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Friday 3 June 2011

From a book

Accustomed as we are to live in a world of partitions and frontiers, modern man's mentality tends to consider as natural the appropriation and occupation of living space which is, however, something artificial, the maximum expression of the civilising process which one day detained the nomads and hunters and connected them with a territory.

To become sedentary and end their lifelong pilgrimage, which them from one place to another in search of the sustenance which nature spontaneously gave them, man was obliged to define and defend his territory, give it identity, differentiate it from the land occupied by neighbouring peoples and to lay down the foundations of a legitimacy which would dominate any conflictive issues. And man did this with such ability, and gave such value to the site of his home, that he eventually inverted his perspective, finally reasoning as if the starting point were the land, and not mankind; as if the earth had the responsibility of transmitting to each social group its identity, way of being and way of life.

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