Like the chemical fouling of its aquifers, the enriching of its long-buried defense-related minerals, and the “surveillance”—but we should understand all those fingerprint scanners and census-takers as part of a far more bloated, pervading gnosis—of its citizens, the enclosure of peripheries and hinterlands has always been an inalienable right of nations. Once they are sufficiently kitted out with the technological and financial jackhammers of development, states can finally achieve the long-held dream of assimilating high-friction hills, mountains, islands, and waterways into a single smoothly paved regime. This tends to involve the tidy classification of perceived minorities into politically neutered ethnic groups; the orderly naming of streets, towns, and gods; the sedenterizing of nomads and drifters; and the grinding down of all the pre-state pluralistic spurs over which anthropologists like to fawn—cultural practices, languages, and subsistence (as well as all other illegibly private) lifestyles—into the pulplessness of national identity.
Newsletter #10: The Fugitive World
Newsletter #10: The Fugitive World
Newsletter #10: The Fugitive World
Like the chemical fouling of its aquifers, the enriching of its long-buried defense-related minerals, and the “surveillance”—but we should understand all those fingerprint scanners and census-takers as part of a far more bloated, pervading gnosis—of its citizens, the enclosure of peripheries and hinterlands has always been an inalienable right of nations. Once they are sufficiently kitted out with the technological and financial jackhammers of development, states can finally achieve the long-held dream of assimilating high-friction hills, mountains, islands, and waterways into a single smoothly paved regime. This tends to involve the tidy classification of perceived minorities into politically neutered ethnic groups; the orderly naming of streets, towns, and gods; the sedenterizing of nomads and drifters; and the grinding down of all the pre-state pluralistic spurs over which anthropologists like to fawn—cultural practices, languages, and subsistence (as well as all other illegibly private) lifestyles—into the pulplessness of national identity.