Imagined communities: Banal nationalism in Barcelona "locutorios"

Despite the huge competition that has emerged as a result of the ongoing multiplication of the means to connect to telephone and computer networks, Barcelona call shops, known as "locutorios", are relatively successful small businesses. From a collective ethnographic fieldwork of "locutorios" in Barcelona we articulate Michael Billig's concept of Banal Nationalism and Benedict Anderson's concept of Imagined Community to show that national imagined communities can be found in these public spaces of connection. The remarkable relevance of national identifications in these spaces, which paradoxically symbolize globalization as few do, is not only that it occurs without apparent conflicts but also that it allows coexistence and facilitate the emergence of new imagined communities.