Comunitats imaginades. Reflexions sobre l'origen i la propagació

ISBN:

2005, Checked and extended edition, 260 pp

What is what makes people to love or die for nations at the same time that to hate or kill in its name? There are a lot of books written on the nationalist movements from the political point of view, but the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to the nation has not received the necessary attention. In this research paper, favourably and repeatedly quoted, Benedict Anderson studies the creation and spreading of the «imagined communities» that constitute the nationality. Anderson explores the creation processes of these communities: the territorialization of the religious faiths, the decline of the old royalty, the interaction between capitalism and printing, the development of the State vernacular language, and the changing conceptions of time. He shows us how a nationalism originally from America, which was adapted by the European popular movements, the imperial powers and the anti-imperialist groups of resistance in Asia and Africa, was born. The result has been that the national community has taken the place of the primitive ways of broader communities based on the royalty, the dynastic rights or religion. Therefore, nationalism would play a similar role as religion in the nationalist institutions of democracy and bureaucracy, and it would legitimate them. This revised edition has been extended with two new chapters. In the first one, Anderson thinks about the complex role of the colonialist State in the development of nationalisms in the Third World, and, in the second one, he analyses the processes by which the nations all over the world have made out an old past.