A Place for The Copts Imagined Territory And Spatial Conflict In Egypt



A Place for The Copts Imagined Territory And Spatial Conflict In Egypt

Outine

1. Introduction

2. Discusssion

3. Conclsuion

4. References

Introduction

Anderson, J. (1986) has called the nation an 'imagined community'. Nations are imagined, according to Anderson, 'because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.' Anderson does not mean to imply that a nation is somehow false or unreal, only that nations do not exist a priori so much as they are constructed by social agents. The process by which the national community is imagined and constructed, then, must be examined and understood. He argues that nations are imagined as limited because they include some humans and exclude the rest. Those that are included in the nation are imagined to share a deep comradeship, irrespective of any internal differences that exist among them. Anderson's analysis, in its emphasis on community and language, does not extensively develop the deeply territorial nature of nations and nationalism. Geographers have done well to address this point.

Discussion

A preliminary attempt was made by Knight to explore the link between territory and nationalism. James Anderson went further in suggesting that nations and nationalism are 'territorial in that they explicitly claim, and are based on, particular geographical territories, as distinct from merely occupying geographical space, which is true of all social organizations'. He later argued for a territorial approach to the study of nationalism because it is such a clearly 'territorial form of ideology'. Taylor, drawing from Tivey and from Smith, identifies one of the central aspects of the nationalist doctrine to be the claim that 'all nations (rather than states) have an inalienable right to a territory or homeland'. Beyond these endogenous territorial characteristics, nations and nationalism are also territorial in that they have an intimate relationship with the modern state. Taylor identifies another central tenet of nationalist doctrine: 'every nation requires its own sovereign state for the true expression of its culture'. The territorial nature of the modern state has been well documented. (Anderson, 1986)

The modern state's field of control is defined by territorial demarcation, and it is the sole legitimate authority in that territory. Because control of a state is seen by nationalists as necessary for the true expression of national culture, nations are thus territorial through their relationship with the territorial state. If we combine Benedict Anderson's notion of the imagined national community with the assertion that the nation is a fundamentally territorial idea (or ideology), it follows that a nation's territory must be imagined as well. That is, in the process of imagining the nation, actors also imagine the territory that goes with that nation. Just as no member of a nation can meet all the other members, so no member can survey all of a national territory. The territory must be imagined to be a coherent, ...