Imagined Communities (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Imagined communities are a concept coined by Benedict Anderson. He believes that a nation is a community socially constructed, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.:6-7 Anderson's book, Imagined Communities, in which he explains the concept in depth, was published in 1983. Benedict Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity: for example, the nationhood felt with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympics. 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."