In Precarious Motion: From Territorial to Transnational Cultures
Author(s)
Amit-Talai, Vered
Abstract
In spite of an effort to reorient ethnographic practice away from territorial cultures, recent anthropological treatments of the “transnational” have tended to rely on cases that closely approximate localized communities of traditional ethnography. This kind of focus, however, cannot address the more diffuse and disaggregated outcomes of globalization. This essay examines the convergent orientations and limitations of two influential anthropological renderings of transnational social and cultural fields. In considering the implications of a Cayman Islands case study, I suggest that anthropologists may have to accept the loss of collectivity as a conceptual and epistemological anchor in order to address the situations of the many unconnected travellers and migrants whose movements do not involve the reproduction of transnational aggregates.
