Ethnicity in a globalizing world: borders, boundaries, and virtual communities

Abstract

In a globalizing world, traditional ethnic and national boundaries and borders are becoming less relevant to the study of cultural variation. A growing number of anthropologists and sociologists point to the delinking of territory and culture. Others raise the issue of whether the compression of time and space that has accompanied globalization has fostered, even in the remotest areas, an awareness and some degree of mediated experience of the world at large. This might be resulting not only in the formation of a layer of world culture but also in the shrinking of cultural repertoires. As the importance of physical space and boundaries declines in everyday communication, it is also becoming possible to construct and maintain ethnic ties in new ways. For example, the boundaries between the mother nation and the country of immigration have become blurred in the case of ethnic diasporas. This raises the issue of to what extent virtual communities might constitute an alternative to bounded social units such as ethnic communities. This article discusses these issues in the anthropological and sociological study of ethnicity.