National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul," wrote Simone Weil (1987:41) in wartime England in 1942. In our day, new conjunctures of theoretical enquiry in anthropology and other fields are making it possible and necessary to rethink the question of roots in relationif not to the soul-to identity, and to the forms of its territorialization. The metaphorical concept of having roots involves intimate linkages between people and place-linkages that are increasingly recognized in anthropology as areas to be denatured and explored afresh. As Appadurai(1988, 1990), Said (1979, 1986), Clifford (1988:10-11, 275), Rosaldo (1989:196ff.), Hannerz (1987), Hebdige (1987), Robertson (1988), and others have recently suggested, notions of nativeness and native places become very complex as more and more people identify themselves, or are categorized, in reference to deterritorialized "homelands," "cultures," and "origins." There has emerged a new awareness of the global social fact that, now more than perhaps ever before, people are chronically mobile and routinely displaced, and invent homes and homelands in the absence of territorial, national bases-not in situ, but through memories of, and claims on, places that they can or will no longer corporeally inhabit. Exile and other forms of territorial displacement are not, of course, exclusively "postmodern" phenomena. People have always moved-whether through desire or through violence. Scholars have also written about these movements for a long time and from diverse perspectives (Arendt 1973; Fustel de Coulanges 1980:190-193; Heller and Feher 1988:90; Marrus 1985; Mauss 1969:573-639; Moore 1989; Zolberg 1983). What is interesting is that now particular theoretical shifts have arranged themselves into new conjunctures that give these phenomena greater analytic visibility than perhaps ever before. Thus, we (anthropologists) have old questions, but also something very new.