Reterritorialization - Use in Anthropology

Use in Anthropology

Reterritorialization is when people within a place start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and making it their own. An example would be the Indonesian Hip Hop. Although hip hop and rap grew out of the inner cities of New York and Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s, by the time it reached Indonesia through Europe and Central Asia, it had already lost some of its original characteristics. Imported hip hop diffused first to a small group of people in Indonesia; then, Indonesians began to create hip hop music. Although the music was hip hop, the local artists integrated their local culture with the practises of the “foreign” hip hop to create a hybrid that was no longer foreign.

Most current work in human geography uses anthropological definitions of culture and often views the practice associated with popular culture as cultural expressions that may reveal or create aspects of place, space landscape, and identity. The continuous cycles of deterritorialization and reterritorialization through axiomatization makes up one of the basic rhythms of capitalist society. Karl Marx referred to this as the constant revolution of the means of production and uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions that distinguish the bourgeois era from all the previous. The fundamental mechanism of capital accompanies the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. It conjoins deterritorialized resources and appropriates the surplus from their reterritorialized conjunction.

Deterritorialization and reterritorialization presuppose and reinforce the notice of a common essence of desire and labor. This refers to the detachment and reattachment of the energies of production in general of investments of all kinds, whether conventionally considered psychological or economical.