About this title: What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality - the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to the nation - has not received proportionate attention. In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality. Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism ...
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Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Verso Books, New York
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780860915461ISBN:0860915468
Description: Fine. 8vo. 224 pages. Tight, clean and crisp. A faint hint of shelf wear to wraps, otherwise Very Fine. No inscriptions. No underlining. No highlighting, No notes in the margins. An excellent copy. read more
Description: New in no jacket. pp. 224. What makes people love & die for nations, as well as hate & kill in their name? The sense of nationality--the personal & cultural feeling of belonging to a nation--has not received much attention. Here, Anderson examines the creation & global spread of the ëimagined communitiesí of nationality. He explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism & ... read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Verso Books
Date Published: 2006-11-16
ISBN-13:9781844670864ISBN:1844670864
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781844670864. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: Revised edtn.
Binding: orig. wrappers
Publisher: Verso, London
Date Published: (1996)
Description: Minor rubbing. VG. 23x15cm, xv, 224 pp., PAPERBACK. Contents: Introduction--Cultural roots--The origins of national consciousness--Creole pioneers--Old languages, new models--Official nationalism and imperialism--The last wave--Patriotism and racism--The angel of history--Census, map, museum--Memory and forgetting. read more
Binding: Unknown Binding
Publisher: Verso
Date Published: 1983
ISBN-13:9780860910596ISBN:0860910598
Description: Good. Isbn matches clean xlibrary hardcover mylar covered dj. light wear and clean text FAST SHIPPING W/ CONFIRMATION. NO PRIORITY OR INTERNATIONAL ORDERS OVER 4LBs. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: London: Verso
Date Published: 2006
Description: Very Good. A trade softcover with 240 pages. Some underlining and marginalia to the first chapter, pages are otherwise unmarked. A sound binding. Anderson's classic on nationalism. read more
"Nuanced take on the formation of nationalism; Anderson understands nation-ness as a cultural artefact, similar to religious communities and dynastic realms, that is created through a shared imaginal space. Anderson's conception is novel, as many before him describe nationalism as an ideology. Instead, Anderson conceives the nation as an imagined community enacted through daily rituals of engaging with text (print media, most specifically)."
"An important book with a complex argument that can be boiled down to the following: with the rise of the printing press and industrialized capitalism people were able to conceptualize themselves in national terms that lead into state formations. This process necessarily entails myth making.
Anderson's argument has been influential. The prose is highly dense at times, but the central premise is worth thinking about"
"Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities may be over twenty five years old now, but that doesn't make it any less relevant, even had he not added on the chapters (as interesting as they were) that he adjusted himself with later on, after the fall of the USSR and later with his new ideas on the topic. (Though I love that he did that- it shows someone who is not content to rest on his laurels and whose ideas about the world were not set by the best-selling status of one book he wrote, and that he refuses to be tied to it. I like watching geniuses continue to change and develop.)
In any case! It is quite relevant- especially since 9/11, as we see that the impact of nationalism hasn't declined in the least, and the attachment that people feel for it is very real and has very real consequences on people's lives. Anderson's basic thesis is that nations are "imagined communities," created in the New World by the creole bourgeoisie of the British and Spanish colonies by the conjunction of print journalism (which allowed groups of people to imagine themselves as a community, through providing the links that bound regions together), language, cultural imprints (such as "sacred script" cultures) and the forces of capitalism. He is writing this book to be useful to Marxist theorists, in order to fill what he feels is the gap in the Marxist analysis of nationalism. But it is by no means only useful to the Marxist or even liberal theorist. The reminder that nationalism is a new phenomenon, and that any pretentious to antiquity by any nation is absolutely ridiculous, and even the whole concept of a nation worth dying for is invented, not something that, as the Abbe Sieyes wrote in the French Revolution (perhaps understandably, he was trying to turn the nation of peasants into Frenchmen) "exists in the state of nature."
Anderson says that nations have three conditions: that they are sovereign, limited, and a community. He talks about how these resulted from the specific time and place that the whole concept was invented, but also how they have been adapted and used throughout the world. One of the major strengths of his book (surely influenced by the period of criticism he was writing in) is its major focus on areas of the world outside of Europe (though many of those areas- as most of the world was- were European colonies): Southeast Asia, Latin America, China, Japan. It is fascinating to watch first the process by which he believes nationalism is formed and then nationalism's journey across time and space to crop up in its many different incarnations as various groups constantly find different uses for it.
This is a book to be read and re-read constantly to remind oneself about questioning some very basic assumptions that a lot of people take for granted, and then questioning why those assumptions exist in the first place. I think this book constantly challenges you to look inward and to figure out what matters to you, how it got to matter to you so much, and how you may or may not have been steered that way by a government, leaders, education, or some other outside force that has nothing to do with "natural" feelings.
I've always had a hugely negative, shuddering reaction to two things: religious fundamentalism and overbearing nationalism. This book helped give me the language (as Anderson would say himself) to better explain why."
"Extraordinary book on nationalism, and how we create these images of who we are.
(I took a graduate course in Cultural Anthropology on ethnicity and nationalism, where we read a tremendous amount of the current academic thinking on related topics, and I found nearly all of it appallingly bad: in a world all their own, little touch with reality, and also a ridiculous fog index in the writing. There were a few gems in there, though, and this was the standout, by far. And more than a decade later, it has held up. This book has stuck with me.)"
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