Afterword: Imagined Emotions for Imagined Communities

Summary

When Benedict Anderson wrote Imagined Communities he meant to illuminate nationalism. But right from the start, he was aware that every sort of community was imagined. The Spaniards who first tried to impose conceptual order on the classes they found in pre-conquest Philippines ‘imagined’ their categories quite as much as later nationalists would conceive of their ‘imagined [limited and sovereign] political community’. It is therefore not so odd that medievalists would find the term useful: even before Anderson, the French medievalist Georges Duby was writing about ‘l’imaginaire du féodalism’, by which he meant the imaginary yet potent categories of ‘the three orders’ of society. The authors of the chapters in this book have shown how fruitful a topic is the ‘imagined Baltic Rim’, whether imagined by the conquering, the dominated, or the excluded.

Some of those authors have also focused on the related issue of imagined emotions in their imagined Baltic communities. This is a topic that Anderson never took up explicitly, even though he included plenty of examples of emotions. In this Afterword, I will first critique Anderson's treatment of emotions and then turn to what we may learn about emotions and imagined communities from the chapters in this book.

While noting, off-hand, that there is ‘an element of fond imagining’, in all the ‘affections’, Anderson did not focus on the emotions that led people to be willing to die for their imagined nation. True, he spoke of the ‘profound emotional legitimacy’ that nation-ness and nationalism commanded. He asserted that people had ‘deep attachments’ to their nation. He recognized the nation's religious character, which for him explained the ‘colossal sacrifices’ people were willing to make for it. But, for Anderson, these matters were not worth careful exploration. Indeed, he considered religion to be above all a matter of belief, not of feeling. Religion had linked each soul to a sacred past and a sacred destiny. When the Enlightenment spelled the end of ‘religious modes of thought’, nationalism stepped in to take up the burden of meaningful continuity. The morning newspaper took the place of daily prayer; a common vernacular took the place of the divine Word. Nationalism gave people a new way to find a sense of continuity and meaning.