Nation and Cultural Product : a Critical Response to Imagined Community’s Benedict Anderson

There are some ideas in understanding the concept of nation. Generally, the nation is a community of kinship, especially a bounded, territory extensive, temporally deep community of nativity. The term of “community” deals with the awareness of the individual in recognizing oneself to be necessarily related to others. One of the examples is a community of family, where one is related to each other in that community. To understand the nation is to recognize the relation of one individual to another not only within a family, but also within the territorially extensive, nation (Grosby 14). The idea of nation as imagined community by Benedict Anderson can be seen in the media as cultural products. This essay tries to explore the theory of nation as imagined community in relation to the cultural products in the form of novel and magazine whereas nowadays there are still other mass media which, in fact, are bound to nationalist movements which can raise the imagination towards national identity.

An Account of Imagined community as the Idea of Nation

Benedict Anderson defines the nation differently in comparison with other scholars. Anderson defines a nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). This abstract concept can be best understood by the example of the recent disaster of tsunami called Tohoku earthquake which happened in the Northern area of Japan on 2011 that killed many people (“Tsunami”).All Japanese people mourned and helped their brothers. The sense of Northern Japanese is a part of Japanese wholly is generally raised by the mass media that they read, watch, or listen. A community finally has a common nationalism as a feeling which is caused by the common interest and attention.

Novel and Newspaper as Cultural Product

In relation with the cultural products which are significant towards imagined community, he says, “...imagined community of the nation can be best seen if we consider the basic structure of the two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper” (24-25). It means that this imagined community is established due to the strength of mass media, especially printed media. Novel and newspaper, as he says, include printed media. Printed media has an important role in the dissemination of nation ideas. Anderson argues that the reading of daily newspaper regularly can form the readers to share some common senses, images, and ideas because of its contents and the focus the news. The experiences of nation or the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life among the readers of newspaper (35-36).

The theory of Anderson which is abstract is elaborated through the novels from different culture and epochs. All those novels emphasize on the idea of simultaneity that views the time of imagined community. On the novel of “Semarang Hitam” (Black Semarang) published in 1924, an Indonesian novel of Mas Marco Kartodikoro, Anderson shows that the social phenomenon emerging through unnamed character “our young man” represents collective body of “Indonesian people” or “imagined community” of Indonesia (24-32).

In the same Indonesian literary period of Mas Marco Kartodikoro, in relation with the idea of nation, Angkatan Pujangga Baru or the "New Literates" was established as a space to realize a new cultural formation for the need of developing national identity. The color of nationalism as central theme in literary work also appears in the work of Indonesian author, Sutan Takdir Alisyahbana. He is well-known with the idea of new Indonesia which refers to the West. The idea of nationalism is clear illustrated in his novel “Layar Terkembang” (With Sails Unfurled) published in 1936 (Efendi 30-31).The novel tells the story of two sisters and their relationship with a medical student. It is also emphasizing the need for Indonesians to adopt Western values in order to modernize the country.

However, Anderson’s theory regarding cultural product has a “weakness”. He just emphasizes on the roles of print media to see and establish the culture and national identity as he mentioned “the newspaper as cultural product” (33). Whereas nowadays there are still other mass media as cultural product and national identity through popular music, theatre, television, film, radio, and other information technology. According to Choi (2006), although Anderson does not include film as one of the media to construct the idea of nation but, in fact, film narration which develops in space and time with national characteristic also can raise national identity among the viewers.

Work Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London-New York: Verso, 1991.

Choi, Jinhee. National Cinema, the Very Idea. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Efendi, Anwar. “Potret Generasi Pascanasional dalam Novel Burung-Burung Rantau karya YB. Mangunjaya. “ Ibda’, Journal of Cultural and Islamic Study. Vol. 6 No.1 (Jan-Jun 2008): 27-41

Grosby, Steven. Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

“Tsunami”. Wikipedia. 2102. 20 March 2012.