ABSTRACT
The implications are clear: the war is an "irrational" product of "ancient hatreds" and an obsession with the past that makes little sense to citizens of the "modern" West. In emphasizing that the war in Yugoslavia was a civil war in which atrocities were being committed on both sides, Kalymnians were employing understandings of the Greek civil war. Global positioning and local experiences are crucial to comprehending Kalymnian understandings of the war in Yugoslavia. The 1990s have seen a growing anthropological concern with the ways in which encompassing global, national and regional systems and processes are dialectically affecting and mediated by local meanings. Anthropologists from different camps are analyzing the ways in which identities and boundaries are being re-drawn by the dramatic increases in transnational migrations of peoples, capital, commodities and media.
