Imagined Communities - Commentary
1 November 2024
This is a commentary on Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson.
On Page 12, the author remarks
All the great classical communities conceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power. Accordingly, the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or Chinese was, in theory, unlimited. (In fact, the deader the written language- the farther it was from speech - the better: in principle everyone has access to a pure world of signs.)
I want to extrapolate the last statement of this analysis - the shared imagination must be accessible to everyone who is (or aspires to be) part of the community. Popular memes and viral social media trends are accessible across languages and cultures. We do not have to forget the physical world. For a long time (2024), American culture export has dominated the world by providing everyone equal access to something, not a language, but commercial goods. Everyone in the “civilised” world knows McDonalds and Starbucks. They wear t-shirts branded with American university or state names. The goods invoke experiences. Funny enough, the flavours and the menu for fast food chains are often tweaked to suit local tastes. But the experience and the vibe! This is analogous to language losing centre focus as the glue because there are often translations of the base material, as long as they invoke the desired emotions among the audience. Avengers Assemble does not need a language. A core component of IC is nationalism via language, but it also forms an excellent background for the next episode: globalism via commercial goods.
On Page 35,
The significance of this mass ceremony - Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers - is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.
Well, given the exposition of the previous paragraph, I have to say - the parent reads the morning newspaper on the porch, and the child watches Instagram reels on the toilet seat. The mode of communication has evolved but the core sustains - you share an imagination with a community. I am trying to force the use of words rooted in “imagination”, but you can equivalently phrase this as “shared mental space” or “shared mindspace”. You believe in the same values; you laugh at the same jokes, and you would refer to the same scenarios. Your ideas about fun when you meet others at an event are the same. These are passive statements. More actively, you participate in activities that enforce or evolve your participation in a community. Why do people go to concerts they do not enjoy? Or cafes to take a selfie with a coffee they find too bitter? Or do any sort of tedious religious rituals. Trivially, one could call it “seeking vaildation”, but that represents these actions as something of a natural impulse of human beings. That is subtly different from awarding agency to an individual. Various individuals are parts of various communities; their participation is ultimately their choice.
On Page 57,
For the new functionary, however, things are more complex…
…Sent out to township A at rank V he may return to the capital at rank W; proceed to province B at rank X; continue to vice-royalty C at rank Y; and end his pilgrimage in the capital at rank Z…
…on his upward-spiralling road he encounters as eager fellow pilgrims his functionary colleagues, from places and families he has scarcely heard of and surely hopes never to have to see. But in experiencing them as travelling-companions, a consciousness of connectedness emerges, above all when all share a single language-of-state.
This is how modern careers work. Education institutions are not homogenous, especially at the higher level. However, they are regulated by governments and recognised by industry with mutual information. Everyone agrees that Institute ABC is a good institute for studying mechanical engineering. While individual institutions retain their heterogeneity, the system as a whole is homogenous. When there are significant differences across nations, there are ways to attain equivalency. The institutes are trusted to provide investiture to their members. This is society’s expectation. The first institute kicks off an individual’s pilgrimage as described by IC. Yet again, friendships and imaginations flourish. If you need to switch careers or community memberships, you can go to another institute to be provided with the required values. I joke about a U.S. Master’s degree as a visa ticket, an entry into the predestined career of individuals that share a particular ideal, not connected by skills or goals or vision, but connected by being part of an imagined community for members of the institute. People have fond memories of their college days - memories of their batchmates and rarely of the coursework they were required to do. Everyone understands this and treats it as common sense, yet it is unclear if this is by design or an emergent phenomenon of human organisation.
On Page 79
Thus in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis…
To put it another way, one can sleep with anyone, but one can only read some people’s words.
Solidarity on an imagined plane against your physical plane is prevalent now. Perhaps the Great Firewall of China and similar censorship in other states break against the phenomenon. Still, the rest of the “free world” is free to imagine themselves as citizens of Mother Earth with shared futures, values and problems.
On Page 154
… the colonial empire, with its rapidly expanding bureaucratic apparatus and its ‘Russifying’ policies, permitted sizeable number of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off centre court: i.e. anywhere in the empire except at home.
This is how I feel about myself and my friends and colleagues. With our freedom of profession, location and some relatively mild restrictions, we are bourgeois in the strictest sense, living the life of nobility. We find it an inconvenience and a tragedy that some of us would get to work in the developed nations of the West while the rest of us will be stuck in India, living like a yajman - surrounded by servants and labourers of convenience. Rather than being a thing of pity, it is an expression of privilege. We are not truly aristocrats in India (We think of ourselves at the mercy of the political class of the Indian republic). Yet, we can live our yajman lives as long as we do it without burdening the flow of history. A feature of colonial nationalism was apathy towards the colonised. A feature of capitalist globalisation is apathy towards the exploited.