Imagined Communities - Review (Coffee History)
Benedict Anderson
In editorial terms, the month of April should be celebrated by historians and other representatives of the humanities. There were several important releases covering various areas of knowledge. One of the most anticipated book, which hit bookstores late last month, was the now classic "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson.
Published by Companhia das Letras, Anderson's book falls within the theoretical debates, and why not practical on nationalism. Brother of the famous Marxist historian Perry Anderson, Benedict has an academic career outside the traditional circuits, or rather, outside the circles of Eurocentric approach to social phenomena. Children of British parents, was born in Anderson Hunming, China in 1936, and grew up in California. He studied at Cambridge (where she teaches today) and began to devote himself to the study of politics and history of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He is also professor emeritus at Cornell University.
Imagined Communities was originally published in 1983, quickly making huge international success. In Brazil, the book first appeared in 1989, but with a limited edition. Until this new version of Companhia das Letras, students and Brazilian researchers had trouble finding the old title.
By bringing the issue of nationalism and the formation of the sense of nation, Anderson produced a text that talks and rejects the thesis established names such as the liberal philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner , and the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Elie Kedourie. For Anderson, the rise of nationalism has not debts to Western European industrialism, or the illustration nor the Marxist formulation that bet on a key economist. But what is its wording then?
For Benedict Anderson, the nation is nothing more than a limited community, sovereign, and especially imagined. Limited as great as they are, there will always be finite boundaries; sovereign because it presupposes a great deal with pluralism alive and finally imagined, because its subjects, never even knowing fully each other, share common signs and symbols, which make them see themselves as belonging to the same imaginary space.
Challenging the concepts of "invention," Anderson puts these "imagined communities" exist thanks to a kind of "horizontal comradeship" that owes much more to a construction will be cultural rather than specifically political or coercive. In this sense, what distinguishes the different nations is the "style" are imagined and how the resources of that resort. Therefore, there is no community more or less real. The imagination of communities, the author observes, is not synonymous with fake companies, but a "web of kinship" that endows its members a certain particularity.
The formation of these networks, Anderson continues, should not be understood outside the context of the proliferation of newspapers and other publications, like the novel, that since the emergence of the press Mechanical Gutenberg, are creating a kind of invisible link and therefore symbolic, not uncommon among people who had not the slightest resemblance between them cultural. The time of the newspapers, the time of simultaneity would be essential to think the "being together" lodged in the minds of those who are part of a nation. So he speaks on the importance of studying an "editorial capitalism", something similar to the studies on the emergence of public sphere, much debated by intellectuals like Habermas, John B. Thompson and Peter Burke.
Photo: Neo-Nazi demonstrators in the streets of Russia
But not just media editorials, nationalism depended on the verge of become a modern neurosis. Other spaces were also central to the construction of its meaning, as Anderson brings the triad: the museum, censuses and maps enabled the rulers to project desires and perspectives hitherto purely complicated scale. And speaking of these issues is not just alluding to the formation of a common memory, shared. The other side of this memory - forgetting - is also considered by Anderson as an important factor. No wonder he uses the words of nineteenth-century historian, Ernest Renan - still a reference in the study of nationalism - which said that nations have always needed some dose of forgetfulness of the past to be constituted as such.
Currently, talk of nationalism and identity formation of ties becomes even more urgent. "Imagined Communities" helps us think through the conceptual and theoretical tools, many challenges of the contemporary world. One, perhaps the most impressive is the great advancement of Communication and Information, which increasingly create new social networks in old communities and nations, thus establishing parameters and new experiences for those who live adjacent to all the time shrouded with categories and classifications political and cultural. How do these technologies impact on our way of thinking about nationalism? What are the contours of these new imagined communities? What is the style, to repeat the words of Anderson, which differentiate them from others. Finally, please note the current differences between Tibet and China and between Kosovo and Serbia. The conflicts and outbreaks of violence involving these "sub-nationalisms" - how would you rate Anderson - show that contrary to what Eric Hobsbawm says, we are very far from the end of an "Age of nationalism."
The book has a great historian of the preface Lilia Moritz Schawarcz, plus two appendices chapters, which deepens the author updates previous discussions, as well as a reinterpretation and Updates ; will of concepts and approaches. With yellowish leaves (anti-reflective), sources of reasonable size and always a helpful index, reading the great prose Anderson becomes even more enjoyable. A key book in the library of every historian. A gift infallible for anyone who enjoys reading.
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Price: U.S. $ 38.00
Publisher: Companhia Das Letras (2008)
Pages: 330
