Chapter 3
This land is my land
Even though children soon experience the things we are going to discuss in this chapter, the theme is a difficult one because there are good reasons for the two attitudes we are about to explain. We have defined these as attitudes as Sedentary and Nomadic, in other words “loving one’s own home”, and “going to someone else’s home” (or “welcoming those who come to our home”). The idea is to encourage young people to grasp the positive aspects of all points of view and to lead them to discuss the limitations of each one. Consequently, with regard to such an apparently simple theme we have to convey the idea that as far as certain problems are concerned there is no one single answer, but many of them, which depend on viewpoint, the particular situation, and so on.
At the end of this section we propose several discussion ideas aimed at reconciling the apparent contradiction and at showing how the need for protection and privacy (emphasized by sedentary communities) and the drive to explore (championed by the nomads) are in fact two aspects of the human personality, that these two aspects imply each other and that, therefore, each of us is a little sedentary and a little nomadic (albeit to an extent that varies according to culture and personality).
Having established these premises we move on to the second section, devoted to the problem of frontiers, in which the children will be invited to consider the territorial boundaries of their own geographical area.
1 - Territory.
All human beings need a safe place in which to shelter from bad weather and the dangers of the outside world
We are territorial animals
All the human beings feel attracted towards what lies beyond known territory.
We are nomadic animals
All human beings feel attracted to what lies beyond known territory. The call of a distant place, unknown and fascinating, induces people to leave their place of origin in order to head for destinations that may be fairly close or very far away.
The instinct of exploration is just as important as the instinct of preservation, because it leads people to leave a safe base in order to discover the nature of the external environment, what resources it offers, and what there is to be learned from it.
2 - Frontiers.
Lots of people live in the countryside where the land is divided into fields delimited by borders: fencing, barbed wire, or merely some stones placed on the ground to mark the limits of the field.
We are territorial animals
All human beings need a safe place in which to shelter from bad weather and the dangers of the outside world, where they can rest with no fear of being attacked, where they can share some day-to-day experiences with the members of their own family, and where they feel part of a larger group to which they are bound by a common language, by a history and by a series of future projects.
The instinct of preservation drives people to seek refuge
“in their own home”, and to defend this familiar space from strangers wishing to enter it.
We are nomadic animals
All human beings feel attracted to what lies beyond known territory. The call of a distant place, unknown and fascinating, induces people to leave their place of origin in order to head for destinations that may be fairly close or very far away.
The instinct of exploration is just as important as the instinct of preservation, because it leads people to leave a safe base in order to discover the nature of the external environment, what resources it offers, and what there is to be learned from it.
Personal space
Being bound to our own space, our own place of origin, the environment to which we belong, that is to say to our own territory, is called territoriality. Territoriality is a natural phenomenon, common to many animals, and concerns first and foremost the defence of our personal space from intrusion on the part of strangers. If we slowly approach a stray cat, once we get to a certain distance we see that the cat suddenly flees. It is as if we had stepped over an invisible boundary to enter in what the cat perceives as its personal space, and its flight serves to re-establish a “safe distance”. If at this point we were to prevent the cat from running away, and if we continued to move closer to it, it is probable that, on feeling threatened, it would begin to show signs of aggressive behaviour towards us: it would puff up its fur, arch its back, spit, and so on, in an attempt to drive us back.
Ethologists have established that many birds and mammals behave in a similar fashion, both with enemies belonging to other species, and (in certain cases) with members of their own species. In fact, personal space is not just a defence against enemy aggression; for many animals it is also a way of discouraging the excessive nearness of members of the same species, and therefore serves to avoid the effects of overcrowding (if the population is too numerous then there isn’t enough food to go round, individuals disturb one another, diseases may begin to spread, and so on). Consequently, these animals tend to run away or to behave aggressively even when their personal space is “invaded” by their own kind.
Human beings are territorial animals too. If strangers get very close to us, breathe in our face or step on our toes, we feel disturbed by their closeness, and we almost feel like behaving the ways animals do, showing our teeth right away, or running off. Usually we limit ourselves to stepping back a little and keeping our distance. If the space is too small, like when we find ourselves in a lift with a stranger, we try to behave if he or she were not there, for example by turning the other way, or gazing into space. So we too defend our personal space, even though we do this in a way different to animals.
Contact with other people
In the animal kingdom some creatures live in solitude, like certain birds, tigers, lizards or vipers. Others instead live in groups, like lions, zebras, wolves, herring, and very many birds. They do this because living in groups allows individuals to help one another and to find food together, while enabling them to defend themselves better from enemies. When they meet members of their own kind, these animals make attempts to get to know one another and, if possible, to make friends. In order to do this they exchange signals, and since they cannot talk they move their tails, or sniff one another in order to sense from the smell whether they have encountered an animal they can trust, they emit sounds, and sometimes they lick one another. If, by the smell or by other signals, an animal acquires trust in another animal, then the two agree to stay together, behaving as if they could talk to each other, and sometimes even playing together.
It looks just like when two children meet. They move close to each other, they wonder “Who are you?” or ask “Do you want to play with me?” or one offers the other a sweet or a plaything. In fact human beings also need to feel the presence of their own kind and seek contact with other people. We have such contacts every day, and when we are alone for too long we get bored and we look for someone. Sometimes people go out into the streets or to the bar merely to enjoy “a chat”. Sometimes we telephone people even though we have nothing in particular to say to them, but just to hear their voice (and to have them hear ours).
Contact with others may occur in various ways: sometimes there is eye contact, or a greeting, and we begin to talk or to play together. Even fighting can be a form of contact. When contact is made we admit others into our personal space, and the others do the same for us.
How children construct their own personal space
New born babies do not yet have any sense of their own personal space and see no boundaries between themselves and others: during the very first months of life, the external environment manifests itself to babies as a confused thing: babies do not yet know that they have a body of their own, distinct from those of others, nor do they recognize objects and people as things different from themselves. For babies, being in the world means being with mummy, who breastfeeds and fondles them, and there is no difference between the mother’s personal space and that of the child. But, between the second and sixth months, children begin to notice the fact that they and the mother are two different things. And this is how they begin to become aware of a strange “boundary” between themselves and others. It is precisely for this reason that children suffer if the mother (or the person who looks after them) goes away; children follow her with their eyes, call her and, when they cannot see her anymore, they become desperate. But it is thanks to this “experience of separation” that children – at the of age between six and eighteen months – slowly begin to recognize themselves as individuals distinct from others.
And so children gradually begin to recognize their own personal space. Whereas when they were smaller anyone could approach them, as time goes by only a few intimates can penetrate an invisible “limit of nearness” without arousing feelings of anxiety or disquiet. Around three years of age, children begin to keep their distance with regard to adults who are not close family members or friends (while this distance still does not exist as far as their peers are concerned). Still in this period, children begin to distinguish the distances to be kept between males and females, and only in this way do they acquire an awareness of their own “gender” (that is to say, being male or female). On recognizing their own personal space children also acquire a sense of property. Within their personal space children recognize certain objects as theirs, and they defend them from others (everything they like arouses the statement: “that’s mine!”). This “sense of property” is natural and only through training do we learn that we cannot have all the things we want even though they belong to someone else, and that many things must be shared. Learning to respect other people’s property means, for children, growing up to be social animals, who accept certain rules in order to be able to live in a group, whether it is the family, the street, school, or the village.
Children understand that in certain situations some people should be kept at more of a distance than others (parents teach them not to put their trust in strangers, who might be “bad”) but also that, just as they wish to defend their own space and possessions from the invasion of others, they too must respect other people’s spaces and possessions.
• How children begin to explore
Newborn babies spend almost all of the time drifting in a state midway between sleep and wakefulness, waking up when they are hungry or have some other need, and plunging back into sleep as soon as their needs are satisfied. But at around six months of age they begin to “explore” the world around them. The first explorations primarily regard the body of the mother, or whoever looks after the infant: babies pull her hair, nose, ears, put their hands in her mouth, observing and manipulating her from close to. Once they become familiar with the mother’s face, and having realized that this is an entity physically separate from them, at around eight months children can turn with a blend of curiosity and fear to exploring the faces of other people, whose features are compared to those of the mother.
As children gradually acquire mobility and self awareness, they explore the world more and more. At first they limit themselves to grasping, sucking, and touching whatever comes within range. Later, through sight and hearing, they observe more distant objects. As soon as they are able to crawl, they begin to move away from the mother for brief periods: sometimes they become so absorbed in their activities that they seem to forget her presence, but then they are seized by sudden separation anxiety and they return to her. It is as if they make little return trips from the mother to the surrounding environment.
Thus, in a certain sense, children create a kind of “map” of the world they know, learning to recognize and to foresee a growing number of situations, and at the same time learning to understand better what they know and can do. For example, children learn that if they grasp a fragile object and then release their grip, the object falls to the ground and breaks; but, by so doing, they also realize what they can do with their hands. When, towards the end of the first year, children learn to walk, whole new horizons open up for them. By standing on their feet they see their environment from “high up” and they recognize it better. Play introduces new experiences (they learn that balls bounce, that certain objects roll, that others make sounds if shaken, and so on). In the meantime they learn to speak, and gradually become able to share their own experiences with others.
If children see a thing that they like or one that makes an impression on them they begin to say that it is “big” or “nice”, if they see an object or an animal that they know, they will repeat its name pointing at it with a finger, and they try to say the name over and over to others in order to convey their impressions or discoveries.
Territory
Often, animals live in a clearly defined area in which they build their nest or lair, raise their young, find and conserve food, play, and so on. This place is their “territory”, and they defend it from strangers.
In order to communicate their presence in the territory to others and to make it known to others who might cross the boundaries of the protected areas, many animals mark the territory in various ways: for example, they may emit acoustic signals (like birdsong or the howling of wolves), visual signals (for example, scratches on tree trunks) or olfactory signals (by emitting smells through glands and urine). If an outsider ignores these signals, this triggers the defensive reactions of those who consider themselves to be the rightful occupants of the territory. Fighting seldom begins. More often there follows a ritualization of the conflict, in which the adversaries limit themselves to showing their aggressiveness through certain external signals until one of the two (usually the invader) beats the retreat.
Human beings too need familiar spaces in which to carry on their activities and these spaces are the home, school, the neighbourhood, the village, all the way to far more extensive territories, like the region or the country in which they live. These places are perceived as part of their own personal space and, as such, they are “marked” and defended from intruders. These defensive marks can be of various types: for a house they might be closed doors, signs reading “beware of the dog”, or a gate; for a large country there will be frontiers, where the national flag is flown and where guards keep watch over those crossing the border.
Nomadism
The word nomad comes from a Greek word meaning “to roam in search of pasture”, in other words to wander around, sometimes without a fixed destination, and sometimes towards destinations that are far off and still only vaguely defined. Nomadism springs from the desire for freedom, from curiosity, from the desire to go beyond - with the mind or the body - the boundaries of known territory.
On certain occasions, and this happened frequently in the past, an entire population sets to wandering because a food shortage at home or natural catastrophes (floods, earthquakes, plagues) have made it difficult to live in their territory. So they move off in search of a different country, in which there may be fields to cultivate, gardens full of fruit, water, a mild climate and plenty of animals to hunt or to raise. In the chapter on migration we shall be talking about the forms of nomadism in which entire populations go on the move.
The attraction of things that we do not know yet is expressed in many ways. Since childhood, we take an interest in all things that are hidden or secret: store rooms, attics, rooms that we are not permitted to enter, are all places that stimulate the imagination and the desire to explore. Before we explore such places we daydream about them, inventing stories about them. Sometimes these are very beautiful stories, sometimes they are very frightening (like when we believe that the cellar or a certain dark room is inhabited by the bogeyman, the wolf or some other wicked being). As adults we may fantasize about far off lands, but we always feel the need to explore what we do not yet know. In all countries legends have been invented about distant lands, often populated by fantastic creatures.