imaginary

1. (mathematics, countable) An imaginary number.countable

2. (sociology) The set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole.Examples: "The sensory media are sensuous materials which prolong our bodily life into the surrounding world, and hence the media are imaginaries. These perceptually penetrated materials are " imaginaries " because they operate here in our living body […]."; "For example, colonial motifs of many kinds became increasingly central to the British national imaginary from the mid-nineteenth century, while the imaginative significance of 'the soldier' has long been derived from, and helped to sustain, the linkage between national and military imaginaries."; "While Oil, its extraction, and the global petroculture and its role in transforming the planet's climate undoubtedly play a crucial role in the Antropocene imaginary — to the extent that petrofiction has been construed not just as a genre but as a periodizing gesture of "petromodernity" — it would hamper both the imagination and the root of petrofiction to restrict the range of this term to the encounter with fossil fuels within a carbon imaginary."