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i finally got around to reading Anderson's Imagined Communities. I have to say that i miss judge the guy. here's the passage that made me wink:
"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. Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely back-handed way when he wrote that 'Or l’essence d'une nation est que tons les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses.” 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." (Anderson).

what i like about this passage, is that he is not equating imagined with false, but with creation, and that he leaves open the possibility that smaller communities are not imagined, but maybe real, since people do know each other. Anderson's analysis of nationalism has everything to do with European nations, but little to do with the Cultural nationalism as formulated by those who imagined alternatives. missing from his book, as maybe it should be, is the perspective of subalter peoples, including indigenous peoples. communities that are not just imagined, but are linked by real bonds of blood, culture, language, ancestry, etc. current first world nations are the result of imperialism, not all communities are this. how about indigenous peoples in all the americas?