Anderson’s Constructivism And Its Influence On Contemporary National Theory

Nation and nationalism has been an important topic between Chinese and western academia.In 1983,Benedict Anderson’s famous book named The Imagined Community: the Origin and Spread of Nationalism was published,which causes great influence on the western academia.Anderson with his highly imagination and romantic style defines the concept of nation as “imagined community”.He puts his focus on the southeast of Asian region and tries to play an audience of “sympathy for the weak nations”.He also tries to break the traditional Eurocentric narratives and decides to set a new paradigm in the western academia.Unlike the primordialism which emphasizes the historical and natural characteristics of the native and also unlike the rest of the modernist paradigm,Anderson regards nation as the modern creation as well as the result of social psychology of collective identify,rather than a fictitious community.Therefore,this article attempts to comb Anderson’s theory and have a great understanding of it,and then probes into the influence on the western academia,the primary primordialism and the other constructivism.First of all,this article will introduce the research’s background and purpose as well as the study status at home and abroad and the research methods.Second,this article will introduce Anderson’s historical background and theoretical system and try to build a large framework to understand his constructivism better.Third,this article focuses on the main content of Anderson’s constructivism.Respectively from two aspects of the epistemology and social structure,it also focuses on analyzing the constructive theory’s cultural root and social root and studying its space-time characteristics in the process of four waves of nationalism.Fourth,this article focuses on exploring Anderson’s theory’s influence and limitation,by the means of comparing to the primordialism and other views of modernism as well as the previous constructivism,to strengthen the understanding of the contribution and limitation.The last part is the conclusion and discussion.