The thing is - people expect people to be predictable. How else would the world work?
And that applies as much to where someone lives as to how someone acts, or how someone lives (or loves - which is the first word that I wrote - somewhat unconsciously - a serendipitious typo that, in true Freudian manner, exposed precisely what I wanted to say, or should have said, but then went back and edited (in a true post-modern computer manner)).
So what is it about this thing that people want people to be living SOMEWHERE. A known and fixed place of abode, that they can find you at, that they can relate you to, that they know you will
always be at. More for their own sake, I am sure, than for yours.
Is there something more to it than this?
Is there something to deeply genetic about this?
Is it a western european / caucasian centric type of thing (maybe also an Asia / Subcontinent type of thing, maybe also a Polynesian and Island sort of thing, maybe even most of Africa sort of thing (which other places in the world have I missed?), maybe everywhere except for the few nomads that still currently exist).
Why the mis-trust of gypsies throughout Europe? Surely it goes deeper than simply worried about the lack of roots making it easier for them to break the law (steal, etc) and get away with it (which it probably is rather harder to do for them than others in many instances).
Not being any sort of expert in this area, but the "gypsy" culture/peoples appear to universally be "problematical" in most countries in Europe, over many periods of time (it does not seem to be limited to just certain peoples and certain times). But, correct me if I am wrong.
Maybe it goes back to the time when we swapped our nomadic hunter/gatherer existence for a more settled agricultural existence - and thus started to genetically "program" ourselves that we should "value" permanency of place as opposed to "wandering" from place to place.
There had to be a mechanism whereby we, as a race, psychologically and then genetically (so to speak), valued a certain type and style of behaviour (ie that of permanency of place, as opposed to nomadism) and re-inforced such behavioural and thought processes (as opposed to those that did not suit the socialogical and "political" purposes of the time - even economic purposes, since permanently tending to fields and living in one place probably resulted in a "better" (read "richer", etc) life for those that pursued such a life).
It could also certainly have been political, in that people tied to one place are probably easier to control and direct than people who can easily and readily move somewhere else, if they do not like the particular leader at a particular point in time. Maybe there, then, has been a series of "programmings" over ages which deals with in-built political control.
Maybe it has something to do with the place we are born - the deep feeling for the earth than is "in-bred" in us, from when we are born.
It has always struck me, especially in todays age of cheap and fast transport around the world, that more people choose to remain in the land that they were born, and even close to the very place that they were born and grew up, as opposed to moving somewhere else (for whatever reason). Of course, this "choice" is being broken down due to the "explosion" of travel and "living" options available today (for instance, there are even people who permanently live on cruise ships - the ultimate "nomadism"), yet there would be many more people who live within 100 miles of where they grew up, than not.
Maybe it goes back to our time living off the land, when we had to commune with nature, and had to understand, intimately, where we were living and how we lived in relation to this small small part of the earth, just in order to survive.
Maybe there is something to be said for this quasi-spiritual affinity with Gaia that certain people expouse. More than we really know consciously. How would we be able to tell? To do some "scientific experiments" to verify the hypothesis?
Yet, for whatever reason, it still seems real, that there is a "sense of place and home", for each person, regardless of the legion of "grey nomads" travelling around the world, let alone this continent (but who almost always have a home base to go back to), and regardless of the legion of mobile young (and not so young) people travelling around the world, working and loving, from place to place (but not so quickly that they can be classified as nomadic).
Is this something that we are possibly slowly modifying now - genetically re-programming so to speak (in the same way that we may have genetically re-programming from hunters/gatherers to farmers in a much earlier age)?
Interesting to hear from those who are in the midst of their "re-programming"? How does it feel? And why do it? And would they even be able to expostulate on something which may be so unconscious that it is "the very air that they breath"?
