Introduction

In the last decades of the twentieth century, questions of boundaries, space and mobility have become a central focus of debate in anthropology. Time-honoured approaches of fieldwork seemed to have lost their sites, social entities long held to be clearly defined by distinct boundaries of reference and/or of location, seemed to dissolve before the anthropologists’ gaze. The concept of culture – once a comfortable, if admittedly vague, reference to everything anthropologists used to study, had lost its innocence. Now ‘culture’ is seen as fraught with notions of homogeneity, boundedness and locality, implicitly denying new realities.