was that its western border was a frontier. So, the nation itself was an imagined community, and its founders decided that its formation was worth the bloodshed of war. is that it was possibly the first imagined community that was built around a set of core principles as well as a common language, principles that were codified in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Would you give us 3 examples of imagined community from the American Revolution era? The owner of a production company in Santa Monica who shoots movies and runs shows in Burbank is definitively part of Hollywood even if he or she hardly ever goes to the physical place known as Hollywood.Ģ. A hedge fund manager living and working in Pacific Palisades who hardly ever sets foot in Manhattan is definitively part of Wall Street. I argued in my keynote that imagined communities do not have to have physical borders, that they can be metaphors for communities that can stretch to far-flung corners of the world. As we all know, that led to such historical developments as the Protestant Reformation and, in Anderson’s construct, it led to a sense of communion with people who spoke the same language and shared the same ethnicity, a communion eventually codified in the Treaty of Westphalia and the formation of the nation-states of Europe. Which enabled people to read them and talk about them. Thar invention made possible the publication of The Bible and other books in the vernacular.

In his definition, imagined communities are “socially-organized communities imagined by people who perceive themselves as part of that group.” He used the term to describe how nation-states were formed, prompted by the invention of the movable type printing press by Johannes von Gutenberg. “Imagined community” is a term coined by the late political scientist Benedict Anderson.

How do you define in your own words an imagined community? In your keynote in Malibu, you mentioned about imagined community in reference to Wall Street that has people everywhere being part of it rather than just those stock brokers living in NYC.

Imagined community definition