¹ The first group is represented for instance by Robert Ardrey and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfledt. See Ardrey, R., The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations (New York: Atheneum, 1966)Google Scholar; Eibl-Eibesfledt, I., Ethology: The Biology of Behaviour (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970)Google Scholar. The second group is represented especially by Robert D. Sack. See Sack, R. D., “Human Territoriality: A Theory” (1983) 73: 1 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sack, R.D., Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Sack, R.D., “Human Territoriality” in Smelser, N.J. & Baltes, P.B., eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2003)Google Scholar.

² Probably the best attempts to overcome intuitive conceptions of territory have been provided by radical geography since the 1970s, which however, as we will see, is more focused on space than territory. See Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991/1974)Google Scholar; R.D. Sack, “Human Territoriality: A Theory”, supra note 1; Soja, Edward W., Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989)Google Scholar; Rose, Gillian, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Blomley, Nicholas, Law, Space and the Geographies of Power (New York: The Guildford Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Harvey, David, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar; Delaney, David, Race, Place, and the Law: 1836-1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Delaney, David, Territory: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Something akin to this has been attempted for instance by Pierre Bourdieu, who advanced the idea that social places are structured like (and upon) physical places. See e.g. Bourdieu, P., “Effets de lieu” in Bourdieu, P.., ed., La misère du monde (Paris: Seuil, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁴ See von Uexküll, Jakob, “A stroll through the worlds of animals and men. A picture book of invisibile worlds” in Schiller, C.H., ed., Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a modern concept (New York: International Universities Press, 1957/1934) at 54 Google Scholar. For an outlook on contemporary debates around von Uexküll's ideas, see the 2001 special issue of 134: 1/4 Semiotica “Jakob von Uexküll: A paradigm for biology and semiotics”.

⁵ A pervasive critique of the nefariousness of social constructist theories can be found in the latest works by Bruno Latour. See e.g. Latour, B., Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶ Circumstantialism is associated with the work of Fredrik Barth. See Barth, F., ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969)Google Scholar. A typical example of primordialist theory is offered by Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991)Google Scholar. For a historical and conceptual reconstruction, see Poutignat, Philippe & Streiff-Fénart, Jocelyne, Théories de l'ethnicité (Paris: P.U.F., 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷ The term is used here without connection to sociological functionalist theories.

⁸ R.D. Sack, “Human Territoriality: A Theory”, supra note 1 at 19. See also R.D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, supra note 1 at 55. Influences upon this definition come from Gottman, Jean, The Significance of Territory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973)Google Scholar; and Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1977/1975)Google Scholar.

⁹ An operational view of borders has been developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. See Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, Mille plateaux (Paris: P.U.F., 1980)Google Scholar; Woodward, Keith & Jones, John Paul III, “On the border with Deleuze and Guattari” in van Houtum, H., Kramsch, O. & Zierhofer, W., eds., B/ordering Space (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See Storey, David, Territory: The Claiming of Space (Harlow: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2001), at §3 Google Scholar.

¹¹ Interestingly, legal territories are transversal to the just mentioned ones. Other types of similar transversalities can be imagined, which, on the whole, invite to de-essentialize the physicalist conception of territory.

¹² Malmberg, Torsten, Human Territoriality: Survey of Behavioural Territories in Man with Preliminary Analysis and Discussion of Meaning (Den Haag, Paris, New York: Mouton Publishers, 1980) at 11 Google Scholar.

¹³ On creativity as a domain of action see for instance Joas, Hans, The Creativity of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ This is a well-known issue in the epistemology of social knowledge: the fact that social categories are constructed does not mean at all that we might undo them as it pleases us and simply go on without them. The need that a certain constructed category was called to satisfy, the style of construction and the history of the social construct are rarely (if ever) irrelevant. While being critical and vigilant about naturalized categories is a worthy activity, such critical awareness does not in itself represent an endpoint of the enquiry.

¹⁵ See e.g. Asch, Michael, “From Terra Nullius to Affirmation: Reconciling Aboriginal Rights with the Canadian Constitution” (2002) 17:2 C.J.L.S. 23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Grosby, Steven, “Territoriality: The Transcendental, Primordial Feature of Modern Societies” (1995) 1:2 Nations and Nationalism 143 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Smith, Anthony D., Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Interestingly, minoritarian groups, who failed to conceive and represent themselves as nations in a modernist way, or where not interested in doing so, entertain a much more ambiguous and rich relationship with territories: see Casimir, Michael J. & Rao, Aparna, eds., Mobility and Territoriality: Social and Spatial Boundaries among Foragers, Fishers, Pastoralists and Peripatetics (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1992)Google Scholar. On the other hand, Zygmunt Bauman has made the interesting observation that in modern society life ambitions are often expressed in terms of mobility, which brings us back to the Simmelian theme of the confrontation between settled and mobile people. See e.g. Bauman, Z., “Social uses of law and order” in Garland, D. & Sparks, R., eds., Criminology and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ The point is made cogently by Badie, Bertrand, La fin des territoires. Essai sur le désordre international et sur l'utilité sociale du respect (Paris: Fayard, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Eliade, Mircea, Le sacré et le profane (Gallimard: Paris, 1965/1957)Google Scholar; Bachelard, Gaston, La poétique de l'espace (Paris: P.U.F., 1957)Google Scholar. Michel Foucault developed on this ground his concept of heterotopias as places that are foundationally incommensurable to common places and functionally oriented. See Foucault, M., “Of Other Spaces” (1986/1967) 16 Diacritics 22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ This is the classic distinction advanced by Polanyi, Michael, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar. In spatial analysis, Edward T. Hall developed proxemics as a semiotics of distances and proximities among interacting people, observing how boundary-drawing activities varied according to cultures, practices, and expectations. See Hall, E. T., The Hidden Dimension (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1966)Google Scholar.

²⁰ See Deleuze and Guattari, supra note 9. The authors trace their concept of territorial agencements from a number of sources including biologists like Jakob von Uexküll and anthropologists like André Leroi-Gourhan. See in particular J. von Uexküll, supra note 3, and Leroi-Gourhan, André, Le geste et la parole (Albin Michel, Paris, 1964), Vol. 1 Google Scholar.

²¹ Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et répétition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968)Google Scholar.

²² André Leroi-Gourhan, supra note 20.

²³ See for instance the anthropologist Friedman, Jonathan, “From roots to routes. Tropes for trippers” (2002) 2:1 Anthropological Theory 21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the geographer Elden, Stuart, “Missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world” (2005) 30:1 Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ The classic debate on globalization has largely been focused on a problematization of the modern model of territoriality and on whether the primacy of modern nation-state political organization is being superseded or not. In other words, the question has been concerning the uncoupling of people (population in Foucault's meaning of the word) from the land (political and governmental country, territoire in Foucault's meaning). Several intermediate solutions have been proposed, which pointed out how dispersal and reconcentration are concurrent but in constant, and at times even paradoxical, tension. See for instance Jacobson, David, “New Frontiers: Territory, Social Spaces, and the State” (1997) 12:1 Sociological Forum 121 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gandy, Matthew, “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstruosity in the Contemporary City” (2005) 29:1 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ On the legal and institutional constitution of racial boundaries, see López, Ian F. Haney, While by Law. The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; D. Delaney, Race, supra note 2; Bowker, Geoffrey C. & Star, Susan Leigh, Sorting Things Out. Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Gill, Sheila Dawn, “The Unspeakability of Racism: Mapping Law's Complicity in Manitoba's Racialized Spaces” (2000) 15:2 C.J.L.S. 131 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On illegal migrants as “exceptional” beings and on their foundational role for boundaries in an Agamben-based perspective, see Rajaram, Prem Kumar & Grundy-Warr, Carl, “The Irregular Migrant as Homo Sacer: Migration and Detention in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand” (2004) 42:1 International Migration 33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brighenti, Andrea, “Dogville, or, the Dirty Birth of Law” (2006) 87 Thesis Eleven 96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Lyon, David, Surveillance after September 11 (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2003)Google Scholar. See also Salter, Mark B. “Passports, Mobility, and Security: How smart can the border be?” (2004) 5:1 International Studies Perspectives 71 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Moran, Warren, “The Wine Appellation as Territory in France and California” (1993) 83:4 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 694 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Debord, Guy, “Théorie de la dérive” (1958) 2 Internationale Situationniste online: Situationist International <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html>Google Scholar. There is a clear echo of flâneurisme in the practice of dérive. See the classic Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk project: Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project (Cambridge & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

²⁹ J. Gottman, supra note 8; R.D. Sack, supra note 1.

³⁰ For a recent discussion on property rights and on the shortcomings of the liberal-legal perspective, see Richard, A. Brisbin, J. & Hunter, Susan, “The Transformation of Canadian Property Rights?” (2006) 21:1 C.J.L.S. 135 Google Scholar.

³¹ See for instance the discussion of the feeling of déplacement, out-of-placedness, in Bourdieu, supra note 3.

³² Bourdieu's concept of habitus can be useful to appreciate the fixation of territorial relationships in action. See Bourdieu, Pierre, Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil, 1997)Google Scholar.

³³ Brighenti, Andrea, “Did we really get rid of commands?” (2006) 17:1 Law & Critique 47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Here the term “hegemony” is used simply in the original Gramscian meaning, as the “intellectual and moral headship” exercised by an agent or a class in a spontaneous, molecular and organic way so as to generate a wide, accepted and shared framework within which even conflict and dissent can be accomodated, and which ultimately determines the features of a historic bloc. See Gramsci, Antonio, Quaderni del carcere (Roma: Editori Riuniti 1975)Google Scholar. It is not possible here to venture further into the vast literature on hegemony and ideology. On the interplay between power and space, see in particular G. Rose, supra note 2; N. Blomley, supra note 2; D. Massey, supra note 2; D. Harvey, supra note 2; Herod, Andrew J. & Wright, Melissa W., eds., The Geography of Power: Making Scale (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ Lefebvre, Henri, Eléments de rhythmanalyse (Paris: Syllepse, 1992)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Goffman, Erving, Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)Google Scholar. See also id., Behavior in Public Places. Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (Chicago: The Free Press, 1963).

³⁷ See for instance D. Harvey, supra note 2.; D. Storey, supra note 10; Wright, Richard A., “Operations on the Boundary: The State, the Border and Marginalized Identities” (2004) 36:2 Antipode 138 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. Delaney, Territory, supra note 2.

³⁸ See Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Tyner, James A., “Territoriality, social justice and gendered revolutions in the speeches of Malcolm X” (2004) 29:3 Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 330 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ Consider the case of residential segregation. For three recent research projects on Europe, U.S. and Canada, compare Drever, Anita I., “Separate Spaces, Separate Outcomes? Neighbourhood Impacts on Minorities in Germany” (2004) 41:8 Urban Studies 1423 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ellis, Mark, Wright, Richard & Parks, Virginia, “Work Together, Live Apart? Geographies of Racial and Ethnic Segregation at Home and at Work” (2004) 94:3 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 620 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Myles, John and Hou, Feng “Changing Colours: Spatial Assimilation and New Racial Minority Immigrants” (2004) 29:1 Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality” (1978) in Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin & Miller, Peter, eds., The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 87 Google Scholar.

⁴² Foucault, Michel, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978, Ewald, François, Fontana, Alessandro & Senellart, Michel eds., (Paris: Hautes Etudes, Gallimard, Seuil, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Castellino, Joshua & Allen, Steve, Title to Territory in International Law: A Temporal Analysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Murphy, Alexander B., “Historical Justifications for Territorial Claims” (1990) 80:4 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 531 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Jiménez, Alberto Corsín, “On Space as a Capacity” (2003) 9 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 137 Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ G. Rose, supra note 2.

⁴⁷ Monmonier, Mark, How to Lie With Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Marston, Sallie A., “The social construction of scale” (2000) 24:2 Progress in Human Geography 219 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A.J Herod & M.W. Wright, supra note 34.

⁴⁸ I have tried to develop visibility as an analytical category in a forthcoming article. See Brighenti, Andrea, “Visibility, a category for the social sciences” (2007) 55:3 Current Sociology [forthcoming]CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ Constitutions are the institutional frameworks of different accomodation strategies. See for instance Macdonald, Roderick A., “The Design of Constitutions to Accomodate Linguistic, Cultural and Ethnic Diversity: The Canadian Experiment” in Szabo, D. & Kulczar, K., eds., Dual Images: Multiculturalism on the Two Sides of the Atlantic (Budapest: Royal Society of Canada, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ On graffiti as boundary-drawing devices, see Ley, David & Cybriwsky, Roman, “Urban Graffiti as Territorial Markers” (1974) 64:4 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 491 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On policing as urban territorial management, see Herbert, Steve, “The Normative Ordering of Police Territoriality: Making and Marking Space with the Los Angeles Police Department” (1996) 86:3 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 567 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On fear as a territory-making device, the urban ecology of fear, and its effects of enclosure, see Davis, Mike, Ecology of Fear (New York: Metropolitan books, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ On the subtle multidimensional legal implications of deceivingly simple spaces such as offices, see Macdonald, Roderick A. and Widell, Jonathan, “Office Politics (Again)!” (2005) 20:2 C.J.L.S. 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² E. Goffman, Behavior, supra note 36.

⁵³ One can get an a contrario example of the territorial dimension of intimate adult relationships by considering the case of sexual abuse as territorial trespassing. See e.g. Wright, Joanne, “Consent and Sexual Violence in Canadian Public Discourse: Reflections on Ewanchuk ” (2001) 16:2 C.J.L.S. 173 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a continuist take on the legal dimension in between everyday life and formal, institutionalized organizations, see Jurras, Daniel, “The Legal Dimensions of Everyday Life” (2001) 16:1 C.J.L.S. 45 Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Classic anthropological descriptions of body decoration practices are provided e.g. by Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955)Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1965/1961) at §V Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ “Where Id was, there shall Ego be.” The motto appears as an exergo to the 1933 edition of the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1915-16). The idea is clearly present in Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). A complete theoretical formulation of the idea can be found in The Ego and the Id (1923). See Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes (London: Hogarth Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Maier, Emanuel, “Torah as Movable Territory” (1975) 65:1 Annals of the Association of American Geographers 18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ Lyon, David, Surveillance Society. Monitoring Everyday Life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; See also D. Lyon, supra note 26; Haggerty, Kevin & Ericson, Richard, “The surveillant assemblage” (2000) 51:4 British Journal of Sociology 605 Google ScholarPubMed.

⁵⁹ The distinction between human being and animal, too, is one such basic territorial distinction made possible by boundary-drawing activities. Recently, Giorgio Agamben has provided an intriguing argument that the act of drawing the boundaries between man and animal is in fact much more crucial than human rights enforcement issues. Describing what he calls “the anthropological and anthropogenic machine of the moderns,” which he investigates mainly through the works of von Uexküll and Heidegger, Agamben also reveals the existence of “zones of indistinction” between man and animal, i.e. of non-territorial relations, which are resolved by the introduction of a rupture between humanity and animality inside man himself. See Agamben, G., L'aperto: l'uomo e l'animale (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Ford, Richard, “Law's Territory (A History of Jurisdiction)” (1999) 97:4 Michigan L. Rev. 843 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ J. Gottman, supra note 8. For an interesting case revealing the interplay between language, boundary-drawing, editorial customs, criminal law application and the administration of justice in Quebec, see Kasirer, Nicholas, “The Annotated Criminal Code en version québécoise: Signs of Territoriality in Canadian Criminal Law” (1990) 13 Dalhousie L.J. 520 Google Scholar.

⁶² D. Delaney, Race, supra note 2.

⁶³ Leckey, Robert, “Territoriality in Canadian Administrative Law” (2004) 54 U. Toronto L.J. 352 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Comtois, Suzanne, Vers la primauté de l'approche pragmatique et fonctionnelle. Précis du contrôle judiciaire des décisions de fond des organismes administratifs (Cowansville: Yvon Blais, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Fitzpatrick, Peter, “Taking Place: The Spaces and Timing of Law” (Paper presented at Birkbeck College Anthropology of Law Workshop, 2005) [unpublished]Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Fitzpatrick, Peter, Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Macdonald, Roderick A., “Kaleidoscopic Federalism” in Gaudreault-Desbiens, J.F. & Gélinas, F., eds., Moods of Federalism: Governance, Identity and Methodology (Montreal: Yvon Blais/Brussels: Bruylant, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ See in particular Macdonald, Roderick A., “Here, There and Everywhere: the Legal Pluralism of Jacques Vanderlinden” in Kasirer, N., ed., Mélanges Jacques Vanderlinden (Montreal: Yvon Blais, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ The dichotomy is introduced and discussed at length by de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, Toward a New Common Sense. Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition (London: Routledge, 1995) at §7 Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ See Teubner, Gunther, Global law without a state (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1997)Google Scholar; Gessner, Volkmar & Budak, Ali Cem, eds., Emerging Legal Certainty: Empirical Studies on the Globalization of Law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Sassen, Saskia, “Territory and Territoriality in the Global Economy” (2000) 15 International Sociology 372 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.