ABSTRACT

Culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade and this is related to a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. At the same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized, the people studied by anthropologists are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities within global fields of relations.
So far, much of the analysis of the role of place in culture has been carried out at a level of theoretical debate. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance of place in the global space of relations which mould the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture.

part |86 pages

Finding a place for culture

chapter |21 pages

Cultural sites

Sustaining a home in a deterritorialized world

chapter |20 pages

Imagining a place in the Andes

In the borderland of lived, invented, and analyzed culture

chapter |27 pages

Which world?

On the diffusion of Algerian raï to the West

chapter |14 pages

Seeking place

Capsized identities and contracted belonging among Sri Lankan Tamil refugees

part |123 pages

The culture and politics of place

chapter |19 pages

The nation as a human being—a metaphor in a mid-life crisis?

Notes on the imminent collapse of Norwegian national identity

chapter |19 pages

Paradoxes of sovereignty and independence

“Real” and “pseudo” nation-states and the depoliticization of poverty

chapter |23 pages

The experience of displacement

Reconstructing places and identities in Sri Lanka

chapter |29 pages

Localizing the American dream

Constructing Hawaiian homelands

part |89 pages

Topical metaphors in anthropological thinking

chapter |32 pages

Speechless emissaries

Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization

chapter |12 pages

“Roots” and “Mosaic” in a Balkan Border Village

Locating cultural production

chapter |23 pages

Simplifying complexity

Assimilating the global in a small paradise

chapter |19 pages

There are no Indians in the Dominican Republic

The cultural construction of Dominican identities