The countryman, the peasant, is someone whose occupation is the country and the land. He occupies it and takes care of it, and he is occupied with it: that is, he takes it in hand and is taken up by it. Occupy comes from capio, ‘‘to take, to grasp.’’ Being a peasant means taking in hand the place and the time of the country. Its culture and cultivation, as one says; that is, the fashioning of one by the other— the occupier and the occupied, the toiler and the toiled (which are by turns the one called ‘‘the peasant’’ and that which surrounds him, which is called ‘‘the land,’’ ‘‘the countryside [le campagne],’’ in the sense of the field [le champ], which, for its part, is also a corner or a piece of earth, but opened, extended, cleared by and for the occupation of growing and grazing). The peasant is the one who occupies himself with the land, but he is not, for all that, necessarily someone who works in agriculture. He can be the landsman of all sorts of lands, languages, peoples. What defines him is that he is occupied by or with belonging. Thus there are peasants of the cities or even of science or philosophy. There is some peasant in anyone who belongs and who is taken up with time-and-place, in anyone who makes his own some corner of the here-and-now: it can be a machine, a highway, or a computer as much as a field of beets or a stable. (To be sure, the peasant is, properly speaking, someone who is occupied with an immobile land, and this extension of the concept that I am proposing is only acceptable if we ‘‘immobilize’’ the machine or the computer: if we make of them a sort of ground or region [contre´e] that one can dig into, dig up, uncover . . . Why wouldn’t the Internet also be a kind of movable earth?)
-Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p.70
