Liisa Malkki

[piquantplay]

(1) The world of nations tends to be conceived as discrete spatial partitionings of territory. (2) The relations of people to place tend to be naturalized in discursive and other practices. This naturalization is often specifically conceived in plant metaphors. (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. These botanical concepts reflect a metaphysical sedentarism in scholarly and other contexts. (4) The naturalization of the links between people and place leads to a vision of displacement as pathological, and this, too, is conceived in botanical terms, as uprootedness. Uprootedness comes to signal a loss of moral and, later, emotional bearings. Since both cultural and national identities are conceived in territorialized terms, uprootedness also threatens to denature and spoil these.

From "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees"