ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on locality as a phenomenological property of social life, a structure of feeling that is produced by particular forms of intentional activity and yields particular sorts of material effects. All locality building has a moment of colonization, a moment both historical and chronotypic, when there is a formal recognition that the production of a neighborhood requires deliberate, risky, even violent action in respect to the soil, forests, animals, and other human beings. The production of a neighborhood is inherently colonizing, in the sense that it involves the assertion of socially (often ritually) organized power over places and settings that are viewed as potentially chaotic or rebellious. The political economy that links neighborhoods to contexts is thus both methodologically and historically complex. In the new world, the production of neighborhoods increasingly occurs under conditions where the system of nation-states is the normative hinge for the production of both local and translocal activities.
