All communities are imagined, differing only in style, not genuineness.

Evidence

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. … With a certain ferocity Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’ The drawback to this formulation, however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that ‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 38

Categorization

• DEFINE: Anderson’s core redefinition: ‘imagined’ does not mean ‘fabricated’; the key distinction between communities is their style of imagining.
• XREF: The imagined/fabricated distinction undergirds how critical readership treats Orientalist ‘representations’ — the Islamophobia literature’s core move of treating constructions as constructions, not fictions. — connects to: A universal imagined community was reproduced through countless particular local forms — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 82
• ADDENDUM: The ‘style in which communities are imagined’ parallels how ‘Grafting & Growth’ treats grafted trees — systems built from joining distinct parts rather than invented out of nothing.

Related

• All communities, not just nations, are imagined; they differ only in style (similarity 0.92)
• A universal imagined community was reproduced through countless particular local forms (similarity 0.85)
• Material interests and Enlightenment ideas alone could not shape nationalist imagined communities. (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.79)
• The local resists globalization from within, with no fixed political content (similarity 0.79)
• National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• A universal imagined community was reproduced through countless particular local forms #exemplifies (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 82