19 Aug 2024 — Nitin Verma

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

This is one of those books that you’re unlikely to find prescribed in an Information Studies seminar class, yet it is one that speaks volumes about the role of language in shaping humanity. And what Anderson has to say in this masterpiece, has gotto be extremely relevant to the leaps we’ve made in LLMs.

The main argument of the book is that the concept of a nation is an imagined one. Imagined not as in invented in a superficial, opportunistic sense. But imagined in the sense that the concept represents something that does not exist in physical/geographical reality. This notion of imagined communities is also similarly articulated by Yuval Noah Harari in his bestseller Sapiens.

Anderson places language, and more importantly print-capitalism as the fundamental driving force behind the rise of nationalism in the 18th century. He argues that the commercialization of the printing press created large populations that were united in their minds by the literature they read. This unity created the imagined communities, at first in the Americas, and later in the rest of Western Europe.

However, back in Europe, a different kind of nationalism arose: what Anderson calls “official nationalism”. This type of nationalism arose from dynastic systems wanting to consolidate their power by adopting the model of more ‘organic’ nationalisms of the Americas. In this sense, the organic nationalisms served as models that were copied and adapted the world over.

In Western Europe, “the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought” (p. 11). Anderson further makes the point that religious systems were also imagined, and this imagination occurred through “the medium of sacred language and written script” (p. 13). The sacrality of languages and scripts, though, also distinguishes religious systems from nation-ness. Whereas religious communities were picky about membership, and if one did a good job of knowing the religious community’s language, they were more likely to be accepted (perhaps, regardless of their ethnic characteristics). In contrast, ‘buying’ membership into a nation by learning its language and culture was not possible for most people in the colonies.

This, in my opinion also explains the kind of pre-aristocratic hierarchical systems that evolved the world over, where the religious ‘elites’ were the only literate members of society. The languages (and scripts) these literates read and wrote in were also designed and standardized by the elites for the specific purpose of establishing authority over the communities they ruled or presided over.

In this sense, language has been a tool to divide populations into the haves and the have-nots. Because literacy not only implied access to knowledge, but as a consequence it also entailed access to opportunities and wealth—and ultimately, as per Anderson—membership of nations.

Excellent food for thought!