Efforts to describe ecological history simply in terms
of the transfer of individual species between
segregated ecosystems are bound to be incomplete. The study of such relations is usually best
done at the local level, where they become most visible. But despite its strengths, the choice of a
small region has one crucial problem: how do we locate its boundaries? Traditionally in
anthropology, this has simply involved describing the area within which people conduct their
subsistence activities using "ethno-ecological" techniques, which analyze the way the inhabitants
themselves conceive of their territory as a homeland.
Yet the development of a world capitalist system
has brought more and more people into trade and
market relations that lie well beyond the boundaries of their local ecosystems. Explaining
environmental changes under these circumstances becomes even more complex than explaining
changes internal to a local ecosystem. In an important sense, a distant world and its inhabitants
gradually become part of another people's ecosystem, so that it is increasingly difficult to know
which ecosystem is interacting with which culture. The erasure of boundaries may itself be the
most important issue of all, and this concept is behind international agreements to protect the
environment, and underpins socio- economic arrangements, such as the 'fair trade' movement, that
are designed to protect the agrarian ecosystem of semi-subsistance cultures.
All human groups consciously change their homeland to
some extent. One might even argue that
this, in combination with language, is the crucial trait distinguishing people from other animals.
This instability of human relations with their immediate environment can be used to explain both
cultural and ecological transformations. Environment may initially shape the range of choices
available to a people at a given moment, but then culture reshapes environment in responding to
those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural
development, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination. Changes in the way people
create and re-create their livelihood must be analyzed in terms of changes, not only in their social
relations but in their ecological ones as well.
There is a requirement for the co-development of culture
and environment for humans to survival,
generation to generation, in a particular place. From this perspective we would expect adaptive
behaviours to emerge to maintain equilibrium between culture and ecology. Despite these large
global economic footprints of Western consumerism, it appears that people still imagine a pictorial
view of their homeland, not only in its broad scenic sweep, but also down to the minute elements;
to living creatures in the mind's eye that make it special. The best measure of a culture's ecological
stability may well be how successfully it adjusts its pictorial view of 'homeland' to maintain
an
ability to reproduce itself. This also applies to political stability.
The complexity of the political
concept of homeland was analysed by Dr El-Sakka of Birceit university in a lecture entitled
Concepts on Nation and Homeland in the Forming of Contemporary Palestine". He stated:
" We try to understand the different symbolic and material forms in which the
national Palestinian
identity is constructed, and to place them within different historical configurations. Representations
such as Nation, Motherland and State refer to extremely diverse conceptual fields. Yet the
multiplicity has been subsumed into unitary and popular concepts, which have changed over time.
Thus, the concept of "territorialism", given prominence in current discourse, turns out to
be a
complex mixture of the idea of nation- building and territorial expropriation. We have attempted to
show the role of intellectuals in this development through their exploration of "historic rights"
and
the clash between history and geography. The nationalization of all aspects of the social spheres,
the past, the ideology, the right of return and the creation of national, symbolic and institutional
systems should allow for the integration of disparate social groups, who live together on the same
fragmented and real, or imagined but lost territory. The nationalization also provides the foundation
for a legitimate claim to national identity. The Palestinian territory, a powerful focus of legal and
ideological constructs, is also perceived as a social construct. There are three dimensions to this:
the motherland, the lost Territory and the future State. "Nation builders" offer a positive
representation of the Motherland to be, which can be summed up in a phrase used by many of our
interviewees; "as long as Palestinians maintain a link with their motherland, they make a
distinction between the Motherland and the State"; on that view, the State refers to the desire
to go
back to the 1967 borders, while the Motherland represents an attachment to the historical
Palestine".
In Homeland Mythology, Collins explores the foundations of America’s
most deeply rooted national
narratives. Taken from the Bible, these narratives form the basis for the justification of some of the
cruelest acts Americans have committed, including the slave trade, the Indian genocide, and in our
own time, preemptive war. The central question in this book is not why politicians create these
myths to justify their ends, but rather why we allow ourselves to believe them. Unlike any previous
work on the mythic foundations of America, Homeland Mythology delves deep into why so many of
us accept the axiom that the end can indeed justify the means, just so long as that end is
packaged in the language of biblical religion.
Collins takes the view that the word “homeland” has two main connotations:
'a homeland of' and a
'homeland for'.
"That is, we
speak of the homeland of a particular human or animal population (“the
homeland of the polar bear,” “the homeland of the Maori”). We also speak of the homeland
as a refuge set apart for a displaced people (Liberia as a “homeland for freed American
slaves,” Utah as a “homeland for the Mormons”). After the dispersal of a people from
their
ancestral region, the call for the return of this people combines both connotations: consider
the homeland of/for the Palestinians, the homeland of/for the Jews, the homeland of/for the
Kurds. As far as Europeans are concerned, America began as a homeland for, and only
over time became a homeland of. American nativism—the Euro-American hostility to recent
immigrants and the perceived threat of multilingualism—has always asserted the latter
identity, an assertion that the events of 9/11 served to accentuate.
In contemporary
usage, however, this word stands for a more complicated set of concepts.
A “homeland” is a place of residence, but it also implies a destination marked by that potent
word “home,” a word that seems to alter subtly in accordance with the verbs attached to
it.
The phrase “come home (to)” suggests a return to an earlier set of values from which we
may have strayed. In a decade of orange alerts and not-quite-cozy-enough basement safe
rooms, “coming home” still brings to mind a simpler, more secure setting, a little house
on
the prairie, a time of quilts and comfort foods. “Going home,” on the other hand, can
connote an involuntary return—at least when, in the imperative, it is addressed to
Americans abroad. That “go home” has appeared on placards and in angry chants on nearly
every continent, and it does not evoke the “home” intended by the phrase “American
homeland.” Americans may like to come home, but not to go home—much less “cut and
run” (home). At any rate, they are certainly not likely to “go home” in an era of
global
markets and outsourcing, of cheap labor and materials.
As for that key
phrase, “homeland security,” there is something paradoxical (not to say
Orwellian) about it when the word “security” has come to evoke its very opposite. No doubt
“The Department of Homeland Anxiety” would have been more accurate but not have struck
quite the right tone. Whenever we sense a gap—in this case, a very wide gap—between
language and reality, belief and experience, we are entitled to analyze crucial words and
question the motives of those who disseminate them".
