Identity and Facts on the Ground

November 6, 2007

Reading medieval travel narratives I often notice how individuals relate to their world on quite different terms than we might think. On trips to complete the hajj in Mecca, Muslim travelers did not have to stop at national borders and show their passports, nor did they see their world as split into as many categories as we habitually do. I have covered this ground before, but I remain curious as to the connection between identity as it exists in our minds and the physical layout of the world.

For example, what does a wall do? If it separates a population from each other then it also gives rise to a vocabulary with which people discuss the split population: perhaps there are the westers on the west side of the wall and easters on the east side. As soon as a vocabulary exists to talk about these two groups, there will also come into being a mental category. Before you know it the side of the wall that a person lives on has come to shape a group identity: the westers are proud to be westers.. and will kick the asses of the easters!

Think of all the ways that physical boundaries construct identities. To enter a country we pass a border and show a passport. That border is a security mechanism, but it is also a constructor of a national identity. In other countries there are well defined neighborhoods based on religion or tribal affiliation.. these are constructors of identity. In America we have voluntary associations (churches, clubs) that reinforce our more fluid conceptions of identity.

In The Great Arab Cities in the 16th-18th Centuries André Raymond makes a related point about the structure of Cairo:

The distribution of Cairo's residential districts thus reproduced in the field the frontiers that separated social classes, the most underprivileged strata being pushed toward the outskirts of the city in the zones of hara, whereas the middle class and bourgeois population lived in the vicinity of the center... To a large extent, therefore, the structure of Cairo society showed up on the town plan, social or community divisions being accurately expressed through geographical localizations. [68]

The layers of identity that existed in the minds of Cairenes got written onto the actual landscape. I would suggest that this is something of a law: our mental worlds almost infallibly recreate themselves in the physical world. I remember Plotinus and the image of forms falling fluidly from the Intellect down into Nature. What is at first a disembodied concept gains a body.. i.e. is embodied in something physical. Something like that is at work in city structure.

But what also must be remembered is that physical barriers (even natural features like a mountain range) push back and shapes our mental worlds, creating identity categories that become part of the way we see the world. This last point is not so Platonic.. but equally important.