WHAT IS THE COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION? - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

The collective imagination or collective imagination is a set of symbols, customs or memories that have a specific and common meaning for all the people who are part of a community.

The collective imagination examines the nature of the creative spirit of societies that delight in invention. It also analyzes how the cultural nuclei of creative societies energize and animate economic, social and political systems.

The collective imaginary is, as its name indicates, “collective”, but at the same time part of the individual, as Winston Churchill put it in 1909 when he indicated that “it is not possible to draw a hard and fast line between individualism and collectivism ».

With the creation and expansion of the media, this collective imagination now shares its symbolic heritage with other communities. With these changes, a new term called "global village" has been created, which corresponds to the union of all communities in one.

Thus, the individual and society are committed to each other, each is translatable into the other. Although the individual carries within himself thoughts, feelings and experiences, he also carries those of others, that is, those of society.

Composition of the collective imagination

According to Francesco Varanini (2012), there are two forms of collective imagination: the first is the imagination that explores the unknown and the second is the imagination that explains it, the explicit imagination.

The collective imagination is made up of:

1- Imagination

Imagination can be defined as the capacity of the mind that allows the creation and representation of objects. Imagination allows us to look around to see what is not there.

In the collective imagination, imagination is an incongruous faculty, individual and social at the same time, since it is not known and cannot be said exactly where the individual imagination ends and where the collective imagination begins.

According to Etienne Wenger (1998), the creative character of the imagination is anchored in social interactions and communal experiences. Imagination in this sense is not only the production of personal fantasies, since far from an individual withdrawal from reality, it is a way of belonging that always involves the social world to expand the scope of reality and identity.

Through imagination, each one can locate himself in the world and in history and include in his identities other meanings, other possibilities, other perspectives.

It is through the imagination that the practices themselves are seen as continuous stories that reach into the past, and it is through the imagination that new developments are conceived, alternatives are explored and possible future scenarios are offered.

2- Symbols

The term symbol is made up of two parts: the signifier (which is something that belongs to concrete reality) and the signified (abstract representation that can be determined by a religion, a nation, a historical fact, etc.).

There are symbols known only to a city, state, country or there may be some known throughout the world.

The collective imagination implies a symbolic communication: beliefs or myths, actions or rituals and sacred symbols or deities.

Cornelius Castoriadis (1975), talks about the power of symbols and imagination, and the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), states that individuals and societies assimilate the world in imaginary and symbolic ways.

3- Concepts

It is an idea or notion, a conception of something made by the mind and expressed by words, allegories, comparisons or symbolic representations.

There are concepts that are universal, just as there are individual concepts that are considered more abstract since they can be somewhat subjective.

4- Memory

Memory is the ability to store and retrieve data or information. Memory is not imagination but these two are accomplices. The imagination does what the historian does. According to Kant, history is the past made present, and imagination is the fusion of past and present, of present and future.

Memory can be individual or collective. In the case of the collective imaginary, we work with data that can be expressed by a certain group of people and that have a common meaning.

5- Myths and legends

For some, the list of the composition of the collective imagination ends at point 4. However, there are authors who add to this classification the myths of societies.

A myth is considered a story that has a very deep meaning for a culture, where generally a divine explanation is presented that establishes a belief that passes through several generations, and that they are in reality improbable or not possible to verify them.

According to Varanini, myth is the collective imagination that explains, communicates and gives meaning to the shared experience of individuals. The longer society lives through transition, the more myths are important, and truly become, a vehicle for transformation.

These emerge from the instinctive fear of change, and decide the interpretation of evolution in the environment, thus leading to transformation.

A legend is a very old story (or set of stories) that is told about a famous person or event, but is not always true.

For example: "the legend says that Queen Joaquina always wore her boots to bed"; "1952 game is a baseball legend"; "The opera is based on an Icelandic legend."

Collective Imaginary: Present and Future

According to various authors, through the collective imagination, at the moment the borders that separate people are opening, so new periods of social creativity are about to emerge.

Social networks and the expansion of the media have recently unleashed the power of the collective imagination in ways that are still hardly understood.

In the present, the collective emerges without leaders, guides, or institutional structures. This is why the collective imagination opens the doors to the possibility that everything can change and emerge towards something new.

References

1. The Collective Imagination: The Creative Spirit of Free Societies. Peter Murphy (2012).
2. Media and Ritual. Johanna Sumiala (2013).
3. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Etienne Wenger (1998).
4. Projects and Complexity. Francesco Varanini, Walter Ginevri (2012).
5. EdukaLife (2015).