ABSTRACT
The nature of the link between community, place and culture has been questioned from different vantage points in anthropology.1 Students of globalization and migration have noted that the interconnected and mobile lives that people lead today cannot be captured through fieldwork in local sites that are expected to correspond with cultural wholes. Such lives call, rather, for studies of the complex, non-local socio-cultural contexts that characterize modern human existence. Anthropologists who have examined how culture is perceived and practised at an individual level, however, have argued that there never was a close fit between local communities and shared culture. This becomes clear once one abandons the study of generalized cultural wholes and focuses, instead, upon individual lives. Communities or shared fields of belonging are cultural constructions, and the various ways in which they are imagined and sustained by individuals and collectivities, they argue, should be the object of anthropological study. In this chapter I shall examine the kinds of communities and fields of belonging that emerge in the life stories of two men of Caribbean background living in England as they define a place for themselves in the modern world of mobility and interconnectedness. The analysis is based on life story interviews carried out with members of the global family networks of which these men are part. The life stories related by the two persons examined here suggest that a variety of social, economic and cultural factors, grounded in local as well as in global relationships, come into play in the construction and sustaining of communities. I therefore conclude that while it is important for anthropologists to explore the constructed and diffuse nature of many communities today, it is equally, if not more important, to ground studies of such communities in the concrete fields of social relations and cultural values within which they are imagined and realized. I end the chapter by calling into question the usefulness of the notion of diasporic
community, which is being used today in many works on transnationalism and globalization. I argue that this term evokes generalized ideas of communities of belonging rooted in distant homelands, often espoused by third world intellectuals, that may prove to be too simplified when examined against the multifaceted life experiences of those supposed to belong to these communities.
