Territorial Phantom Pains (and other Cartographic Anxieties)

Abstract

National loss of territory is commonly described in corporeal language of mutilation and dismemberment. In this paper I argue that this language is not simply poetic or metaphoric but that it reflects a genuine association between the individual body and the national contours, and that this identification has been greatly facilitated by the emergence of the national map. In revisiting the common trope of the nation-as-body through inclusion of insights from neuroscience, I explore what happens when a lack of fit intervenes between the physical geographical extent of the nation and the mental map held by its inhabitants. Taking Manchuria as my main focus while suggesting a much wider applicability, I suggest that 'lost' territories, no longer included within the national body, remain nonetheless part of a previous national incarnation. As such, they draw national sentiments and affect, eliciting what can be labeled 'phantom pains'.

Dancing on the graves: Independence, hot/banal nationalism and the mobilization of memory

“…The ceded Karelian area became highly important for national narratives, heritage and collective memories (Paasi, 1996), and a sore object of emotional 'territorial phantom pains' for the evacuees (cf. Billé, 2014).…”

New Dimensions of Identity Politics: Contested Memories in History Museums of the 20th Century

“…Can we even speak of alterity as a 'thing', or is it always enacted in the act of normative comparison? Or can I become other to myself, divide the self into multiples, as in the psychological state of schizophrenia (Biehl 2005; Biehl and Locke 2010), the phenomenon of 'phantom pain' (Billé 2014), or the much-discussed Melanesian-derived notion of the 'dividual', according to which "persons are frequently constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them", thus affording that "the singular person can be imagined as a social microcosm" (Strathern 1988: 13).…”

Suomen nykynuorten käsityksiä Karjalasta

“…Laine & van der Velde 2017). Siinä missä joillekin ihmisille luovutettu Karjala voi olla melko "etäinen" ja merkityksetön, toisille sen menettäminen voi yhä aiheuttaa "alueellista haamukipua" (territorial phamtom pains), joka on kansallisvaltion tason vastine menetetyn raajan aiheuttamalle kivulle (Billé 2014;.…”