The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.
- Anderson, page 7
I find it fascinating how as social beings we are constantly defining ourselves in contrast to Others. Anderson's point that the nation is imagined as limited because it's defined in large part by its boundaries strikes me as a curious, if necessary, characteristic of how we explain and define the social structures in our world. As I processed this, the first question that came to mind was this: If the nation is in part defined by its exclusion of all other nations, can you be a citizen of multiple nations at the same time? The legal answer, by the way, is yes in many countries and sort of in the United States. If you are becoming a naturalized citizen in the U.S., you are required to renounce any other citizenships under oath (although, the State Department doesn't often bother checking up on this anymore so you can still keep your other passport). I know this because I became a U.S. citizen about 10 years ago and am still a Mexican citizen in the eyes of Mexico.
In my experience, it's been difficult to manage the dual identity of belonging to 2 nations at the same time -- in part because establishing your national identity sometimes involves claiming that "we're" the best and always involves speaking with a point of view that comes from inside that imagined boundary ("we" being Americans by default). That's a hard transition to make! It took me years to stop referring to Americans as "you"! But eventually I did start referring to Americans as "us." My life is here and as much as I can easily access Mexico's newspapers online now, (what would Anderson make of that??) my nation as an imagined community is composed of my day-to-day interactions that are bound by American culture and physicality.
I guess the next question is whether the power of new communication tools will once again help reorganize our understanding of institutionalized imagined communities like nations? We'll have to wait and see...
Your post makes me wonder if nation as an ideology is most visible in cases where it is put to the test, such as when people are trying to navigate multiple nationalities at a time; or, on a macro level, when national governments are trying to revise immigration policy. I think your point about online access to newspapers is a great one; on the one hand the ritual of all reading the same paper at the same time is gone, but the ritual communion Anderson reads into that might well be recreated in other ways in web-based communion of varying kinds.
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