ABSTRACT
Benedict Anderson famously argues the imaginary constitution of 'horizontal' solidarities as the foundation of the nation-form; Arjun Appadurai argued similarly that globalization rests on the 'work' of the imagination. Much ethnography has pursued those 'imagined communities' that derive from the circulations of media and translocal productions of culture. Inspired more by Clifford Geertz, however, and his concept of the moral imagination, Coleman urges a return to ethnography's distinctive method of embodied and interpersonal acts of sympathetic engagement and collaborative interpretation, and asks what the imagination might reveal of a global world that is yet, always and inevitably locally lived. The Matses are a native people of Peruvian Amazonia who spend most of their lives in forest villages and who rarely visit urban settings. However, Matses children engage regularly with the city by imagining it at a distance. This becomes manifest in their creative productions and their conversations.
