"A Generalized Condition of Homelessness"

In Beyond Culture: Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference, Gupta and Ferguson discuss the contemporary difficulty of qualifying space. Diaspora and deterritorialization (whatever their causes) demands a restructuring of our archaic notions of a "neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory and societal organization are inscribed."

Besides many pertinent and fascinating analysis throughout the paper, I thought this paragraph was an interesting follow up to my previous post and a comment on the lasting effects of the Palestinian migration to Jordan where approximately 40% of the population is Palestinian, having fled the Mandate of Palestine in the wake of the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars: "The irony of these times however is that as actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places becomes perhaps ever more salient. It is here that it becomes most visible how imagined communities (Anderson 1983) come to be attached to imagined places as displaced peoples cluster around remembered or imagined homelands, places or communities in a world that seems increasingly to deny such firm territorialized anchors in their actuality. "