Region

Doesn’t the keyword “region” self-evidently denote a discrete place? Certainly, the first definition in the American Heritage Dictionary—a region is “a large, usually continuous segment of a surface or space”—indicates as much. This usage of the term presumes that regions are self-contained places—generally, that they are effects of natural geography. As such, it fosters a paradox within the term “region” and its variants by making invisible the myriad ways in which human processes, particularly those associated with modernization, nation formation, and globalization, create “places” that appear to preexist or be peripheral to these very processes.