socially constructed, imagined political community

Benedict Anderson introduced the concept in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, revised edition 2006), defining a nation as an imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never meet most of their fellow members, yet each carries a mental image of their shared belonging; it is limited because every nation draws boundaries beyond which other nations begin; and it is sovereign because the concept took hold in an era when older dynastic and religious orders were losing their claim to rule by divine right. Anderson traced the rise of national consciousness to what he called print-capitalism, the mass circulation of books and newspapers in shared vernacular languages, which let dispersed strangers picture themselves as one public moving together through the same calendar time. As an academic object of study the construct is distinctive in treating the nation not as a natural or ancient given but as a cultural artifact with a datable historical origin, and it has become a standard reference point across political science, sociology, history, and anthropology for analysing nationalism, collective identity, and the formation of large-scale social groups.[1][2][3]

Unit
A type of large-scale social group: the nation conceived as an imagined political community
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Studied through historical and textual analysis of print media, language, censuses, maps, and public narratives that construct national belonging

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Nearby constructs

community5 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, five constructsidentity6 fields · 14 citationsjingle · one name, six constructsartifact2 fields · 2 citationsjingle · one word, two constructs

References

  1. Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso.
  2. Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Rev. ed.). Verso.
  3. Calhoun, C. (1993). Nationalism and ethnicity. Annual Review of Sociology, 19, 211–239. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.19.080193.001235

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