Territorial tropes for the idea of the nation persist in part because our very ideas of cultural coherence have become imbricated with the commonsense of the nation, In the history of culture theory, of course, territory and territoriality have played an important role: in a general way the idea that cultures are coherent, bounded, contiguous, and persistent has always been underwritten by a sense that human sociality is naturally localized and even locality-bound. The concern of anthropologists with rules of residence and their relation to descent groups and other social formations, for example, is based on a continuing sense that territorial realities of one or other sort both bound and determine social arrangements. Despite some vigorous efforts to counter such varieties of territorial determinism, the image of spatial resources and practices as both constituting and determining forms of sociality is remarkably resilient. This idea is utterly explicit in those branches of ecology, archaeology, and material culture studies that take spatial practices as their main source of evidence and analysis. Though books like Robert Ardrey ’s The Territorial Imperative are no longer in vogue, there is still a widespread sense that human beings are conditioned to demand spaces of allegiance that are extensions of their bodies. Variations of this assumption not only characterize anthropology but are also deeply entwined with the discipline of geography as a component of various national and imperial projects.