The Global Imagined Community

What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogenous, empty time,’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measure by clock and calendar.

(Anderson 24)

In this part of his essay, Anderson explains the concept of simultaneity-cross-time, the frame in which modern humanity operates according to man-made concepts of time and space. In an ever internationalizing world, this concept rings truer since people of one nation are more aware of, and affected by, the fact that citizens of another are moving about, living, much the same as they are living at the same time. Soon after this passage, Anderson uses an example of the reading of newspapers internationally, which particularly illuminated this concept for me: many of us wake up in the morning and read the newspaper (or at least encounter some form of global media with or without intending to via the Internet or the public), and are thus unintentionally brought in to the global imagined community. These forms of media connect us to the media-informed of other nations in our daily, ritualistic “imagining” of the world as we see it through news headlines – someone in China might be reading about Obama’s most recent stopover in Asia in Chinese and with a bias different from my own, but both of us have formulated an opinion on what this event means and are now connected in our understanding and participation in the global imagined community. This community may be imagined, or “marked not by prefiguring or fulfillment” since we do not always intend to create it, but it is nevertheless powerful in its ability to unconsciously link the world.

When one moves back and looks at the larger picture of the various stories in Silko’s The Almanac of the Dead, one can see the unconscious and inevitable connections Silko depicts across cultures, nations, and peoples. Sterling, for instance, is hired to protect the Laguna tribe from the prying of the American film crew that is constantly violating Native customs; but, it is a losing battle from the start as the tribe has overestimated Sterling’s knowledge of modern culture and underestimated the film crew, i.e. the pervasiveness of American consumerist culture. In the face of a younger generation with less interest in its own Native culture and an increasingly impeaching American culture, the Tribal Council exiles Sterling less out of reason, than out of a need of a scapegoat for the loss and doom of “the Indian way”. Sterling comments on the diminution of Native culture and ties it to the history of African tribes:

…Sterling had begun to realize that people he had been used to calling “Mexicans” were really remnants of different kinds of Indians. But what had remained of what was Indian was in appearance only – the skin and hair and the eyes. The cheekbones and nose like eagles and hawks. They had lost contact with their tribes and their ancestors’ worlds…Indians flung across the world forever separated from their tribes and from their ancestral lands – that kind of think had been happening to human beings since the beginning of time. African tribes had been sold into slavery all over the Earth.

(Silko 88)

It is interesting that Silko uses African tribes in comparison to these Native American tribes because it further highlights the brutality and effectiveness of American (presumably white) culture in disintegrating tribal, community and land-based lifestyles. The demand for slaves during America’s colonial period, another form of American consumerism, brutally eradicated, or weakened, many African tribal cultures because these cultures were easy to impose upon and exploit. Both examples demonstrate the negative effects of the global community Anderson described: the assimilation, which means to say eradication, of materially weaker cultures (those that are tribal or technologically undeveloped) into a greater, materialistic, pervasive Western culture.