Summary
In the article, Malkki (1992) talked about rootedness in relation to identity and territorialization. It deals with the exploration of ‘identity and territory that are reflected in ordinary language, national discourses, scholarly studies of nations, nationalism and refugees.’
She started with the concept of nation and comparing it with the anthropological concept of culture. That of the ‘national geographic ‘ map wherein nations are seen as fixed in space and of anthropologists’ spacial arrangement of ‘peoples and cultures, wherein the concept of space are segmented. This connection between nation and culture is metaphysical in a sense that ‘culture is something that exists in soil’. There is an emotional tie to the soil. Such definition confines or incarcerates the ‘natives’ or ‘indigenous’ of the land in a space of immobility. ‘Spacial incarceration of the native is conceived as highly valued rooting of ‘peoples’ and ‘cultures’ that is simultaneously moral and literally botanical, or ecological.
According to the author, territorialization is associated with sedentarism that is reflected in language and in social practice. Sedentarism, hence, territorializes cultural or national identities. On the other side of the line is that of territorial displacement. Terms of transplantation and uprootendness was discussed as subject of displacement. Transplantation that means picking up roots in an orderly manner that evokes live, viable roots, thereby, acclimatization to the foreign soil is possible. Uprooting is the opposite, wherein broken and dangling roots happen, a loss of moral and emotional bearings. Movement of people is either ‘through desire or through violence’.
In the preceding discussions, Malkki (1992) summarized four points: (1) the world of nations tends to be conceived as discrete spacial partitioning of territory, (2) the relations of people to place tend to be naturalized in discursive and other practices, (3) the concept of culture has many points of connection with that of the nation and is likewise thought to be rooted in concrete localities, and (4) the naturalization of links between people and place lead to a vision of displacement as pathological and uprootedness.
After summarizing her points, Malkki (1992) used the field research in rural, western Tanzania among Hutu refugees who fled Burundi due to the genocidal massacres that took place to delve on the issue of uprootedness. Uprootedness is best seen with the discussion of how displaced group of people living in different situations define their identity. She painted a detailed comparison of the Hutu refugees who have lived in a refugee camp and those who have lived outside the refugee camp in Tanzania, ‘examining ways in which they construct, remember, and lay claim to particular places as homelands or nations.
Finally, the author pointed out two opposing positions in her paper. On one side is between sedentarism and displacement, and on the other side, between ‘the nationals’ and ‘the cosmopolitans’ in exile in Tanzania. She concluded that ‘deterritorialization and identity are linked and that identity is seen as always mobile and processual. Attachments, she said, are formed though living in, remembering, and imagining them’.
Critique and Reflection
On Malkki’s (1992) discussion of identity and territory, it was indicated that ‘people are chronically mobile and routinely displaced, inventing homes and homelands in the absence of territorial, national bases through memories of and claims on places that they can or will no longer inhabit’. This is true of those who are away from the land of their birth and has difficulties going back because of circumstances they are in. In the case of the Hutu refugees, those who lived in the isolated camp have strong ties to Burundi, their country of origin. On their minds, they see their plight as temporary and the end goal is to go back to their ‘native’ land, having a heroized national identity. Those who lived outside of the camp, the town refugees, however, assimilated themselves to township life, creating a ‘lively cosmopolitanism’.
Such discussion of rootedness and uprootedness is somewhat similar to Blanc’s (2000) discussion in her article on Balikbayan: A Filipino Extension of the National Imaginary and of State boundaries. After the historical account of the definition and redefinition of ‘Balikbayan’ over time and the role of the government in the transformations, citizenship is being redefined to include the feeling of belongingness. In the redefinition, it will include those who migrated to foreign soil, giving them rights in their country of origin. As such, the Philippines state deterritorialized the nation – belongingness and loyalty but not that of the state – entitlements and responsibilities.
As with the balikbayans, the plight of refugees is likened to such forceful uprooting. In the local arena, we have our own refugees. The persistent conflict in Mindanao also generates displacement of people, of being taken away from their lands and source of livelihood, and thereby promoting not only psychological stress and anxiety but the onset of poverty and hunger. People being interviewed on TV speak of their displacement and desire for peace to be able to go back to their lands and start anew.
Indeed, the onset of globalization and transnational milieu allow people to leave their own countries through desire or economic reasons and establish themselves in the host foreign countries. Yet, despite being away from their ‘homelands,’ they were able to create their own identity and at the same time assimilate themselves in the new place. Transplantation and uprootedness from their country of origin does not mean cutting all relations. As a matter of fact, nation-states, groups and the people themselves create venues and possibilities to bridge their connection to their ‘homelands’ not necessarily by physical travel but by other means such as technological gadgets and forming groups and associations.
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