(Un)Imaginative

Last week, Benedict Anderson delivered a speech at the University of Chicago, where a conference celebrated the 25th anniversary of his book "Imagined Communities." He touched upon very interesting topics, such as Japan's change in wordview from a horizontal perspective to a vertical one after the 1860s, or the reevaluation of the perception of "time" after the invention of the telegraph. Nonetheless, the speech as a whole fell short of the high expectations harbored by me and others: there was no overarching topic, much less an attempt to elaborate on the issues raised. After drifting into linguistics and the question whether the usage of the past tense in the English language enabled us to express future intentions, most of the audience passed out and was tossing and turning on its seats. A shame......