Patria ubicumque est est bene. "Marcus Tullius Cicero
, Tusculanae Quaestiones, V, 37.
, Tusculanae Quaestiones, V, 37.
Cicero Said That a man's homeland is Wherever I Prospers, But if we think about the concept of Homeland, We Could Easily retell it to a sense of Belonging - to a particular Territory, to a country -, Where Are Deeper roots supposed to exist. Meaning That is clear in the Latin word patria , which literally means ‘land of the (fore)fathers’. Nevertheless, in old times those fathers were not everyone’s fathers, and we could hold the same opinion nowadays.
Usually ‘homeland’, ‘fatherland’ and ‘motherland’ can be understood as synonyms, but in sensu stricto it should not be so. The former term is preferred, because of cultural associations regularly made to the latter ones. The word ‘fatherland’ has a certain ideological reading, related to the german concept of Vaterland ― for referring to Germany itself ―, very popular during the Nazi regime, whereas ‘motherland’ is often applied by the Russian about their country. Moreover, to talk about fatherland might mislead our reasoning, adding ownership as an obligatory variable, which is precisely what I hereby want to call into question. So, to whom belongs a defined homeland?
In antiquity, only a community capable of having memory of its ancestors could have a clearly-defined homeland. Once a human group had chosen a place for settling down, the subsequent generations inherited something more tangible than family memories and genealogical records: they had a territorial legacy to perpetuate. These settlements organize themselves to become more complex structures, suitable for self-defence and later accumulation of surplus, as well as social institutions to make possible perpetuation of their collective organism. Whilst landowner families possess enough memory to preserve their sedentary situation, in the extra muros area other communities flourish: natives and new settlers begin taking part of the city life in one way or another, but lacking systems and institutions like those created by the settlement founders. In the antiquity, every time the landlords needed to expand the city boundaries, or to obtain work force for the ever-growing urban metabolism, the inner city had to make some concessions to include alien people from the outskirts in key aspects of daily life. That’s how the ancient societies used to admit absolute foreigners in terms of religion, consanguinity or civic life, into their patria.
Initially we could say that ‘those who have father’, known precisely as ‘ Patricii’ before the Roman Republic was established, were the only class that could claim to have patria , or in other words, to belong to a indisputable fatherland. The patrician society could trace its family trees back to a distant past, thus legitimating property, unlike the lower classes devoid of patrilineality, lacking in a piece of earth for bequeathing to their descendants. They had no familiar divinities, no descent systems, no civic laws and, of course, no regular patrimony . However, it didn’t mean that those people couldn’t cherish feelings of belonging to the land where they inhabited. Certainly, they could have no fatherland, but there was an actual space they could have considered as a rightful homeland.
Over the centuries, many of the rights exercised solely by the patricians were gradually extended to the plebeians. The differences among social strata, though, kept on existing, and lower classes continued being considered separately in practice. The Roman legions could march into the recently occupied territories of the Empire, bearing splendid banners with the acronym spqr on them, and carrying their imperial badges up to the four corners of the known world. Later, several laws were made and modified to grant Roman citizenship even to the inhabitants of the most distant provinces. Considering all this, it’s still difficult to imagine Dacian peasants, Egyptian fishermen or Gallic shepherds, identifying themselves as plausible members of the Roman society, gladly accepting occupation, strange habits, a foreign language, even an anatopic temple close to the city’s agora. Much time must go by before the native population can admit civic achievements coming from another country as part of its own culture, while the new ruling system strips this very population from almost everything it traditionally had. Being no longer landowners, autochthonous peoples have been always forced to adapt themselves to strange institutions, which considered property as a privilege of the few. As each original homeland vanishes, imported codes attempt to create standard citizens in a world more and more homogeneous. This ubiquitous process, seeming so familiar to modern ears, occurred since the very beginning of civilisation.
For many centuries, only landed aristocracy could have a discernible identity and a legitimate homeland, until the rise of a dynamic class, the bourgeoisie, which barely started a thousand years ago. When the feudal order started its decline, large estates began to become property of wealthy tradesmen, especially after the late Middle Ages, and the early industrialisation period. But after all, these long-term historical processes affected quite little to the great majority of world population. In 1800, only 10 percent of the European population lived in urban areas, wherefrom they could get everything that defined themselves as members of a homeland, whereas the remaining 90 percent, consisting of rural families attached to the earth for generations, hardly could identify itself with the container state. Class consciousness emerged along with several revolutionary episodes during the xix century, and after the ‘spring of the peoples’ in 1848, masses started slowly to understand differently the meaning of words such as ‘class’, ‘nation’ and ‘homeland’. Thenceforth, necessity of belonging to a bigger community spread throughout the planet.
Religion played that role for almost two millennia, supplying the people with a strong idea of nation. In the West, Christendom opened the gates of the Kingdom of God to all men, recognising no differences between Jews and Gentils, Greeks and Barbarians, Citizens and Metics. In the other hand, Islam gathered many different cultures from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indonesian Archipelago, under a same faith. However, in a world that witnessed the Nietzschean death of God, man felt the lack of belonging to a secular community anyway ― even disregarding the philosopher’s warning and deciding to remain in his institutionalized belief ―, and realised about the difference between nation and homeland. Many features, like sharing a common mother tongue, a connected history, a presumed common ancestry, or the same ethnic group, became indicators of identification to a nation. The awareness of this heritage could mean a source of pride, but at the same time an effective distraction from the actual rootlessness. All the binding commitments to the earth were displaced to written contracts signed up with companies and international holdings, owners of the land and the resources it yields in today’s world.
Every time we identify ourselves with a territory and call it ‘homeland’, it’s not because of being born in it, but for recognising many of its components as part of our way of understanding the world daily. But does it make sense to keep talking about homeland, if those allegedly universal elements fade into the background, or are managed by a handful of people? Governments have less and less limits for selling fragments of (public?) homeland to private hands: nature reserves, fresh water, energy sources. If we make use of the Original Meaning of the word 'homeland', we will oblige to Be Admit That Belongs to a homeland still FEW people, just like in ancient Rome. Consequently today, like yesterday, only patricians and rich merchants Properly Can Talk about homeland, whilst the plebeians Have Themselves to resign to the ephemeral.
Usually ‘homeland’, ‘fatherland’ and ‘motherland’ can be understood as synonyms, but in sensu stricto it should not be so. The former term is preferred, because of cultural associations regularly made to the latter ones. The word ‘fatherland’ has a certain ideological reading, related to the german concept of Vaterland ― for referring to Germany itself ―, very popular during the Nazi regime, whereas ‘motherland’ is often applied by the Russian about their country. Moreover, to talk about fatherland might mislead our reasoning, adding ownership as an obligatory variable, which is precisely what I hereby want to call into question. So, to whom belongs a defined homeland?
In antiquity, only a community capable of having memory of its ancestors could have a clearly-defined homeland. Once a human group had chosen a place for settling down, the subsequent generations inherited something more tangible than family memories and genealogical records: they had a territorial legacy to perpetuate. These settlements organize themselves to become more complex structures, suitable for self-defence and later accumulation of surplus, as well as social institutions to make possible perpetuation of their collective organism. Whilst landowner families possess enough memory to preserve their sedentary situation, in the extra muros area other communities flourish: natives and new settlers begin taking part of the city life in one way or another, but lacking systems and institutions like those created by the settlement founders. In the antiquity, every time the landlords needed to expand the city boundaries, or to obtain work force for the ever-growing urban metabolism, the inner city had to make some concessions to include alien people from the outskirts in key aspects of daily life. That’s how the ancient societies used to admit absolute foreigners in terms of religion, consanguinity or civic life, into their patria.
Initially we could say that ‘those who have father’, known precisely as ‘ Patricii’ before the Roman Republic was established, were the only class that could claim to have patria , or in other words, to belong to a indisputable fatherland. The patrician society could trace its family trees back to a distant past, thus legitimating property, unlike the lower classes devoid of patrilineality, lacking in a piece of earth for bequeathing to their descendants. They had no familiar divinities, no descent systems, no civic laws and, of course, no regular patrimony . However, it didn’t mean that those people couldn’t cherish feelings of belonging to the land where they inhabited. Certainly, they could have no fatherland, but there was an actual space they could have considered as a rightful homeland.
Over the centuries, many of the rights exercised solely by the patricians were gradually extended to the plebeians. The differences among social strata, though, kept on existing, and lower classes continued being considered separately in practice. The Roman legions could march into the recently occupied territories of the Empire, bearing splendid banners with the acronym spqr on them, and carrying their imperial badges up to the four corners of the known world. Later, several laws were made and modified to grant Roman citizenship even to the inhabitants of the most distant provinces. Considering all this, it’s still difficult to imagine Dacian peasants, Egyptian fishermen or Gallic shepherds, identifying themselves as plausible members of the Roman society, gladly accepting occupation, strange habits, a foreign language, even an anatopic temple close to the city’s agora. Much time must go by before the native population can admit civic achievements coming from another country as part of its own culture, while the new ruling system strips this very population from almost everything it traditionally had. Being no longer landowners, autochthonous peoples have been always forced to adapt themselves to strange institutions, which considered property as a privilege of the few. As each original homeland vanishes, imported codes attempt to create standard citizens in a world more and more homogeneous. This ubiquitous process, seeming so familiar to modern ears, occurred since the very beginning of civilisation.
For many centuries, only landed aristocracy could have a discernible identity and a legitimate homeland, until the rise of a dynamic class, the bourgeoisie, which barely started a thousand years ago. When the feudal order started its decline, large estates began to become property of wealthy tradesmen, especially after the late Middle Ages, and the early industrialisation period. But after all, these long-term historical processes affected quite little to the great majority of world population. In 1800, only 10 percent of the European population lived in urban areas, wherefrom they could get everything that defined themselves as members of a homeland, whereas the remaining 90 percent, consisting of rural families attached to the earth for generations, hardly could identify itself with the container state. Class consciousness emerged along with several revolutionary episodes during the xix century, and after the ‘spring of the peoples’ in 1848, masses started slowly to understand differently the meaning of words such as ‘class’, ‘nation’ and ‘homeland’. Thenceforth, necessity of belonging to a bigger community spread throughout the planet.
Religion played that role for almost two millennia, supplying the people with a strong idea of nation. In the West, Christendom opened the gates of the Kingdom of God to all men, recognising no differences between Jews and Gentils, Greeks and Barbarians, Citizens and Metics. In the other hand, Islam gathered many different cultures from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indonesian Archipelago, under a same faith. However, in a world that witnessed the Nietzschean death of God, man felt the lack of belonging to a secular community anyway ― even disregarding the philosopher’s warning and deciding to remain in his institutionalized belief ―, and realised about the difference between nation and homeland. Many features, like sharing a common mother tongue, a connected history, a presumed common ancestry, or the same ethnic group, became indicators of identification to a nation. The awareness of this heritage could mean a source of pride, but at the same time an effective distraction from the actual rootlessness. All the binding commitments to the earth were displaced to written contracts signed up with companies and international holdings, owners of the land and the resources it yields in today’s world.
Every time we identify ourselves with a territory and call it ‘homeland’, it’s not because of being born in it, but for recognising many of its components as part of our way of understanding the world daily. But does it make sense to keep talking about homeland, if those allegedly universal elements fade into the background, or are managed by a handful of people? Governments have less and less limits for selling fragments of (public?) homeland to private hands: nature reserves, fresh water, energy sources. If we make use of the Original Meaning of the word 'homeland', we will oblige to Be Admit That Belongs to a homeland still FEW people, just like in ancient Rome. Consequently today, like yesterday, only patricians and rich merchants Properly Can Talk about homeland, whilst the plebeians Have Themselves to resign to the ephemeral.
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