Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference

For a subject whose central rite of passage is fieldwork, whose romance has rested on its exploration of the remote ("the most other of others" [Hannerz 1986:363]), whose critical function is seen to lie in its juxtaposition of radically different ways of being (located "elsewhere") with that of the anthropologists' own, usually Western, culture, there has been surprisingly little self-consciousness about the issue of space in anthropological theory. (Some notable exceptions are Appadurai [1986, 1988], Hannerz [1987], and Rosaldo [1988, 1989].) This collection of five ethnographic articles represents a modest attempt to deal with the issues of space and place, along with some necessarily related concerns such as those of location, displacement, community, and identity. In particular, we wish to explore how the renewed interest in theorizing space in postmodernist and feminist theory (Anzaldua 1987; Baudrillard 1988; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Foucault 1982; Jameson 1984; Kaplan 1987; Martin and Mohanty 1986)-embodied in such notions as surveillance, panopticism, simulacra, deterritorialization, postmodern hyperspace, borderlands, and marginality-forces us to reevaluate such central analytic concepts in anthropology as that of "culture" and, by extension, the idea of "cultural difference."