Walls and human exceptionalism

Walls and human exceptionalism

This paper investigates walls as mechanisms for constructing and sustaining human exceptionalism. The excluded other being considered here is non-human. Walls destroy and constrain opportunities for non-humans as assertively as they do for excluded humans. Building walls is hugely environmentally destructive, and walls dramatically impede the movement and fragment the living space of many non-humans. At a more fundamental level, walls create and perpetuate an entire geography based upon the assumption that the ongoing comfort, security and convenience of particular privileged humans justify the reshaping of the world to their advantage and to the exclusion or impediment of almost all others.

Territorial negotiations take many diverse forms; communication, aggression and submission, ritual, cooperation, bargaining, all these are foreclosed by a wall. The power-based territorial claims that walls impose come to be taken as righteous or prior, because they are embedded in the physical landscape itself and confirmed within the landscape of human social and legal conventions. Their radical boundary-staking enables human judgements to focus upon interactions within human society, and to turn away from interconnectedness with what can become construed as a simplified outside. The mangrove communities of Sydney will be invited to contribute their alternative approaches to negotiating boundaries.

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