ABSTRACT
Social space is textured out of a landscape of understandings, out of a landscape of memories and imagination, out of landscapes of bodily phenotype, language, religion, and birthplace, and, not the least, out of a political economy. Social space is textured; it acquires contours and colors that often are impregnated with actual and metaphoric ties of blood and kinship. Collectivities of persons who are signifying, and that which is signified, are cloven and coalesce. Circumscribed – as well as far-flung, prevailing – intersubjectivities demarcate oneself and one’s neighbors into a social topography, into various “us’s” and “thems.” It is these invisible, though sometimes physically apparent, saliencies of the social topography that I call ethnic identities.
