How Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities changed Myriam Bartu’s life
- The co-founder of Enrich HK, a charity that trains Hong Kong’s domestic helpers in financial literacy, says the 1983 book taught her how boundaries, identities and race are all imagined
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) explores the origins of nationalism. It is based on the late political scientist’s observation that any community beyond people who actually know each other is largely imagined and that national identities are therefore arbitrary. Myriam Bartu, co-founder of Enrich HK, a charity that provides financial-literacy courses to domestic helpers in Hong Kong, explains how the book changed her life.
About 20 years ago I was studying history and Chinese studies at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) at the University of London. Everything we were learning was based on assumptions that countries were clearly delineated and natural. I’d never doubted that. Then I came across this book in my last year. It was compulsory reading for a course about nationalism in China.
It was an ah-ha moment, as it argued that the entire concept of nations is artificial. Beyond the communities of people that you see day to day, every idea of community is imagined.
When you walk across a border, people don’t suddenly change – the boundary is imagined and so is the sense of community attached to it. Issues of race are equally imagined – any differences are only in our imagination.I began working for (London-based charity) Quaker Social Action with women from ethnic minorities. I realised they were only perceived to be who they are because of the idea we have of who we are. I realised it was wrong that people were treated differently as a result of this idea and as a result lived harder lives.
With Enrich, I wanted to work with migrants. They are perceived as outsiders, like me, but the law is applied differently to them [...] It’s all completely arbitrary and based on this imaginary idea that they are a different group. On a human level, it doesn’t make sense
When my husband and I moved to Hong Kong in 2004, I started working with ethnic-minority women in China. There’s a politicised sense of being a member of an ethnic minority in China, as the law is applied to them differently. It wasn’t obvious to me that they were any different from other people.