Dwelling 3-4 essays.

Settling, Domesticating, Nationalizing

People enter into relationships with spaces: clearing land, establishing homesteads or communities, transforming an unyielding nature into a source of reliable sustenance. The benevolent land becomes viewed as a friend, a partner, a legacy to be passed down to future generations. As the bond between space and human community grows, it becomes possible to imagine a sacralized link between land and people: a nationalizing that represents human culture and natural landscape as brought together into a divinely sanctioned union. Such nationalizing, of course, also involves exclusion: persons and places that do not conform to expected images are ostracized, marginalized, banished. Such processes can create layers of nationalization, in which some districts or polities are defined as more authentic, more true, more quitessential than others. All of these processes are accomplished figuratively and physically on the land but imaginatively through texts.

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