David Boles: Human Meme

1862. That is the year Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Act said that any American willing to settle on 160 acres of public land, live there for five years, and improve the parcel, could file a claim and receive title. Between 1862 and 1976, when the Federal Land Policy and Management Act finally repealed the Homestead Act in the contiguous states, the United States distributed approximately 270 million acres of continental North America through this mechanism of the registered claim. The claim, the parcel, the boundary line, the survey marker. That is how the American imagination learned to think about territory. My new book, The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves, argues that the American body is now claimed the same way. Not metaphorically. Structurally. The body you are sitting in right now, the body listening to my voice, is divided among institutional claimants who have filed on portions of it with the same legal and procedural logic that onc