Chapter 12: Homeland making and the territorialization of national identity.

This chapter examines the ways in which homeland images, myths and symbols have been used to nationalize space and territorialize national identity. Although homelands are most often depicted as politically neutral, cultural spaces that are both natural and eternal, in reality homelands are politically constructed places toward which the population is territorialized. Homelands are constructed to instill not only a sense of spatial identity or emotional attachment to an ancestral homeland among the population being territorialized, but also a sense of exclusiveness. Homelands do not come ready-made, but rather are the outcomes of the national construction of social space. Nationalism is fundamentally an ideology and political action program designed to convert land into national territory. Nationalists employ a wide variety of mechanisms in the social construction of national homelands. Along with cartographic representations, those engaged in nationalizing space also frequently personify the homeland with the invention of allegorical masculine and feminine characters. In Kazakhstan, a multicultural Kazakhstani identity or civic nation is promoted by the state at the same time that policies and the changing interethnic relations of daily life are remaking Kazakhstan into a more ethnically exclusionary Kazakh homeland. The selection of symbolic national landscapes in homeland representations also frequently involves a conscious effort at differentiation from the symbolic landscapes and homeland images of ethnonational others. Monuments in the landscape help to project an image of permanence onto the nation and its relationship to the land, and thus reinforce the imagery of primordialism and rootedness.