Nation, territory, memory: making state-space meaningful

Abstract

Geography has been in a critical position in the formation of ideas of territorially bounded homelands, nations, and its conceptual basis echoes this connection. Entrikin (2002) observes how terms such as territory, place, and landscape have been regularly connected to an atavistic ethnos rather than a more cosmopolitan demos, and how these terms often allude to primordial links of peoples to land and of blood to soil. These terms, he notes, fuse the material and the affective in often emotionalized narratives of collective identity and shared historical experience and memory. Geographers have certainly not been just marionettes in the service of nationalism. Critical scholars have studied these terms since the 1960s-70s and challenged the taken for granted ‘boundedness’ of spaces (Paasi, Harrison and Jones 2018). Yet, in a world where millions of immigrants and asylum seekers escape wars, hunger and ecological problems, and cross state borders to seek refuge, and where ethno-nationalist and xenophobic violence flourish, there is a grave need to analyze critically of the changing practices and discourses behind the lasting grasp of bounded territories and their roles as fuel for nationalism (cf. Murphy 2013, Meusburger et al. 2011).