Territory, Place ,Region

I may have already quoted from David Harvey's Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom but it is amazingly relevant to many of the topics I have been posting about lately and the position of my esteemed "commentors". I'm thinking of Kultur's emphasis on the paradigmatic shift from forage to farm and the relation of culture to land use. Yodood stresses a place-based ecological "awakening" as do various communalist theorists like Murray Bookchin and certain "deep ecologists".Some go so far as to say landscapes sculpt identity and "moral character". I believe it can be argued that the Celebrating Conservatives I wrote about have a regional, sentimental "rootedness" that motivates them ( for good or ill) and the Zapatistas who I learned about last night have a conception of place that is both anthropological in the indigenous sense and political in the "ejido" sense. I am writing a novel about Israel-Palestine in which territory is certainly central and it occurs to me the latest IWW " historical re-creation" we had a couple weeks ago was also about a certain claim to place, our Free Speech corner and the struggle over memory and record which all monuments embody.

Everyone is wedded to some notion of place, or home or dwelling (Heigegger). "From the Mountains , to the Prairies..."to the Fatherland and Homeland, there is tons of mythological baggage which goes along with a very real notion of "bounded togetherness" ( Burke). Kultur astutely links the spatial with the temporal, introducing the relation between a lost "ecstatic" way of living and the fear of death associated with linear time. Bookchin introduces relationality in the form of democratic politics to make his localism more dynamic. The Conservatives try to ignore away the dialectical tension ( mostly due to Christian dogma) and cling to static notions of time and space resulting in their incoherent critiques of globalization and the "New World Order". The Zapatistas are aware of romantic, commodified indigenous-ness exemplified by bright skirted women doing native dances for the tourists and selling "authentic" trinkets.They stress autonomy and dignity but remain surrounded by tanks, troops and an encroaching capitalist culture.

Advanced capitalism knows no boundaries, could care less about maps ( unless fighting a war) and moves vast quantities of money ( power) around at the speed of light. Time is literally money and visa versa! In this sense, as Hardt and Negri point out, it is cosmopolitan and affects the nature of the old nation/state. But as it globe trots it builds walls and fences and enclosures behind it and leaves in it's destructive wake a scorched earth and armies of dispossessed. As Harvey says " The final victory of capitalist modernity is not the disappearance of the nonmodern world , but it's artificial preservation and reconstruction..."

Ive got a ways to go but for now he leaves us with this: ...those who proclaim, with Aristotle, that there is some essentialist theory of place (genius loci), that "place is the first of all things" or who hold ,with Heidegger, that "place is the locale of the truth of being" (though not of becoming) are plainly mistaken." He says place is contingent and dynamic and a process that social movements must shape before it is to late.