In a small town in the late nineteenth century, a tea-stall owner reads a daily newspaper aloud every evening. Farmers, clerks and weavers gather to listen. The same reports are being read out in towns hundreds of miles away, to people these listeners do not even know exist. Over the years, the listeners begin to follow the affairs of those distant readers as closely as they follow their own.
According to Benedict Anderson, the kind of shared reading seen in this town helped the growth of which of the following?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Nationalism
Option (1) Regionalism — Incorrect. Regionalism is loyalty to one region, its language or its culture, above the wider country. The shared reading here links people across distant towns, so it builds a bond wider than any region.
Option (2) Secularism — Incorrect. Secularism keeps the state apart from religion and treats all faiths equally. Reading the same news together has no link with the place of religion in the state.
Option (3) Liberalism — Incorrect. Liberalism is a political idea that puts individual freedom and limited government first. Anderson did not tie shared reading of news to this idea.
Option (4) Nationalism — Correct. Anderson argued that reading the same news gave people across a country a sense of belonging, a 'we feeling'. This bond among strangers helped the growth of nationalism, and he called the nation an 'imagined community'.
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