Homelands: A Conceptual Essay

Abstract

The crucial component of a definition of homelands is the bonding of ethnic groups to the land. This bonding varies in its intensity and may be greatest for folk or more primitive cultures in which belief systems of animism persist. Animism involving a belief in spirits inhabiting the land provides a cultural foundational construct for an emotional psychological tie between ethnic groups, most primitively speaking, the tribe, and their social territory, i.e. zones of exclusivity. In the European evolution of these animistic beliefs Romanticism and nationalism developed as cultural expressions of homeland bonding. Among ethnic groups the development of cultural myths often focuses on supposed homeland hearth areas. The result is the development of mythic homelands or hearth areas. The size or scale of homelands and the internal structure of homelands, i.e. the degree of fragmentation, are issues that are preeminently the domain of the cultural geographer.