Appadurai

Un par de notas de los ultimos días. Cierro la lista con los analisis de las transformaciones espaciales de la posmodernidad. Esta corriente en general no me sirvio para contestar preguntas que me venían interesando, y por lo general lei con cierto esceptisimo, si bien Appadurai siempre me resultó interesante. Me doy cuenta que incluso Harvey plantea algunos puntos fundamentales, claro que el tema es como los procesos de los que hablan ponen en funcionamiento movimintos que muchas veces se desprenden e incluso se enfrentan de los movmientos iniciales por ejemplo de fragmentacion espacial del capitalismo tardío.

Appadurai, A. 1996 Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography. In Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, eds. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. London: Blackwell, pp. 337-349

Appadurai proposes to think beyond the nation to cosntrcut a post- sovereign moral geography to re consider the principle of territorial sovereignty in which nation-states rest. He argues that this is an urgent topic in the face of the crisis o the nation state, and thus consider the issue of state sovereignty as a cultural topic. It is in the disjunction of state, sovereignty and territory manifested in the new localities that the nation state loses its unity. If the local has always been in contradiction to the unifying forces of nationalism toward and imagined community, it is in the production of trans-localities that this gap becomes enhanced. There is a contradiction between the principles of self determination as freedom to act and move and the encarceration of people to places as a need of the state’s administration to contrl and organize “different types” of citizens resulting from migrations. By tran-slocal he is referring to the intensification of movement, as trans-national migrants, who create a new type of locality, conformed in heterogeneity rather than in the homogeneous unity of a community. Both challenge the isomorphism people, territory over which state sovereignty resides. It challenges the political and ethnographic maps that erase difference within and erases movement. The new heterogeneous ethno-scapes force the state to reconsider the universality of rights even among people occupying one same territory, as this universality demands for an homogeneous population of citizens. National territory and “homeland” become two distinct objects, one of the state bureaucracy and the other for its “citizens-subjects”, territory as defined and boundarized space becomes desattached from people’s national affects, as more heterogeneous ideas of home and roots come into play (based on communities, religions, ongoing relations, ethnicity among others). However the crisis of state territorial sovereignties are not the same in all cases, if for some the problem are refugees, the borders are the main problem in other cases, or the presence of foreign populations in significant centres for national identity. In this cases is more the state administration and power is what is challenged, while nationalities become become articulated in other terms (of race, religion, language, region, among others). “states are the only major players in the global scene that really need the idea of territoriality based of sovereignty.” (342) In this context new post national (non national, translocal) solidarities emerge in which homeland can still be an important marker but gather around notions of community, labour flows, racial or religious ties. Thus the new postnational cartography, indefectibly effected by the globalization of economy, is emerging with more blurry boundaries than neat nation-state division, as some configurations are global and others regional, and defining its new centres (sometimes around trasnlocalities). The idea of coherent nation territory is in part sustained by the cultural theory that territorializes cultures. However if the contemporary moment has been defined as deterrtorialized it is important to note the reterritorializations effected by this two. These reterritorializations take shape of counternationalism, nativisma but also the production of new localized communities (such as refugee camps). But in the extension of nationalisms it must be differentiated the ones generated by diasporic populations from the ones generated by attempts of expanding state nationalism through emigrants [this is we cannot forget politics of this transloclities]. It is the new “minorities” that demand the efforts of the state to reterritorilize them within a new civic order [and has to redifine the limits of tits jurisdiction] Thus the problem is not so much ethnic plurality and transculturality, but the broader gap diasporic pluralism opens to the ideals of territorial stability of the nation state.