The Birth of Territory

Elden, Stuart

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226041285.001.0001

Cited by 751 publications

(275 citation statements)

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“…According to the ideologues, Islamic and British, and as a consequence Christian, influxes had compromised the primacy and inviolability of Hindu nationhood; these 'late' arrivals are narrated as critical junctures in the historical trajectory of the Hindu nation, serving as prototypical outgroup members in the historical narrative of the ingroup at different moments in time (see Liu & Khan, 2014). This temporal ordering further emphasised the indigeneity, or autochthony (see Geschiere, 2009;Elden 2013), of the Hindu nation and people. On the other hand, the Islamic and British influx was emphasised as being antagonistic to Hindu nationhood by representing these historical encounters as equalling a dark age, which was juxtaposed against the positive valorisation of the Vedic civilisation as a golden age.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons from the past for the future: The definition and mobilisation of Hindu nationhood by the Hindu nationalist movement of India

Khan

Svensson

Jogdand

et al. 2017

J. Soc. Polit. Psych.

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Guided by a self-categorisation and social-identity framework of identity entrepreneurship (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001), and social representations theory of history (Liu & Hilton, 2005), this paper examines how the Hindu nationalist movement of India defines Hindu nationhood by embedding it in an essentialising historical narrative. The heart of the paper consists of a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the ideological manifestos of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, "Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?" (1928) and "We, or Our Nationhood Defined" (1939), written by two of its founding leaders -Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, respectively. The texts constitute authoritative attempts to define Hindu nationhood that continue to guide the Hindu nationalist movement today. The derived themes and sub-themes indicate that the definition of Hindu nationhood largely was embedded in a narrative about its historical origins and trajectory, but also its future. More specifically, a 'golden age' was invoked to define the origins of Hindu nationhood, whereas a dark age in its historical trajectory was invoked to identify peoples considered to be enemies of Hindu nationhood, and thereby to legitimise their exclusion. Through its selective account of past events and its efforts to utilise this as a cohesive mobilising factor, the emergence and rise of the Hindu nationalist movement elucidate lessons that further our understanding of the rise of right-wing movements around the world today.Keywords: India, Hindu nationalism, Indian independence, Hindu-Muslim relations, entrepreneurs of identity, social identity theory, self-categorisation theory, social representations theory Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2017, Vol. 5(2), 477-511, doi:10.5964/jspp.v5i2.736 Received: 2016-11-01. Accepted: 2017-09-08. Published (VoR): 2017 Handling Editor: Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Department of Psychology, Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA *Corresponding author at: School of Psychology, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, United Kingdom. E-mail: s.s.khan@keele.ac.uk This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Modernist theories of nationalism (e.g., Anderson, 1983;Gellner, 1983;Hobsbawm, 1990) posit that nationhood is a socially constructed phenomenon inextricably associated with the formation of nation states and pursuit of economic and political ends. According to Anderson, nations are imagined in that the citizens of even the smallest of countries never will meet, know, or even hear of all their fellow citizens. Yet they will be bound and act together on the basis of commonly shared understandings of what it means to belong to a nation. As such, they function as discursive frames that are drawn upon 'to make sense of the world' (see Nesbitt-Larking & Kin...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons from the past for the future: The definition and mobilisation of Hindu nationhood by the Hindu nationalist movement of India

Khan

Svensson

Jogdand

et al. 2017

J. Soc. Polit. Psych.

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“…The characteristics of modern territoriality noted by many researchers are its obviousness and stability (Agnew, 1994;Elden, 2013;Gregory, 1994;O'Tuathail, 1996); these researchers analyse the historicity of the modern concept of territory and emphasise its modern roots. Modern territoriallity and statehood are inherently linked: the state controls the space of a particular territory and the territory of the state defines the control of violence over that state and its population.…”

Section: Territoriallity and The International Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

When States Lose Territory: Georgia‘s Post-2008 Adjustment

Jakniūnaitė¹

2018

BJPS

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“…For all the tensions, contaminations, gaps, and fractures that are identified between the whole and its parts by Agamben, Rancière, and Laclau what is not recognized is that from the perspective of the state a 'proper' people is always seen as coextensive with a given territory. Stuart Elden's (2013) genealogy of the concept of territory painstakingly documents its social production. He traces how juridico-political discourse produces state as a bounded territory as the name of that space.…”

Section: Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations

Isin

2018

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This essay is an attempt to think 'mobile peoples' as a political concept. I consider mobile peoples as a norm rather than an exception and as political subjects rather than subject peoples. After discussing the tension between 'mobile' and 'peoples', I draw on Ian Hacking's historical ontology for understanding how a people comes to be. For understanding how the people comes to be, or rather, how the tension between a people that constitutes itself as a whole and those peoples that remain as residual parts, I draw on Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Ernesto Laclau as authors who identified this tension as a fundamental problem of 'Western' political thought. Yet, their inattention to territory draws me to James Scott whose work on early states challenges how we have come to understand the people as sedentary in the first place. His account of how 'barbarians' (mobile peoples) came to be seen as a threat to sedentary peoples enables us to understand that tension. Then a path opens toward thinking about mobile peoples as a political concept.

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The Birth of Territory

Cited by 751 publications

References 0 publications

Lessons from the past for the future: The definition and mobilisation of Hindu nationhood by the Hindu nationalist movement of India

Lessons from the past for the future: The definition and mobilisation of Hindu nationhood by the Hindu nationalist movement of India

When States Lose Territory: Georgia‘s Post-2008 Adjustment

Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations

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