英语论文网

How is the Nation an Imagined Community?
“What many of today’s writers and critics realise,I think rightly,is that there is no future in imagining an artificial Wales,but only in engagement with the real nation in all its diversity.”(Diane Davies 1999:19)
A nation is something we belong to;it gives us a sense of identity and informs who we are.It is a place for us to connect with people who are similar to ourselves and shttps://www.51lunwen.org/eparates us from people of other nations different from our own.Our nationalities are something we can chose to believe in and through this belief view our nation as something that is very real in our lives.So how real is‘real’?For Davies this is a
hybrid of its origins in Celtic/Roman culture to the present Anglo influences.I want to suggest that ideas of nation and those connected to it are more abstract than‘real’.In this essay I will consider what Ernest Gellner argues is a nation.From here I will compare Gellner’s argument with Hans Kohn suggestion of where nationalism
develops.I will move on to contrast these ideas and discuss how we construct our nation identity and consider how this affects the way we view ourselves.Finally I will consider how these debates may lead us to believe the nation is an imagined community.
“The great,but valid,paradox is this:nations can be defined only in terms of the age of nationalism,rather than,as you might expect,the other way around”(Gellner 1983:55).Here Gellner is arguing that a nation is constructed through the existence of nationalism.Nationalism itself becomes constructed through a particular process.For
nationalism to develop there must be the social conditions to allow a single,dominant culture to be defined and sustained by all the members of the group.Under a sense of nationalism politics become established to justify and protect ideas onationalism as the norm.Gellner claims nationalism is constructed through will and culture.Will mustfeature the pre-existence of the formation of any group and is needed to secure
adherence,loyalty,solidarity and identification with the group.Yet Gellner recognises other methods of‘will’may play a part in the formation of a group such as fear and coercion.He argues most groups are neither exclusively one extreme nor the other but
a combination of these elements and that perhaps these elements may sustain each other.
Gellner also argues culture is an important feature of nationalism.A nationalist culture
develops from pre-existing elements inherited from the past but these are used in a selective manner often in an altered state and in the transformation of new cultural features.Culture doesn’t develop through accident but simultaneously is not consciously contrived.When a high culture attempts to impose itself upon previous simple folk culture a resistance occurs.The result isn’t a replacement of the high
culture with the past low culture but instead a new culture develops and replaces them both,one that have links to past culture.Gellner suggests a sense of nationalism is deep rooted yet deceptive because through imposing a new culture an anonymous, impersonal society is created and held together through individuals.I would suggest
Gellner is arguing a nation is a reflection of individuals,who through culture perform distinct activities such as language to collectively act in a worship of themselves.This becomes a tool that enables the re-affirmation of the nationalist values,solidarity and cont