The Dictionary of Human Geography

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indigenous people in these areas was system-

atically ignored. The same process of physical

clearance and conceptual deletion of previous

human presence accompanied the extension

of the Yellowstone model outside the USA. It

was soon copied in the British Dominions

(Canada 1887, Australia 1891 and New

Zealand 1894) and in colonial possessions in

africa(the Belgian Congo in 1925, South

Africa in 1926). Following the Second World

War, the model was adopted in East Africa,

asia and eventually globally as the inter-

national conservation movement grew

(Adams, 2004). The International Union for

the Conservation of Nature and Natural

Resources (IUCN) established a Provisional

Committee on National Parks in 1958, now

the World Commission on Protected Areas

(www.iucn.org/themes/wcpa). The United

Nations adopted a ‘World List of National

Parks and Equivalent Reserves’ in 1962, and

IUCN defined a series of protected area cat-

egories, of which US-style National Parks are

widely regarded as the most important (www.

unep-wcmc.org/protected_areas/categories/).

The global protected area network expanded

rapidly. By 2005, there were over 100,000

protected areas covering over 2 million

square kilometres, more than 12 per cent of

the Earth’s land surface.

National parks created internationally on

the Yellowstone model are imagined as places

free from human settlement. Their creation

has therefore often caused displacement of

indigenous or other peoples, either through

restrictions on access to land andresources

(including cultural sites) or direct forced

resettlement. Globally, there has been a per-

sistent failure to recognize historic human oc-

cupation of andrightsto land placed within

national parks, or to recognize the extent

of human modification of ‘wilderness’

(Neumann, 2004b). Partly because of opposi-

tion to such imposed parks, there has been

significant emphasis in international conserva-

tion policy on ‘community-based conserva-

tion’ and ‘park outreach projects’ that seek to

create local political and economic support for

parks (Hulme and Murphree, 2001). There

are also alternatives to the exclusive national

park model; for example, British National

Parks and French Parcs Re ́gionaux, which

are essentially planning designations to pre-

serve the quality of privately owned land.wma

nationalism A name for the modern social

and political formations that draw together

feelings of belonging, solidarity and

identification between national citizens and

theterritoryimagined as their collective na-

tional homeland. The existence and coherence

of a particularnationis in this sense best

understood as an ongoing product and not

the primordial precursor of nationalism. But

while nationalism can therefore be said to

make nations, they are neither illusions nor

invented like works of fiction. Although

Benedict Anderson’s phrase ‘imagined com-

munities’ has sometimes been misinterpreted

as suggesting such an inventive account, in

fact, his emphasis on the politically and

socially constructive work of nationalism in

producing nations is the heart of his much-

reprinted book (2006). Nations are imagined,

he argues, because nationalism mobilizes a

strong but abstract sense of community

between distant strangers in a way that

consolidates their identification with both a

common historical inheritance and a shared

national space. This is also why nationalism

is more social than the personal passions of

patriotism and less legal than the regulative

norms ofcitizenship, even though – as femi-

nist and queer geographers in particular have

underlined – it is clearly interwoven with each

(see Bell and Binnie, 2000; Marston, 1990:

see alsofeminist geographies).

In the most recent edition of his book,

Anderson reviews its many translations and

globe-trotting travels, further documenting

how nationalism clearly fosters distinct

national cultures of reading, writing, teaching

and communication. He underlines too that

one of his initial intentions in the book (and

one that he thinks accounts for much of its

global popularity) is that it shifted the geogra-

phical focus of the study of nationalism away

from europe (and the eurocentrism that

traditional Marxist accounts shared with trad-

itional liberal accounts) and towards various

post-colonial nationalisms of the global

south, including not least of all what he calls

the ‘creole nationalisms’ of the Americas

(a formulation that itself also usefully under-

mines exceptionalist American arguments

about US republicanism as the uniquely

pioneering prototype of post-colonial national-

ism). In making this case, however, Anderson

does not directly address the many ways in

which his arguments have both resonated with

and been advanced by various versions of

post-colonial theory (seepost-colonialism).

His own attention to the role ofmapsand

other geographical depictions in imagining the

communities of nationalism clearly resonates,

for example, with Edward Said’s theoretical

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_N Final Proof page 488 31.3.2009 3:13pm Compositor Name: ARaju

NATIONALISM