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Anderson defines the nation as, “an imagined political community – and imagined
as both inherently limited and sovereign…It 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” (Anderson,
B., 1983, p.6).
“Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the
style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are
connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined
particularly-as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and client ship. Until quite recently,
the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society.' We may today
think of the French aristocracy of the ancient régime as a class; but surely it was
imagined this way only very late.” (Anderson, B., 1983, p.7).
(a) "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. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.
The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the
human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for,
say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.” (Anderson, B., 1983, p.7).
(b) "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. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even
the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with
the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphic between each faith's
ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free and if under God,
directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state.” (Anderson, B.,
1983, p.7).
(1) The objective modernity of nations in the eye of the historian vs. their
subjective antiquity in the eye of nationalists.
A. The first paradox refers on how people believe that their nation is superior
compared to the other other nation, also may consider a historical nation, particularly
one not of their own country, as ‘substandard’, lesser than their own, or in other words,
‘behind’ or ‘barbaric’, despite them being ahead of their time. One of the example of this
is the Roman Empire they may be barbaric but they were very far ahead of their time
and extremely advanced. They invented a lot of the things we use today, such as
heating, concrete and our modern calendar. They even helped develop concepts we
consider today as vital for our society and way of living, such as roads, the alphabet and
even the drainage system. But some of the nationalist still consider thie advancementa
that time to be insignificant and unimportant.
(2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio- cultural concepts vs. the
particularity of its concrete manifestations.
B. The second paradox refers to the idea held by the nationalists that everybody
should their own nationality or the right to be belong to some kind of group
Anderson defines the nation as, “an imagined political community – and imagined
as both inherently limited and sovereign…It 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” (Anderson,
B., 1983, p.6). It says even though the people in a nation don’t know everyone in the
community, they have the concept the concept that they belong to a single nation and
everyone is connected by the nation.
“Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the
style in which they are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are
connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined
particularly-as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and client ship. Until quite recently,
the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society.' We may today
think of the French aristocracy of the ancient régime as a class; but surely it was
imagined this way only very late.” (Anderson, B., 1983, p.7).
(c) How the Consciousness of Nationalism Originated
(d) How did print-languages laid the bases for nationalistic consciousness?
Print languages laid the foundation for national consciousness in three ways:
they created unified fields of exchange and communication they gave a new fixity to
language they created languages of-power of a kind different from the older
administrative vernaculars However, the concrete formation of contemporary nation-
states is not isomorphic with the determinate reach of particular print languages, one
must also look at the emergence of political entities on the world stage.