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few would assent to such a simple typology today, it remains a powerful root metaphor for distinctions between the traditional and the modern driving even much of current research,35
37
An interesting seminar organised in 1998 by Charles Stafford at the LSE around the general topic of 'separations' allowed me to realise the really rather simple truth that no community is ever wholly a 'face-to-face' one. From our earliest years we must confront, and learn to deal with, the fact of separation from those who are closest to us and whose relationships with us we learn to characterise as love. Husbands are constantly being parted from their wives, children from their parents and each other, every day, and in their absences we create imaginary images and representations of those who have left us or whom we have left which are continually confirmed, or challenged, by their returns or failures to return. This is what community is about; not 'face-to-face' communications, for there never was much of that - but absence, parting, separation, and death.38
This is the real meaning, and importance, of community; that somehow we form abstract bonds of representation of those from whom we are regularly parted and who regularly return or are returned to us.39 These are indeed the social relations which Radcliffe-Brown talked about, and they are in a very important sense - as Levi-Strauss clearly saw - both abstract, and imaginatively constructed. And this is where the enormous power of the imagination comes in, in constructing relations which become so real that Radcliffe-Brown could compare them to the structures of seashells.*
40
In this sense the nation is indeed, as Ben Anderson (1983) showed in another famous phrase, an imagined community - but so is any community. Any community, or family, is in this sense a virtual one, as indeed are nation-states. Again as Anderson saw clearly, what is qualitatively different about the 'nation-state' is the kinds of communication means it employs to construct its own (virtual, or imaginary) identity; print media, modern or 'hyper-real' telecommunications. It is in this sense, through the employment of new means of communication, that the Hmong are becoming a virtual nationality, and this may also be true of other societies in the region.