> In 1976, when Paul Simon won the Album Of The Year Grammy for his Still Crazy After All These Years, he wryly noted, "I'd like to thank Stevie Wonder, who didn't make an album this year."
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is a book by Benedict Anderson. It introduces a popular concept in political sciences and sociology, that of imagined communities named after it. It was first published in 1983, and reissued with additional chapters in 1991 and a further revised version in 2006.
Eric G.E. Zuelow described this book as "perhaps the most read book about nationalism".
== Nationalism and imagined communities ==
According to Anderson's theory of imagined communities, the main causes of nationalism are the declining importance of privileged access...
@Mitch I mean, maybe by some definitions I'm a nationalist?
Not really well-versed into these definitions.
But isn't it a self-fulfilling prophecy? If people imagine in a communion of people, then the communion exists. Especially if it's something as big as a nation.
You can yell the worst things at the next shitty driver but when the subject is nationality, he's a fellow comrade.
By some definitions most of us are nationalists. That is, most of any nation loves most things about it. But when someone refers to "nationalism" they mean something more distilled, more extreme.
@Mitch It's so weird. It's like throwing republican and democrat ideologies in a blender and giving each of the two major Iranian parties a glass of the resulting goop.
@Robusto Official? I think science and religion are not as much in a supposed battlefield here. But I think the consensus is some form of old Earth creationism
I remember hearing about one Islamic scholar who was pretty well into what would correspond to young earth creationism and the sin of believing in evolution. But I also vaguely remember that most islamic scholars (scholars who are Muslims, not scholars of Islam, waiat, maybe both), thought that that guy was weird.
Science, in its pure sense, does tell you that it speculates often strongly whether something is harmful, but it's us that make the ethical and moral implications.
@Færd RE the Wikipedia summary, the causations Anderson asserted struck me as odd. Surely it wasn't hard to gather people under some national flag in the ancient past to demonize the enemy that wasn't? BTW, I guess the next step after the book should be reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/2q67yj/…