ABSTRACT
This chapter particularly addresses the local consequences of the global complement to, and inversion of, the earlier discussions of how local values may affect global events. In recent years, anthropological interest in the state and in nationalism has belatedly taken on focus and intensity. Anthropologists have hitherto largely shunned the state as a hostile and invasive presence in local social life and have seen nationalism as an embarrassing first cousin to the discipline itself, one distinctly prone to public excesses of essentialism and reification. The focus on cultural intimacy works against this static, elitist, and conflationary reading. Its data are ethnographic and are of a kind often summarily dismissed as mere anecdote. The disemia concept may work best for countries with an ambiguous relationship to ideal images of a powerful culture, in which both formalism and irony provide important resources for political negotiation.
