La identidad expandida: Cartografías del saber

Abstract

Based on the premise Territory = Soil + Identity Lafont (2010), the following article addresses the use of indicators and chart axes as tools to define identity. Although identity can be under­stood as the differentiating substance of any phenomenon, what is being suggested is that choosing some indicators or others, apart from providing different chart axes, also give mixed results when it comes to pinning down a given identity. In order to define a city (and its limits and expansions), a group of people, a nation, a village, a per­son, a computer, certain food, a luxury item, a basic need, a right, an obligation, we must be clear about the identity of the phenomenon we are dealing with: identifying is the most essential process that human beings face.  Are human beings innately prone to identify? Right from birth, human beings  must identify themselves as a separate entity, different from their mothers and integrated in different group situations. Depending on the way in which people and spaces are identified, that will give rise to rights and obligations, which will in turn condition their lives. However, those identities should be freely chosen by the people? Or should they abide by the indicators imposed upon the individual, including incidental issues such as place of birth? This article proposes indicators and chart axes whereby we can get close, among other things, to the identifiable idea of the urban, rural and industrial areas, as well as approaching the trans-ter­ritorial corridors or joint portals, and by extension the human communities that settle in those territories. In order to gain an understanding of the changing and expanding finiteness of identity concepts, it is essential to identify and define the fuzzy spaces leading to the limits, here understood as a tendency and not as setting the limits.