Imagined Communities

Even though I've only transcribed a handful of the interviews I've collected, I've already been able to identify a couple of recurring themes. If you know anything about Wales and Welshness, you may have guessed one of them: language. There are a lot of discussions about Welsh as a language as opposed to Welsh as an identity. In fact, when I was conducting the interviews and I used the word Welsh, many of the respondents misunderstood the term and responded as if I were asking about the language - or perhaps the concept of Welsh as a language as opposed to identity is so firmly grounded in the forefront of the discourse of Welshness that they have difficulty differentiating the two. I soon picked up on this issue and switched to using the term Cymraeg when asking about the language as opposed identity.

The other theme is community. Many of the participants talked about community either directly or indirectly - meaning they either spoke specifically about the term community - using the word and speaking about their local village, or they talked about it in general terms - not specifically mentioning community, but using language that evoked notions of community. Both localized and nationalized concepts of community were discussed and it made me think about Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities. Dicks and Van Loon (p.209, 1999) reiterate Anderson's concept of imagined communities writing,

"Anderson argues that nations are actively constructed communities with finite boundaries, in which the face-to-face mode of human interaction has been displaced by an imaginary simultaneity of existence, disseminated by print-media such as the novel and the newspaper."

The imagined simultaneity represents the impression that members of a community all share "an awareness of each other's existence at any one point in 'empty homogenous time'." (p.209) Anderson believes this is produced through countless narratives such as novels, maps, and museums - but what about curriculum? What about the school, and what about the language used in schools to instruct students on what a community is and how a member of that community performs her/his affiliation? I've just been introduced to Benedict Anderson's work, but I think it will prove to be helpful in fleshing out concepts of community as they relate to my study of how students' and teachers' talk about identity in school construct their performance of that identity.

I wanted to find a picture that related to the post above. I typed "Welsh Community" into Google and this is one of the first images returned. This is the cemetary at Aberfan, a small village in the Merthyr Valley. This is the location of the greatest coal-related tragedy in Welsh history. A coal tip collapsed and demolished the village of Aberfan. The school took the brunt of the damage and 116 children were killed (as well as many adults). I find it interesting that this is one of the images returned from a search using Welsh and Community  as keywords. In using Anderson's concept of imagined communities, and if community and the concept of imagined simultaneity of existence is constructed through print media, how is have these concepts been used in producing a sense of community in Aberfan, and how is that specifically tied and grounded to this tragedy that happened 40 years ago? Can Aberfan ever be a different community?