Rootlessness drives tribes to claim kinship across dispersed territory rather than bounded nations

Evidence

Tribal nationalism grew out of this atmosphere of rootlessness. It spread widely not only among the peoples of Austria-Hungary but also, though on a higher level, among members of the unhappy intelligentsia of Czarist Russia. Rootlessness was the true source of that “enlarged tribal consciousness” which actually meant that members of these peoples had no definite home but felt at home wherever other members of their “tribe” happened to live. “It is our distinction,” said Schoenerer, “…that we do not gravitate toward Vienna but gravitate to whatever place Germans may live in.” The hallmark of the pan-movements was that they never even tried to achieve national emancipation, but at once, in their dreams of expansion, transcended the narrow bounds of a national community and proclaimed a folk community that would remain a political factor even if its members were dispersed all over the earth. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 590

Categorization

• XREF: This is the dispersal/statelessness thread that the reader’s scaffold on race-thinking and statelessness builds on; connects to Arendt’s later chapters on stateless people and to the imagined community of the nation literature. — connects to: Seasonal territory asserted by migrating birds overrides documented human ownership — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 134; Place-based kinship duties anchor indigenous refusal to relocate — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 689; Nomadic belonging-in-motion and oil-age rootlessness are opposites — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 207
• DEFINE: Defines ‘tribal nationalism’ and ‘enlarged tribal consciousness’ as distinct from national liberation — a folk community that persists across dispersion rather than bounded national territory.