GLOBAL IMAGINARY

Imagined Community
Benedict Anderson is political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United
States. He wrote the book 'Imagined Communities' which focuses on nations and
nationalism.

Nationalism and Imagined Communities

According to Anderson's theory of imagined communities, the main causes of nationalism
are the movement to abolish the ideas of rule by divine right and hereditary monarchy, and
the emergence of printing press capitalism. Initially, the history of society and politics were
based on the existence of a common religion.

From this, Anderson argues that in the presence and development of technology, people
started to think what really is history and politics. With the emergence of the printing press
and capitalism, people gained national consciousness regarding the common values that
bring those people together.

The Imagined Communities started with the creation of their own nation print-languages
that each individual spoke. That helped develop the first forms of known nation-states, who
then created their own form of art, novels, publications, mass media, and communications.

Nation as an Imagined Community

Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community." 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."

Global Imaginary
The concept of “global imaginary,” as coined by Manfred Steger, refers to the consciousness
of belonging to a global community—a consciousness that has emerged in recent decades
with the rapid rise of communication technologies and the decline of nation-based political
ideologies. The concept builds on Benedict Anderson’s theories of “imagined communities,”
but while Anderson used the term to refer to shared ideologies within nations, Steger posits
that globalization is breaking down the imagined walls of nationhood and bringing about “a
shared sense of a thickening world community.”

One artist and scholar has focused on visual culture as a way to understand the concept of
“global imaginary.”  Tommaso Durante’s project, the Visual Archive Project of the Global
Imaginary, explores the visual evidence, through photographs, of the cultural changes
happening worldwide as a result of globalization.  The photographs encompassing the
cultural dimension are full of people, advertisements, storefronts, public spaces, and
symbols that represent merging nationalities and ideologies.

Through the images, we see how symbols and cultural icons stretch across the boundaries of
nations and create a shared global visual landscape.
Global imaginary refers to the belief that one is a member of a global community and not
just of one's own nation state..