Cultural sites: sustaining a home in a deterritorialized world

Abstract

Anthropologists, in the past, have had a tendency to regard people as either settled in localized communities or as migrating and therefore involved in processes of moving and relocating in new places. Impressed by the growing importance of travel in the modern world, they are, however, beginning to critique the idea that settled life in particular places necessarily is a “normal” state of being. A great deal of attention is therefore now being directed at the cultural and social significance of moving in space and the transnational communities which may result from this. In the excitement about foregrounding movement and non-local relations we must be careful, however, not to overemphasize the global and transient character of human life on the loose. On the basis of a study of a West Indian community I shall argue that the strong propensity to migrate found among West Indians is counterbalanced by an equally strongly developed notion of attachment to place. In order to understand West Indian life it is therefore necessary to study the role of both fixed places and changeable and ever-expanding global networks of relations. I suggest that a useful concept in such studies may be found in the notion of “cultural sites,” cultural institutions which have developed in the interrelationship between global and local ties. These cultural sites attain their significance because they are identified with particular places, at the same time as they accommodate the global conditions of life which have long characterized the West Indies. It is suggested that such cultural sites may be useful focal points in anthropological studies of the more general global and local condition of human existence.