View article

Old certainties-never certainties for everyone in any case-are increasingly wearing thin. The essays in this volume are concerned with the undoing of one particular old certainty-the notion that there is an immutable link between cultures, peoples, or identities and specific places. The confidence in this permanent join between a particular culture and a stable terrain has served to ground our modern governing concepts of nations and cultures. In these still powerful conceptual frameworks, there is a homology between a culture, a people, or a nation and its particular terrain, and both the culture and its associated place are regarded as homogeneous in relation to other cultures/places (even if those are characterized by internal differentiation). A series of related spatially conceived hierarchical dualities have flowed from and depended upon this mode of conceiving culture and nation. Such binaries radically …