ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts presents in the subsequent chapters. This part examines the nature of community: it’s making and unmaking through the use of different kinds of discourse which individuals strategically and contingently draw on in the course of their lives. It explores the social and symbolic construction of Armenian identity in London. The part explores the making of community – the defining of boundaries, the asserting of criteria of distinctiveness, the measuring of belonging – in the village and dale of Wanet in north-west England. The reality of community existence, its contingencies and ambiguities, may be very different from the rhetoric of essentialism and chauvinism in which its spokespersons may indulge. Anthropologists should themselves beware of celebrating these suspect and politically dangerous movements out of an ethos of ‘cultural rights’ or communitarianism.
