Dear friends
You'll find here the summaries of your interventions on the theme
"rooting". Summaries oblige to put accents. I invite authors to check
if I put them the way they want. Everybody is invited to change the
summary of his / her text the way he / she wants (but without making it too
long!). We are going
to wait for about ten days before we put these texts on the Web page of the
Workshop :
Knut introduces the debate with the question : how to know if the concept of
"territory" is a
trap ? Our workshop puts forward a vision of local and regional communication
networks. But do
these networks still need "territorial entities"? We risk to forget some
important aspects of
territories: they are defined by borders that either include or exclude, they
are submitted to an
economic control and to politics. For the movements of social emancipation, they
can be a
support, but not an objective as such. They can exclude people. They constitute
the property of
someone who has the right to exploit inhabitants. Finally, territories are
always good for the
approach of " development as usual", they are part of an exploitation strategy
defined by
economic powers.
The term "territory" doesn't invite to have a vision of emancipation. Knut
suggests a set of
other terms (region, earth, inhabitants, habitat, country…) Deterritorialisation
and
re-territorialisation of the economic process may offer an opportunity to
inhabitants to
redefine their own space of interaction and to oblige economic powers to change
the ways they
consider and define territories.
Yves finds it necessary to revise our vocabulary. "Territory" as a military term
is surrounded
by borders that have to be defended. But one can also understand "territory"
from a personal
point of view or from the point of view of a community: it is then a space with
not clearly
defined borders that invite to communicate and to exchange. However, the
administration and the
state stitch to the quasi-military definition.
The experiences of communities are very different, in particular for nomadic or
very mobile
societies. The administrative perception of territory as a field of exercise of
an authority is
incomprehensible for certain populations. In fact, we would need many other
terms indicating
always different perceptions or conceptions of the cosmos.
Anne reminds that according to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, territory is
not necessarily
defined by borders, but by the ways to move on earth. Territories are lived as
vague. "A nomad
creates his territory in a different way than a sedentary, an itinerant again in
another way"
and modern man and woman invent completely new ways. So Anne: "a bipolar
Parisian and Breton
internationalized in sporadic ways."
François fears that our documents neglect the risks of identity return towards
territories,
associated to ideologies of " communautarisme " and nationalism, as it happens
now for example
in India. The discourse about anti-globalisation is sometimes ambiguous. Coming
back to
territories can be a political program as such. François reminds that the root
of the word
territory is the same as of the word terror. The concept of territory, developed
by the FPH, is
opposite to it, yet it may be recovered for another utilization. How many
societies construct
themselves on the base of rejection of others? And vice-versa, how many on the
base of
intercultural understanding ? In fact, all civilizations have been built on
margins, where
cultures and techniques rub against one another, often in confrontation.
On the other hand, François doesn't want to abandon the term territory so
quickly: he shares the
reserves that have been made, but he doesn't see how to substitute the word.
Geographers use
different terms to mark some specific connotations (place, space, proximity,
soil). They
designate groups associated to these spaces as "communities" or "societies". The
term territory
in the sense of "portion of space that corresponds with the rooting of a group"
remains most
convenient.
Jean Charles also reminds that "territory stays in minds as a place delimited by
borders
necessary to defend. The violent territorial competition is so present in the
reptilian brain of
men and in their culture that it will probably take generations and generations
to arrive to the
concept of subsidiarity." This attitude is revealed in democracies by new feudal
local
authorities, by chauvinistic rivalries of villages, of regions, of countries. An
experience of
redefinition of the term has shown "all the difficulties associated to the
application of
propositions aiming to introduce an integrated and subsidiary management of
territories"
Identity doesn't exist as such, it is only discerned in situations when rooting
is threatened and
when a person feels the need to affirm similarity with a group and with a
specific character. In
this process of rooting, the identity has a natural tendency to become
sectarian.
Jean Charles even discovers that there exists a sectarian tendency in our
Workshop, within the
Alliance! Fortunately he makes some concrete proposals on how to get out of it.
And he underlines
that the return to questioning is fundamental to finalize our work.
Ina proposes to reflect more about the term of "rooting " : a man's roots can be
tied to several
territories and several cultures. In general, it is because of injuries or
wounds that people
forget the other roots or elements of their identity. This is the case for
example in regions of
the ex-soviet empire where old wounds had been hidden, it is also the case of
those who are
thrown into confusion by economic internationalization.
The particular relation that a person maintains with a country or a territory is
only one of the
elements of his / her identity. The "tribal" conception of identity, as a result
of an injury,
can refer to a piece of soil, to a nation, to religious communities, etc. This
"desease" or this
epidemic emerges always when people experience a lack of respect, a lack of
taking into
consideration of an element of their identity. Therefore it is important to
fight for the respect
of all roots. Ina mentions the example of the international movement of Via
Campesina, whose
members fight for the right to land and to their autochthonous culture while
opening themselves
also to other cultures and while integrating, in the image of their own
identity, an aspect of
citizens of the world.
Knut appreciates "the subversive utilization" of the term territory introduced
by Anne. As
François, he underlines that it is however necessary to be careful with
ideologies that could be
associated with "roots" and with "territories". The Germans made ominous
experiences in this
domain. The earth, soil or territory are a gift never to be possessed in a
metaphysical meaning.
In German, the term "Gegend" (more or less: region: the space around us) is in
contradiction
with the term "Gebiet", synonymous for "territory": only this last one is a
governed space,
surrounded by borders. This organization of the space has been introduced at
least since the 16th
century, by the military states. Today again, behaviorism refers to this still
dominant
definition of the term"territory". Maybe globalization gives us an opportunity
to come over this
conception.
The dominators always use religious, ethnic or scientific ideologies in order to
legitimize their
actions on commanded territories. And seldom dominated subjects could escape the
trap of the
ideological language, trap that make that those who give orders and those who
are ordered act
together in the construction of a territory. But "to get rooted" simply means
involvement in life
and awareness of history. Roots are tracks of our way to a liveable world.
Ina Ranson
We remind you that "rooting" is the third sub-topic of the first chapter of our
document. The
next one will be "undertaking".
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Forum TERRIT
Fondation Charles Leopold Mayer pour le progres de l'Homme
38, rue Saint-Sabin
75011 Paris - France
Fax : 33 (0)1 43 14 75 99
- To unsubscribe, for further subscriptions, or any queries, send a message
to that effect to <forums-europe@echo.org>
- Pour vous desinscrire, pour de nouvelles inscriptions ou toute autre
information, envoyez un message a cet effet a <forums-europe@echo.org>
- Para desinscribirse, para nueavas inscripciones o para informaciones
complementarias escribe a <territ@echo.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 22 2002 - 13:02:43 AST