His father, James Carew O'Gorman Anderson, was an official with Chinese Maritime Customs. Biography Background Īnderson was born on August 26, 1936, in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and English mother. Benedict Anderson was the elder brother of the historian Perry Anderson. His work on the ' Cornell Paper', which disputed the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966, led to his expulsion from that country.

Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University. A polyglot with an interest in Southeast Asia, he was the Aaron L. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, which explored the origins of nationalism. For example, the media encourage us to imagine the simultaneous occurrence of events across wide tracts of time and space, which contributes to the concept of nation.Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (Aug– December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Communication facilitates not just the construction of a common language but also a common recognition of time. In particular, the mechanization of printing and its commercial dissemination ‘fixed’ a vernacular language as the ‘national’ language and in so doing made a new imagined national community possible. This provided the conditions for the creation of a national consciousness. Thus, it was the mechanized production and commodification of books and newspapers, the rise of ‘print capitalism’, that allowed vernacular languages to be standardized and disseminated. Despite their physical separation, members of a nation often regard themselves as sharing in a fraternity with which they identify.Īn imagined community such as a nation is, according to Anderson, intrinsically connected to communication processes.

The nation is an imagined community because most of its members will never know most of the other members and yet they consider themselves to be a part of the same commonality. National identities are intrinsically connected to, and constituted by, forms of communication.

For Anderson, the nation is an ‘imagined community’ and national identity a construction assembled through symbols and rituals in relation to territorial and administrative categories. The concept of the ‘imagined community’ is most obviously associated with the work of Benedict Anderson on the ‘nation’. Benedict Anderson’s Concept of Imagined Community

Benedict anderson