Owning our Imagined Communities

Should we work harder on taking ownership of our imagined community? A question that has intrigued me since reading Benedict Anderson's theory that a nation’s identity is imagined. It has to be imaged surely, the members of even the smallest state will never know all of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each Scot, Iraqi or Dutch …etc lives the image of their national identity. I agree with Anderson when he suggests that national identities can only be understood as an imagined community because nations are simply too large for all of their members to actually know one another, in other words, it is only possible for its members to imagine that they have a relationship with all other members of the nation across time and space. Most people think of their nation as their extended community, and experience feelings of commonality and solidarity with these people they will never know. A compelling argument that required exploration….
If this is a valid standpoint from which to understand identity at a national scale, I am curious how it’s constructed, whether is it applicable at a city, town and even village scale and whether or not more people should be more involved in the creation of this imagined collective. Anderson recognised the importance of technology in forging ties between the state and the person. He figured that an imagined identity was augmented by developments in mass media production, which subsequently led to the growth of literacy rates, amplifying existing ties through technology; replicating, as it were, the Gemeinschaft through the force of the imagination aided by the book, pamphlet and newspaper. Ironically, Anderson’s publication came out in 1983, 40 years ago. Technology, media and communities have granularised and become far more plastic, and yet our imagined communities remains firm.
I think Anderson’s theory has a great deal of potential when combined with the theories of the ‘Everyday’, ‘Placemaking’ and ‘Peacebuilding’. I propose that our imagined communities have roots within a shared ‘lifeworld’ a place moving beyond a philosophy of consciousness - Habermas explains his theory of lifeworld as represented by a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns' (Habermas et al., 2005). He refers to the lifeworld as 'a storehouse of cultural givens'.
If there is an imagined national community, it stands to reason there are other communities that we imagine, we can only imagine our urban affiliations perhaps even our family affiliations are somewhat imagined.
To build this general consensus of identity there must be common cultural touchpoints. From a national perspective, I can imagine these to be things like a national anthem, traditional dress, language, landscape, climate, historical narratives, heroes and villains….etc. These touchpoints are daily iterated and reiterated through social interaction, social media, press, TV, film, fashion and music. Building an imagined community within a city, town or region is much the same idea, only on a smaller scale. It is generated by shared common experiences, language, rituals, symbols, places, spaces, climate and history. Key buildings are important, town events, green space, traditions and dialect etc…
Therefore, our imagined identity has multiple layers that overlay each other much like a series of acetates (remember them?), they shift in response to context, conversation and condition and seem fairly susceptible to change or manipulation. Therefore, we should all have greater agency in determining how those imagined communities are shaped. An agency that I suggest starts with recognising that there are a series of meta-narratives that we subconsciously subscribe to. They help consolidate our sense of belonging, place and identity and inform our emotions and relations with others and ourselves. So when your watching the Olympics and cheering on your nation's athletes, remember it comes from an imagined place :)
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