Others have used Benedict Anderson’s term to describe other kinds of imagined communities. than they are like very poor or very rich Americans).

And, in many important ways, we are probably more like certain segments of other societies (e.g., individuals in the middle class in the U.S., for example, are probably more like those in the middle class in the U.K. We have things in common with some other Americans, but very little in common with still others. Why do we feel that we have so much in common with other Americans? We will only meet a very small percentage of Americans in our lifetimes. Whenever someone refers to “Americans,” he or she is conjuring up this idea of an imagined community. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. He originally discussed this in the context of nations.

Benedict Anderson famously coined the phrase “imagined community” to describe the way that large groups of people without direct contact could nonetheless think of themselves as a meaningful group.

An imagined community