The Idea Of Nationalism In Benedict Anderson's Imagined Community

“No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers” (Anderson 9). Benedict Anderson detects that the public does not care about who lies inside the tombs because the purpose of the cenotaphs and tombs is to remind the public of what the soldiers died for, the nation. If the cemetery of soldiers existed to reverence individuals, the size and color of cenotaphs and tombs would not be standardized to emphasize the commonality among the soldiers, which is they all died in wars. People think of “the representative body, not the personal life” (Anderson 32). Nevertheless, the question, why people would assume the romanticized deaths are for the nation, lingers. In Imagined Community, …show more content…
Anderson claims that nation “is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 6). Since members cannot meet everyone else in a nation to build personal connections, imagined connections can serve the purpose of distinguishing members who belong to the same nations. Nevertheless, an imagined community is not invented or false. People’s use of imagination is not fabricating a community which does not exist in the real world, but following rules of classifying people. It is the rules that are socially constructed. By community, Anderson points out that in contrast to hierarchical dynasties, nation “is always conceived as a deep, horizontal relationship” (Anderson 7). Instead of sharing the vertical connection with the core, people share a horizontal connection with the concept of nation. Furthermore, Anderson specifies that a nation is limited and sovereign. Nobody imagines nations to be without borders and in the age of Enlightenment, the sacredness of religion weakened and the notion of political sovereignty rose. In Imagined Community, Anderson introduced the demise of religious and dynastic communities to demonstrate a gap for Nationalism to emerge as “an imagined political community” (Anderson 6); he also analyzed how print capitalism and language reinforced …show more content…
Religions offer “imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering” (Anderson 10). Since continuity proceeds and follows physical fatality, people have the reason to think about how they should react to miseries in life, such as disease and loss of loved ones. The sense of continuity is essential to community building because the notion encourages people to connect with the passed and unborn ones who the living individuals have never met. Therefore, the eighteenth century, which is “the dusk of religious modes of thought”, can be “the dawn of the age of nationalism” for Western Europe (Anderson 11). Nationalism, which also has the ability to transform fatality into continuity, can serve to play the religion’s role. In addition, with the discovery of land besides Europe, Europeans are consciously categorizing characteristics and territorializing differences among nations. For instance, in Marco Polo’s description of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo claimed that the festival of Easter is European and Christianity is the best religion. The territorialization sets the foundation of nations being limited for mass print capitalism and language to reinforce the notion. “A gradual demotion of the sacred language itself” (Anderson 18), which changes how people interact with religion, sets the stage for print capitalism and language to perpetuate the concept of