Imagined Communities

The reception of Benedict Anderson’s ideas was very fruitful in many disciplines, and his work provided key concepts that can now throw a clarifying light in some blurry matters. The expression “imagined community” has known a remarkable proliferation, a situation that led to both the formation of a research direction and to the perpetuation of a cliché. In this respect, my article pointed out some suggestive characteristics of virtual communities, explaining why the imagined community is a valuable subject for the theorists of new media. The impossibility to know in person all the members of a big community is just one factor that determines its imagined face. Moreover, the set of values and inner presuppositions that guide the members are important bricks in the construction of community. In my opinion, the virtual community is imagined as a multi-layered experience (technological, conversational, relational etc.). The dynamic of a virtual community contains the tension amongst th...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how visual aesthetic referents used in branding can help foster a transnational imagined community (TIC). The authors use brands embedded with Middle Eastern visual aesthetics as a research context. As such, the study aims to examine how Middle Eastern non-figurative art is used by non-Middle Eastern brands to foster an imagined Middle Easternness. Design/methodology/approach – Through a critical visual analysis, the authors apply a visual social semiotic approach to Middle Eastern art canons to better understand the dimensions of transnational imagined communities. Findings – The study finds and discusses six sub-dimensions of Middle Easternness, which compose two overarching dimensions of TIC, namely, temporal and spatial. These sub-dimensions provide brand managers and designers with six different ways to foster transnational imagined communities through the use of visual aesthetic referents in branding. Research limitations/i...

In October 2019, Netflix launched its first reality talent show Rhythm & Flow. It has been praised for revitalizing the talent competition format and its authentic approach to hip-hop. Furthermore, the show has a large number of female contestants, and is distinctly and unapologetically ‘black’. This paper analyzes Rhythm & Flow’s representation of hip-hop, race and gender. What is the social, cultural and political relevance of introducing a reality talent show about hip-hop, in a time where music genres are increasingly blurred? Using Benedict Anderson’s notion of the ‘imagined community’ and drawing on works on the meaning of race and gender in hip-hop, I argue that Rhythm & Flow imagines the hip-hop community as a real and unified entity, to draw attention to persistent racial inequality in the US. The show uses the reality talent format as a vehicle for emotional engagement, while trading in liveness and interactivity for the authenticity of socio-political relevance.

This article accounts for the allure of sports spectatorship in late capitalism by theorizing spectatorial communities as imagined communities. Building on the work of Benedict Anderson and others, and drawing on discourse around fandom in popular culture and the media, it argues that imagined communities of fandom function as sites of meaning and community within the alienating and individualist context of late capitalism. These communities are invented and continuously rehearsed through fetish spectacle and ritualistic practice and produce Manichean understandings of social relations that can lead to marginalization and violence.

The concept of ‘core category’ is most associated with the grounded theory method developed by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss but has been utilised in relation to other qualitative methods such as phenomenology. The terminology varies and a core category may sometimes be referred to or indexed as core theme, core meaning, core variable, or central category. A core category is the main theme, story-line, or process which subsumes and integrates all lower-level categories in a grounded theory, encapsulates the data efficiently at the most abstract level, and is the category with the strongest explanatory power......

The need to produce difference and sameness simultaneously in order to preserve imperial identity is key to Homi K. Bhabha’s discussion of colonial mimicry. In this discussion Bhabha explores the same sense of similarity in difference that the creature crafted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the prehistoric giants of Geoffrey’s of Monmouth's pseudo history, the Historia regum Britanniae, are subject to: that of being moulded in the image of 'one's Maker', but with inevitable difference. Bhabha argues that colonial mimicry is ‘the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’,  and that ‘to be Anglocized is emphatically not to be English.’ This process of mimicry, of a re-moulding of the imperial self, is not unlike the moulding of Frankenstein’s creature who is created as a reformed (literally) and recognisable ‘Other’. In the sense of Lacan's extimité, the colonial subject is Anglicized, at once at the inner core of the “Empire”, populating and fuelling its existence, but ultimately a foreign body, having no control over what they call home. The results of this mimicking process can be found in V. S Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, the narrator of which, Kripal (‘Cripple’) Singh, exists within a monstrous state of category crisis, constantly alluding to an uncanny sense that he is shipwrecked upon the island of his birth. This sense of shipwreck rises from the irresponsible reproduction of the colonial project, having produced nation upon nation of colonial subjects who exist in a middle passage of displacement. Postcolonial writers like Naipual write neither from a home - a centre - nor a margin, but from diaspora: the displacement of peoples. In 1982, Salman Rushdie wrote of postcolonial literatures in an article for The Times that ‘the Empire writes back to the Centre’, wittily alluding to the 1980 film, ‘Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back’. As Derek Walcott writes, ‘a disorientation is taking place because the native, the exotic, the victim, the noble savage is looking back, returning a stare’, allowing a re-centering of the gaze . The ‘returning stare’, reminiscent of the creature of Frankenstein, who so eloquently questions a moulding process that makes him, in Bhabha’s words, the ‘subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite’, becomes a writing back, itself a moulding process. Indeed, postcolonial writers consider it their duty and privilege to solder together the fragmented and marginalized remains of the shipwrecked and mimicked identity of the colonial subject through the validating process of writing, as this dissertation will explore.

"فإذا كانت القومية علاقة إنتماء لجماعة متخيلة فهى تتضمن الحب طبعا. اما منتجات القومية الثقافية من شعر، ونثر قصصي، وموسيقى، وفنون تشكيلية، فتظهر هذا الحب بوضوح شديد في آلاف الأشكال والأساليب. ومن جهة آخرى كم من النادر حقا أن نجد منتجات قومية مماثلة تعبر عن الخوف والنفور.."

يقدم لنا المؤلف تصديره للطبعة المنقحة الخاصة بكتابه الأشهر (الجماعات المتخيلة)، حيث يفسر نقط التنقيح والتعديل التى قام بها وأسبابها.
اعادة نشر هذا التصدير من الممكن ان تلفت النظر الى مسألة القومية بصورة أعمق من مجرد البحث حول التعريف بها. الأمر الذى من المحتمل أن يؤدى الى ايجاد مسار للبحث حول ظاهرة من الظواهر المرتبطة بها وهي الشخصية الفنية القومية/الفن القومي.

Benedict Anderson’s great work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Anderson 1983; hereafter IC) has been hailed as the “best known single work in nationalism studies” (Breuilly 2016: 625). His work has had an enormous impact throughout the social sciences. Much of Anderson’s formulation depends on observations about the importance of linguistics, communication, and standardization of language in community formation and identities. It is therefore paradoxical that few linguists have addressed Anderson’s work. Even rarer are discussions of the implications of Anderson’s work from the perspective of pragmatics. This essay is an attempt to begin
an exploratory discussion of the many pragmatic issues raised by the concept of Imagined Communities as laid out in Anderson’s important work.

Beeman, William O. 2018 Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. In Östman, Jan-Ola and Jef Verschueren, Eds. Handbook of Pragmatics 21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 81-110.

The geological divergence of the North American and Eurasian plates creates a geological border known as the mid-Atlantic ridge. The continual diverging forces and intense volcanic activity of the sub-oceanic ridge have given birth to the landmass we know as Iceland. Symbolically, the geographical emergence of Iceland is a direct result of the distancing of both the old and new worlds. Iceland and its people rest at the crossroads of two very different societies, making it hard to share a sense of belonging with either continent, despite the unifying forces of globalization. Iceland's unique history and geographical isolation have resulted in a weak sense of belonging with either the historically rich European or progressive North American continents, thus fostering a strong ethnic and nationalistic identity. In lieu, Iceland has formed and maintained its own unique identity with help of both continents, becoming a geographic and cultural halfway intersection between both. This strong cultural identity can be best observed at Pingvellir, a lieu de mémoire representing the history, struggle, and relentlessness of Iceland's thirst for an identity of its own. The ensuing discussion outlines this thirst and how it paved the micronation's development of a strong national identity resistant of global cultural hybridization.

Музей нь үүсэн байгуулагдсан цаг үеийнхээ төрийн байгуулал, дэглэмийн
бэлгэдлийн эрх мэдэл (Бурдьё 1984), бүх төрлийн ноёрхол үүнд жишээ нь жанжлах ёсыг (Грамчи [1936] 1971) шинжлэн судлахад хамгийн тохиромжтой талбар юм. Түүнчлэн музейн бас нэгэн онцлог шинж чанар бол орчин цагийг даган гарч ирсэн агуулга болоод төсөөллийн буюу нүдэнд үзэгдэж гарт баригдах боломжгүй утга санааг биет хэлбэрт хувиргаж хүний оюун санаанд буулгадаг юм. Энэ ч утгаараа музей нь орчин үеийн үндэстэн дээр тулгуурласан улс байгуулсан түүхийг өгүүлдэг гэдгийг Шайнер (2001) дурдсан байдаг.
      Иймээс энэхүү судалгааны ажилд Байгалийн Түүхийн Музей Чингис хааны музей болж хувирсан, түүхэн цаг үеийн явцад Монголын Үндэсний Музей яагаад олон удаа нэршлээ өөрчилсөн зэрэг асуудлуудыг тайлах үүднээс музейн гарал үүсэл, хөгжлийн түүхийг улс төр, үзэл суртал, нийгэм, соёлын талаас нь судлан шинжлэхийг зорилоо. Ингэхдээ баруунд үүсэж хөгжсөн, ялангуяа сэргэн мандалт, соён гэгээрлээс улбаатай орчин үежих үзэгдэлийн хүрээнд суддагдсан онолуудын дагуу авч хэлэлцэхийг зорив. Өөрөөр хэлбэл Монгол улсад орчин үежих үзэгдэл музейгээр дамжин хэрхэн нэвтэрсэн, ямар нэг эрлийзжил үүсгэсэн эсэх, орчин үеийн салшгүй нэг институц болох музейг барууны бус 'хөрсөнд нутагшуулах' үйл явц ямар төсөөллийн дагуу, ямар арга замаар дамжиж хэрэгжсэн зэргийг судлахыг хичээлээ. Судалгааны ажлын гол судлагдахуунаар Монголын Үндэсний Музейг сонгон авч, харин харьцуулалт хийхдээ Богд Хааны Ордон Музей болон Чойжин Ламын Сүм Музейд дадлага хийх явцдаа цуглуулсан мэдээллийг ашигласан болно.

This study looks to detail the notion of community and social structures that support RuneScape as a social entity. This is accomplish using a survey of around 1200 players, semi-structured interviews with over 40 of the respondents. The two limitations of this approach are bias towards the 'main' version of the game, RuneScape3, and the lack of direct comparative ethnography through participant observation. However, comparative ethnography by proxy was achieved through the structure of interviews. The main findings of the study are that the overall community of RuneScape is like that of a nation, with an 'imagined' notion of itself. In actuality the community is fragmented into thematic sub-community groups catalysing around the RuneScape clan system, which closely parallels communities of practice structures. Players are bound to these communities and RuneScape as a whole through a messy assemblage of bondage, comprising of gameplay and social bonds. Therefore, RuneScape, as an MMORPG, is not addictive in and of itself, because of a mix of gameplay and social factors binding players to it. Game designers need to appreciate that MMORPGs represent messy assemblages combining gameplay and social elements, meaning that changes they make impact on players lives.

This essay argues that Anderson’s definition of the nation as a community that is imagined, limited and sovereign, while correctly identifying nations as constructed, is insufficient. In fact, Anderson fails to give a definition at all, by not explaining how the nation is distinct from other ‘styles’ of community. Consequently, his community could be imagined in premodern times.

RESUMEN

“Miguel Hidalgo en los relatos de nación. Del patriotismo criollo al nacionalismo posrevolucionario” no es una investigación que se ocupe de la vida y obra de Hidalgo. Este estudio desarrolla  cómo se construyó el mito nacional en torno a este personaje y cuál fue la importancia que tuvo dicho mito en el proceso de invención de la nación mexicana durante el siglo XIX y primera mitad del XX.

        El trabajo está enfocado en dos aspectos importantes: se aborda cómo el mito del “padre de la patria” ha sido utilizado como estrategia de legitimación política  y como fuerza cohesionadora que facilitó que la población se identificara y sintiera parte de una sola comunidad cultural y política: la nación mexicana

        Para desarrollar la investigación fue necesario identificar los distintos imaginarios nacionales que fueron impulsados desde el siglo XIX para explicar qué era la nación mexicana, qué era lo mexicano y quiénes eran los mexicanos. Cada uno de estos imaginarios fue promovido por diversas condiciones políticas, económicas y tecnológicas. Una vez que se tuvieron estos contextos, en cada uno de ellos se desarrolla qué interpretación se hacía de Miguel Hidalgo, cómo las elites rectoras del país reinterpretaron y se apropiaron de su culto para justificar su poder político y para potenciar una identidad nacional en el resto de la población.

        Esta estrategia metodológica fue derivada de la llamada “teoría modernista sobre el nacionalismo y la invención de las naciones”, la cual sostiene que las naciones modernas son construcciones culturales que tuvieron cabida a finales del siglo XVIII e inicios del XIX, cuando se desplazó la tradición divino-dinástica de los Estados de Antiguo régimen y “la Nación” fue colocada como fuente de soberanía de los Estados modernos. La investigación se centró en cuatro tipo de fuentes: la historiografía clásica del siglo XIX, las celebraciones patrióticas, la enseñanza de historia patria en sistema escolar influenciado por el gobierno y a partir de las fuentes icónicas (monumentos, pintura, etc.) que han tenido un peso en la construcción de imaginarios nacionales.

        Como última precisión, es pertinente mencionar que la tesis, aunque está centrada en la invención del mito del “padre de la patria”, también aporta conocimiento sobre el proceso de invención de la nación mexicana y lo que esto ha implicado: la manipulación del discurso histórico.

Palabras clave:    Miguel Hidalgo, nacionalismo, nación, mito, héroe.

This paper aims at answering the question “No nation now but the Imagination”. The author agrees with Anderson’s ideology about imagined communities but questions its validity. The author’s paper focuses on identifying areas where ‘imagining’ is clearly possible in pre-modern times; where Anderson’s prediction of the end of nationalism being not remote is erroneous; and, how the non-allocation for intangible religious ideology in his theory results in its inapplicability to the Muslim society in India.

Globalization is a phenomenon that is hard to capture, and many scholars have written about how subject. Of importance for this thesis is Arjun Appadurai’s theory of the imaginary and how he attempts to frame globalization through the imagined, creating a world where various aspects of culture are interconnected in both simple and complex ways through the various scapes. This thesis will approach globalization in a similar manner, and focus on some specific subgenres of heavy metal called Viking metal, folk metal, pagan metal and national socialist (black) metal (collectively henceforth referred to VPFNS metal) as a form of case study, by examining how global structures of common difference take upon different local forms.

By interviewing fans of the music, attending concerts as a form of participant observation and by analyzing lyrics using critical discourse analysis, it became obvious that a sense of belonging was created thanks to the imaginary, where rituals help to maintain the neighborhood. These rituals include but are not limited to clapping hands, cheering, bands touring over the world, holding stage banters, people participating in the mosh pit, doing the devil sign, singing along the lyrics, wearing similar clothing by adhering to a typical heavy metal aesthetic, reading lyrics, talking about music with friends, seeking out new music and so on and so forth. All these actions or lack thereof exemplify a person’s ability to possess cultural capital, which in turn marks whether one is “in” or “out”, thus helping to build specific social discourses that define the scene and sets it apart from other subcultures.

These discourses are in turn situated in larger social contexts and fans of VPFNS metal also position themselves in relation to these discourses in various ways. Examples include the prevalent homophobia, racism and sexism found within the scene, and how there appears to be a reproduction of an archaic and romantic form of masculinity that rejects the feminine as abject. This rejection of femininity can be understood as VPFNS metal being situated in a highly phallocentric global context, seeing how patriarchy is often the dominating discourse.
The focus on a cultural historical past can also be understood as the rejection of modernity itself, and all my respondents cite the importance of cultural history being one of the defining features of VPFNS metal. This play with the past and the creation of a hypermasculine discourse within the scene allows people to imagine something beyond themselves and create a sense of stability in a world that is considered to be ever-changing. To conclude, even though religion is slowly being forced into the private sphere and mass media may be considered to be the new opium for the masses, imagination is not dead. If anything, thanks to new technology people are capable of imagine in ways not previously possible by being united through the various scapes and VPFNS metal stands as a good example of the beauty of human imagination.

Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, I argue, constitute a response to what I call the problem of stability: how in the moment of crisis can a rational state stably be realized. The crisis, for Fichte, is both political and philosophical. I argue, by employing the concept of an imagined community, that Fichte’s response to the problem of stability is a philosophical nationalism that understands an existential commitment to freedom, as developed in his Wissenschaftslehre, to define what it means to be German. I suggest that his view of the German language resembles that of sacred languages which were understood as giving expression to a divine reality. Likewise, the German language gives expression to rational life so that spiritual culture, or Wissenschaftslehre, can intervene in the life of a people. In conclusion I compare Fichte’s response to the problem of stability to Rawls’s reflections on stability.

The focus of this research study is on black South African women’s experiences of being science students, becoming graduates and professionals, and the ways in which they navigate institutional and disciplinary spaces that have historically been dominated by white masculinities. Women scientists are living in a critical era as the socio-cultural and political-economic landscape is transforming rapidly, affecting changes in aspects of identity and processes of identification. The individual life histories of black South African women scientists provide a telling story of a society in transformation because they experience the world as an outlier group; paradoxically positioned within an interstitial space between their dual sense of belonging to and alienation from a marginal and an elite group. The racialised gender gap in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines raises critical concerns around the political nature of scientific enquiry and whether black women will achieve equity in society and economic empowerment if they continue to be marginalised from society’s power structures. Little is known about their journeys into becoming the new generation of scientists in post-apartheid South Africa. Using a narrative method to enquire into the lives of 14 young women, the aim of the study was to critically examine questions of discursive, material and symbolic elements that emerge within their narratives across temporal shifts, and how these new meanings reflect specific subjectivities, reconfigure their dynamic social identities and transform time into ‘other spaces’ of belonging beyond categories of social divisions.
I applied a structural analysis to the narrative form, an intersectional analysis of the narrative content in order to identify discursive themes, while a narrative analysis was applied to a portrait of one participant in order to depict the entanglement of form, content and context of a life narrative. Based on the findings, a visual representation of a ‘lived life’ in relation to a ‘told story’ (Wengraf, 2011) is proposed as a useful device to analyse the ways in which multiple, fragmented and contradictory selves are constructed through narrative. By utilising these visual diagrams as a heuristic device, I claim that there are particular features that complicate a person’s narrative identity, which I have organised into four patterns of storytelling, namely a ‘labyrinth storymaze’, a ‘simply- connected storymaze’, a ‘multiply-connected storymaze’ and a ‘weave storymaze’. It seems that failure is a defining feature that complicates, ruptures and convolutes people’s sense of their-selves through space-time.
This study presents a dialectical model for how black women scientists (co)construct them-selves as scientists through recognition from significant others, (de)construct them- selves as scientists through misrecognition and failure, and (re)construct other selves through homespaces, located at the intersection of (mis)recognition. Their (co)constructed internalised ideal of ‘academic talent’ is fraught with contradictions in the temporal flow of discursive themes in their life narratives, which account for how the intersections of ‘race’, class and gender locations coalesce into a “matrix of oppression” (Collins, 2002), positioning young black women as pawns in institutional and disciplinary spaces. The findings disentangle the mutually reinforcing relations between “epistemological access” (Morrow, 2007) and the dominant ideologies of whiteness and masculinity within STEM fields, which are in conflict with the participants’ backgrounds, thus contributing to their experiences of (c)overt discrimination, either through public humiliation, silencing of black women and/or the preferential treatment of white students from lecturers. The findings also indicate that these women resist systems of oppression through everyday homespaces in which they reconstruct new meanings and subjectivities through narrative art that connect them to other spaces and to new “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1991). The significance of this study lies in its contribution to understanding personal and social change, particularly for marginalised groups that come to occupy positions of power in both the production of knowledge and the functioning of society.

How to theorize the nation’s Janus-like form, its simultaneous modernity and antiquity? This paper provides an original answer to this longstanding question. It argues that nations arise from the interaction of ‘societal multiplicity’ and the expansionist tendency of historical capitalism. The emergence of capitalism super-adds a modern inflection to the inherently relational process of collective identity formation by generating modern
sovereignty as an abstract form of rule. Crucially however, just like its emergence, capitalism’s expansion also refracts through societal multiplicity. Non-capitalist societies are therefore pressured into ‘nationalist’ projects of emulative self-preservation in which the nation’s political form (i.e. the sovereign state) is forged before its sociological content (i.e. primitive accumulation). Thus, the original site of this process, France, produced the modular nation-form that unlike Britain’s imperial nationhood could be
globalized. The paper therefore shows that IR’s premise of multiplicity may be the key to one of social sciences’ most enduring puzzles.

In ShivaRatri many Sadhu/Sanyasis from India, Nepal and the Himalayan regions visit Shree Pashupatinath Temple. In other words, ShivaRatri beholds not only spiritual but also social significance to the large Hindu population and the Sanyasi diaspora. This article is about how the widely dispersed members of Naga community feel connected with the fellow members of their own community at the time of ShivaRatri at Pashupatinath. The community is imagined because the sanyasis may not see or hear physically all the other members in this life time but have the image of communion with them in their mind. The study only focuses on the Naga Sadhus or the Dashnami Sect affiliated to the six Akhadas of India founded by Shankaracharya.

A pesar de la competencia que sufren, al multiplicarse las posibilidades de conexión a las redes telefónicas e informáticas, los locutorios de la ciudad de Barcelona y alrededores, no dejan de ser negocios con un relativo éxito. Partiendo de un trabajo de campo colectivo en este artículo articulamos los conceptos de Nacionalismo Banal de Michael Billig y de Comunidad Imaginada de Benedict Anderson, para mostrar que en estos espacios de conexión pueden encontrarse comunidades nacionales imaginadas. La notable vigencia de lo nacional en estos espacios que, paradójicamente, simbolizan como pocos la globalización, no solo no es conflictiva sino que permite la convivencia y facilita la aparición de nuevas comunidades imaginadas.

it has long been acknowledged of course that art and culture play a significant role in imagining communities, but the way they do so is more complex and nuanced than is often acknowledged. Too often, such connections are based on instrumental ‘readings’ of artworks that take paintings as (barely) coded illustrations or emblematic images of the imagined community in question. This  minimises art’s visual qualities and aesthetic modes of operation in favour of pseudo-textual readings that see the works as mimetic or iconographic representations – mere channels for the production of images as ‘correlates of realities’ determined elsewhere. Alternately some scholars impose a historical determinism on art so that it seems as if what happened at that time and is represented or alluded to in the artworks must necessarily lead to what we (now) know came after.
These approaches, not only overlook the aesthetic qualities of art, they also obscure the often more complex cultural politics at work.
In this chapter, I seek to draw out this politics by looking more closely at the aesthetics of Friedrich’s work and analysing the ‘imaginary of connectivity’ that it presents. I show that, through his revolutionary landscape paintings, Friedrich offers an imaginary of connectivity that not only posits a novel space of governance but also subjects - and a subjectivity - of governance. Friedrich imagines a Germany as a territorially connected space but in a Liberal- Nationalist rather than a chauvinistically nationalist way. Moreover, the subjects he imagines are liberal subjects but they are communal, inter-connected rather than atomistic ones. I first introduce Friedrich’s work in the socio-political context of the time it was produced and briefly outline why his approach to landscape was considered so innovative. I then show how his art has often been reductively interpreted before offering an alternative reading by outlining the imaginary of connectivity he proposes. I do this first with regard to the connected space and then the connected subjects of governance he imagines. Finally, I conclude, that this interpretation amounts to a ‘Romanticisation’ of Friedrich and of Liberal Germany, which in keeping with the Romantic, liberal ideal, recovers (some of) their original meanings.

Mit seinen Aufmachern etablierte sich das Nachrichtenmagazin Der Spiegel zu einer „publizistischen Institution“, die die „bundesdeutsche (Nachkriegs-)Geschichte aufs tiefste geprägt hat“. Die Titelgeschichte wurde zum Markenzeichen des Spiegel: mit einem markanten Aufhänger, einer Pointe sowie mit ausgeprägter Metaphorik und rhetorischen Stilmitteln setzt sie Themen, die die öffentliche Debatte prägen. Auf diese Weise hat sich das Blatt zu einem Leitmedium entwickelt, das nicht nur über eine hohe Reichweite bei den Lesern verfügt, sondern auch von Journalisten stark wahrgenommen und häufig zitiert wird. Das Nachrichtenmagazin gilt zugleich als wichtige Instanz der Medienberichterstattung. In einem eigenen Medienressort berichtet der Spiegel regelmäßig über Angebote und Angebotsstrukturen in Rundfunk, Presse und Onlinemedien. Seit den 1970er-Jahren rückt das Blatt zunehmend Diskussionen um neue Medien in den Fokus seiner Berichterstattung. Auf den Titelseiten wird beispielsweise plakativ gefragt, ob Kinder durch das Fernsehen „gefährliche[n] Bilder[n]“ ausgesetzt werden (Nr. 4, 1972) und ob das Internet „doof“ macht (Nr. 33, 2008). Auf diese Weise werden die Empfänger der Massenkommunikation selbst zum Thema gemacht. In diesem Beitrag stehen die Titelcover des Spiegel im Mittelpunkt der Analyse. Untersucht werden ausgewählte Ausgaben seit dem ersten Erscheinen des Spiegel (1947) bis heute (Frühjahr 2014).

Wimbledon and the AELTC have long occupied an important social position as a quintessentially English sporting institution of cultural importance, but underscored with unashamed English nationalism. The club markets The Championships as “tennis in an English garden party”, and the historical connections to Victorian south-east (London-based) English upper-middle-class elitism are transparent in the opulent ivy-clad surroundings of Centre Court, the exclusive blazer-and-tie membership, the players in all-whites, and the strawberries-and-cream type refreshments on sale. Somewhat in contradiction, however, Wimbledon’s fans almost always sport the union flag over the St. Georges cross, and support British players with equal and consummate gusto. Moreover, unlike other sports, tennis is managed by one British (rather than separate English, Scottish or Welsh) association, the LTA, the activities of which are funded almost entirely by Wimbledon’s profits. It is argued that Wimbledon, as expressed in the “banal nationalism” shown by tennis fans and its media and the clubs’ efforts to create an “imagined community” of British fans loyal to the club and home-grown players, represents nostalgia for a now outdated English-dominated form of “Britishness”. This chapter aims to analyse the often contradictory picture of English/British nationalism in tennis, particularly focused on Wimbledon and the AELTC.

The role of anthropology as an academic discipline that seeds tourism imaginaries across the globe is more extensive than generally acknowledged. In this article, I draw on ethnographic and archival research in Indonesia and Tanzania to examine critically the recycling of long-refuted
ethnological ideas and scientific ideologies in contemporary tourism interpretation. A fine-grained analysis of local tour guide narratives and practices in two popular destinations, Yogyakarta and Arusha, illustrates empirically how outdated scholarly models, including anthropological ones, are strategically used to represent and reproduce places and peoples as authentically different and relatively static, seemingly untouched by extra-local influences.

Parce qu’il conteste une ribambelle d’idées reçues, ce livre sera discuté. À l’encontre de ce que l’on dit, les jeunes Québécois s’intéressent à l’histoire de leur société. Ils sont capables de visions d’ensemble du parcours de leur collectivité – visions politiques soit dit en passant ! Et ils se montrent fiduciaires de l’expérience historique du Nous – ou plutôt des Nous québécois, selon qu’ils sont «anglos» ou «francos».

Il y a plus : le nouveau cours Histoire et éducation à la citoyenneté ne dépolitise pas les élèves. Les grandes références nationales continuent d’agir sur la raison historique des jeunes. Et l’histoire du destin tragique du peuple québécois, chez les francophones tout au moins, n’est pas en voie d’être remplacée par une vision déconflictualisée et multiculturaliste du passé collectif.

Tirant profit d’un corpus original amassé sur une dizaine d’années et formé de près de 3500 phrases produites par de jeunes Québécois invités à résumer l’histoire du Québec dans une brève formule, l’auteur nous entraîne au cœur d’une fascinante enquête sur la conscience historique de la nouvelle génération. De ce travail pionnier, il tire des préceptes revivifiants pour l’avenir de l’enseignement de l’histoire au Québec ou ailleurs.

This paper provides an alternative perspective on the relationship between media and nation by theorising the significance of media institutions, representations and practices in routinely articulating the world, as a world of nations. The first part builds a more dynamic framework for understanding these cumulative processes, arguing that an analytical distinction should be made between the mediation of individual nations and the mediation of nationhood. In the second, I consider the possible significance of these processes, namely the articulation of nations as coherent and knowable entities, in sustaining an ongoing sense of (national) identity, place and community.

Benedict Anderson’s great work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Anderson 1983; hereafter IC) has been hailed as the “best known single work in nationalism studies” (Breuilly 2016: 625). His work has had an enormous impact throughout the social sciences. Much of Anderson’s formulation depends on observations about the importance of linguistics, communication, and standardization of language in community formation and identities. It is therefore paradoxical that few linguists have addressed Anderson’s work. Even rarer are discussions of the implications of Anderson’s work from the perspective of pragmatics. This essay is an attempt to begin an exploratory discussion of the many pragmatic issues raised by the concept of Imagined Communities as laid out in Anderson’s important work. Beeman, William O. 2018 Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. In Östman, Jan-Ola and Jef Verschueren, Eds. Handbook of Pragmatics 21. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 81-110.

The essay explores the concept of modernity vis-a-vis the discourse of nationalism studies, primarily Benedict Anderson’s ground-breaking Imagined Communities. It discusses the various meanings implied by “modernity” and “modernism,” and investigates Walter Benjamin’s impact on the historical discourse of the modern nation, claiming that though he has been a significant inspiration for historians and social scientists, his terms are often misread. Benjamin’s comments on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, for instance, which depicts a creature of ambiguous gender, are transformed into an affirmative vision of progress in Anderson’s text. One of the reasons, the essay contends, why the historical discourse of nationalism studies is unable to do justice to Benjamin’s terms lies in the fact that modernist historians do not take the conceptual difference between modernity and modernism into account. This very same lack of differentiation explains why Anderson endows novels produced between the eighteenth century and World War II with the capacity to evoke a ubiquitous sense of communal feeling. (ÁGY)