Against Imagination: On the Ambiguities of a Composite Concept

In this article, I argue that “imagination” and “imaginaries” (arguably quite different but often conflated) have acquired too many meanings, which are in turn too imprecisely applied and combined, to usefully illuminate mechanisms of social belonging. I begin by reviewing others’ critiques of the concepts and the ways scholars have sought to organize and manage its meaning(s) and offering a synthesis of these. I argue for the arbitrariness of such lineages before demonstrating the ways in which various combinations of imagination‐imaginaries have been assembled and deployed in current literature. I contend that ongoing efforts to use and extrapolate the term, or to decipher or cull its meaning, merely recuperate its value as a catchall device for asserting social collectivity and claiming broad relevance of often limited ethnographic data. After arguing, through example, that other theories and concepts often better do the analytical work that anthropologists intend imagination and imaginaries to perform, I conclude with a metatheoretical reflection on the relationship between imagination and contradiction.