Nations' Borders
The version of the text that I read was revised in 1991. Were Anderson to revise it again, today, I wonder how the impact of globalization would change his ideas. I agree that boundaries are elastic. I don't, however, agree that they are finite. The borders are porous, and if a person follows the rules of entry, s/he can join other imagined communities. Let's think about America. There are several borders that define who is/is not America/n. One border is geography. If you live in a particular location, you are American (though you can also live in America and not be American). Another border is place of birth. If you were born in a particular location, you are American. Another border is ancestry. If your parents are Americans, and your birth was registered with the American consulate in the country where you were born, then you are American. Though it is admittedly difficult, one can also meet none of these criteria and still become an American citizen. We cannot predict exactly how many people will apply for citizenship, nor can we predict how many people will be granted citizenship. But we do know that the number of citizens is always growing. In this way, it is not finite. There are also people who reject imagined communities. While some people want to become Americans, others may reject their citizenship in order to become members of other nation-communities. As I said, borders are porous. Even if we agreed that everyone in the world could be American, the total number of Americans would continue to grow every time a baby was born.
Two Communities in Newspapers
First, I disagree with Anderson's claim that a newspaper is simply an "extreme form" of a book that has "ephemeral popularity" (Anderson 34). This claim is unfair to both books and to newspapers. News writing is a distinct genre. Journalists aren't trained to write novels, and viceversa. Moreover, a single book doesn't have nearly as many authors as a single newspaper.
Anderson also writes that the linkage between articles in a single newspaper is imagined (p. 33). I disagree with this, too. (Sorry to be so disagreeable, this week.) There are two real linkages that exist between newspapers articles:
- the fact that they appear in the same paper (which Anderson mentions)
- different articles about the same topic in the same paper
Anderson writes eloquently about different people reading the same newspaper around the country at any given time, creating an imagined community of people who know of each other without knowing each other. The ability for the newspaper to create this type of community is one reason why it (the newspaper) is so important in the formation of imagined national communities. I think that the newspaper also creates imagined communities in another way. When an earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince in January, newspapers throughout America reported on the physical damage, loss of life, and recovery efforts. Thus, two imagined communities were created. The first is the community of readers that read the same paper. The second imagined national community was the representation of Haiti to which those readers were exposed: an imagined community defined by journalists and editors who portrayed Haiti in the sensational way that would increase sales.
All of this is just fodder for my own understanding of imagined communities. I look forward to hearing others' thoughts on Wednesday night.
Hi Maria, hope you are feeling better! I also felt very enraptured by Anderson's statements, perhaps my biggest shock was to think of citizenship as something "imagined" instead of given. I think that on almost every level, the way citizenships are portrayed, they almost seemed like part of your dna. Instead, Anderson forced me to think of it as a cultural construct, and that changed my frame of analysis in so many levels.
ReplyDeleteI like your notion of how porous those borders can be sometimes. I was thinking of the Roma people, how they are being suffering now in France and how that comes, at least to a certain degree, to their rejection of the lifestyle considered acceptable in the EU.
So, would you connect these potential doors to citizenship to the conversion of faith or to the "loyalty to the king" promises of the past? I don't think we can say that as an absolute, but maybe they influenced the way we think of citizenship.
Your raise some great points here. I agree with everything you say about the borders actually being porous and not finite if we take "finite" to mean including a fixed, unchanging number of citizens. But I wonder if Anderson did not mean something a bit different when he said nations were "finite" imagined communities. I suspect he may be referring to delimiting geographical borders (so the nation is believed to have an inside and an outside, although these borders occasionally move). But even more importantly, a nation is finite in the sense that while it may constantly admit more members, it is never "coterminous with all mankind" - it defines itself as much by having insiders as by having outsiders. That said, you may well be right that in recent years the very concept of nation as Anderson defines has been threaten by strengthening transnational ties (of course, there's a backlash to this as well, as rising tides of xenophobia and anti-immigrant movements remind us).
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