Academics and Imaginary Communities

Abstract

There is more than a verbal tie between image, imagine, and imaginary to steal from the memorable association that John Dewey made in Democracy and Education (1916) between common, community, and communication. The choice of word sets here is neither accidental nor incidental: The tie between them has been given us by Benedict Anderson. His Imagined Communities (1983) has captured the imagination of academics, who have found his tale of nation-states cum communities a satisfying explanation of what has been otherwise a source of irritation, if not disdain. The notion of community has been out of favor among social scientists generally and among communication scholars in particular since the heyday of University of Chicago community studies. It is now academically fashionable to consider community a stifling regime of conformity, an outdated god term of progressivism, and too laden with positive baggage to be of analytical value.Clay Carey, however, puts community squarely before us for re-consideration. With Anderson's Imagined Communities as his guide, Carey invites us to imagine how the Amish and Mennonites who subscribe to a nationally distributed newspaper achieve a transcendent virtual community. Finessing Anderson's account, Carey describes The Budget, a 125-year-old weekly newspaper with a stable circulation of 18,000, as creating a community out of a religious diaspora rather than out of a nation-state. Its readers' identification with mostly strangers across distance derives from the newspaper's expression of shared values of faith, tradition, and social cohesion. Letters from scribes representing local settlements display the ongoing and reassuring routines of community life.Carey's respectful if uncritical description of the role of the newspaper and of the communal life it purports to represent provides us a set of challenges for understanding community and the news. Is a newspaper all it takes to pull off community in the minds and hearts of strangers? Do communities exist only in our imaginations without any material standing? How do we as scholars imagine the communities invoked and experienced by others? How do they, Amish and Mennonites, read this newspaper, both literally and figuratively, and what functions do they ascribe to it? Would they agree they are part of an imagined community? Are any of the grounds for community that are practiced locally and displayed in the newspaper contested or resisted? To explore these questions, we need to turn to some other thinking about communities and newspapers to see where they lead.Ontical CommunitiesThinking of community as a sense of shared identity achieved through the imagination, as Anderson does, has led to some academics who have appropriated Anderson's usage to apply it wholesale, too often without sufficient reflection or nuance. The material world, including our bodies, disappears from consideration when community is considered to be, in essence, all in our heads. Geographic and other tangible markers of shared identity can be ignored, which accords the concept a peculiar and unique status among other descriptors of social formations. One is hard-pressed to consider terms such as imagined capitalism or imagined racism or imagined democracy as adequate for these complex, multi-layered meanings that are experienced and put into practice in the material world. Why then community? As a result, Carey's invocation of Anderson as his almost sole explanation for the effect of The Budget on its readers short-changes the analysis. Carey himself claims to be demonstrating how an imagined community comes about by undertaking his own close reading of the newspaper. Carey, however, has grounds for a more original analysis of the connection between material, geographic communities and collective and individual identities across time and space than Anderson can offer.James Mackin's Community Over Chaos: An Ecological Perspective on Communication Ethics (1997) provides a counter view to Anderson's too simplistic imagined communities. …