In this extract from Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1992), Arjun Appadurai draws attention to changing configurations of community in the late twentieth century where, due to increased levels of transnational migration, group identity is no longer straightforwardly attached to a specific locale, and communities are often split by internal cultural and ethnic differences. He considers the challenge this presents to the traditional practice of anthropology which took as its subject matter the spatially bounded and culturally homogenous community: this ‘familiar anthropological object’, he proposes, no longer exists, and anthropology as a discipline will need to respond to new forms of group identity. Appadurai’s observation raises questions which have subsequently been debated by anthropologists: Is ‘community’ still a viable concept in a globalised world? What new methods are needed to identify and analyse transnational, diasporic and deterritorialised communities? Is it still possible to think about the local?

Writing in 2002, Ted C. Lewellen comments on the shift in the attention of anthropologists from ‘bounded cultures and communities’ to ‘transnationals, diasporas’ and ‘deterritorialized ethnicities’. Xavier Inda and Renalto Rosaldo similarly build on Appadurai's observation in remarking that in the twentyfirst century it is impossible ‘to think of culture strictly in […] localized terms’ and ‘to view it as the natural property of spatially circumscribed populations’, since globalisation ‘has radically pulled culture away from place’.3 In a world characterised by increasing movement and an ‘intensification of global interconnectedness’, they suggest, anthropologists have had to reconceptualise culture. This has involved a concomitant reconceptualising of community, since in a globalised world the parameters of community are ‘no longer, if they ever were, simply confined within the limits of a single territorial national space’.