I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the question “where are you from”. It rankled me for a long time – in San Francisco when I first arrived it felt like a provocation, a way of checking if you were a native or a gentrifier. Then I made a friend who has spent a lot of time in Navajo Nation building relationships with folks there. They ask the same question, apparently, because their relationship to the land itself is so much of a part of who they are, that knowing you grew up on a particular mountain or stream tells them about you in ways that go beyond “local culture”. So I started thinking about which parts of your background are important to get to know you? Which fields have you studied, who are your intellectual and ethical ancestors? Is there a “small talk” question that gets at that? “What did you major in” is probably close, for more intellectual folks who are still in or near college, but is still a pretty weak shadow of what I’m trying to get at. 

And this becomes even more relevant when you think about statelessness and movement as political issues. The 21st century doesn’t have a monopoly on this – human history is full of forced and voluntary migrations – but there are particular new spins on it. Cosmopolites (which I just read and is very good) talks about bidoons in the UAE, whose ancestors were nomadic desert people just like everyone else, but missed the citizenship initiatives of when those states were forming, and are now stateless – and the UAE’s efforts to buy them citizenships in Comoros, a poor island in the Indian Ocean. The most marginalized want citizenship as a way to secure their rights, to be legible to government and justice. Then of course the ultra rich are stateless in a different way – trying specifically to escape from government responsibilities like paying taxes, they collect residences and passports in the most convenient nations. Climate refugees may be one of the key stories of the 21st century and this question of “where are you from” may have a completely different meaning for them.