benedict anderson imagined communities citation

This tendency secured unity of the reading communities but also facilitated division into more and less powerful languages and nations. To sum up, the national consciousness has been tightly connected to the published literature for many centuries. A book that helped reshape the field of nationalism studies, Imagined Communities also shows the critical thinking skills of interpretation and analysis working at their highest levels. Finally, the language of published texts became the language of power automatically devaluing the languages of smaller or less influential nations and pushing them out of written culture and, in turn, history. Benedict Anderson’s 1983 masterpiece Imagined Communities is a ground-breaking analysis of the origins and meanings of nations and nationalism. That way, the speakers of various versions of a particular language learned to comprehend a common language that led to the changes in their cultural identities that went beyond that state borders creating imagined communities unified by written text (Anderson 44).īesides, the printed books provided a material example of antiquity and became a symbol of development illustrating how far humanity has come over centuries. As unifying as it was for individual nations, the capitalist penetration of publishing and vernacularization of literature brought that states apart from one another increasing their national identities and international tension as a consequence.įurther, in order to avoid the fragmentation of the reader markets, the publishers tended to print and sell literature in just a few languages that were distributed for the nations speaking similar dialects.

At the same time, the vernacularized texts bad much more power combining the geographical, cultural, and political aspects and could address the identities of the readers in a much more effective way.Īs a result, the language became a useful tool unifying the communities based on multiple features such as culture, religion, geographical position, and political identity simultaneously providing connectivity between all of these aspects. As a language, Latin did not belong to any state in Western Europe but was widely used in the realms of religion which made its influence incomplete.

Benedict anderson imagined communities citation