Appadurai was writing about the translocal at a particular historic moment
when anthropological imaginations of the local were increasingly seen as limiting,
sedentary and insular. Critiquing the implicit acceptance of territorially bounded
nation states as the regulator of locality, Appadurai (1996a, 1996b) asserted that
contemporary local life is divided along a range of spatial horizons that frequently
go across, beyond and often without reference to the borders, and imaginaries of the
nation. Appadurai (1990, 1993) defined nationalism less by territorial sovereignty,
and more by the multiplicity of mobile practices enacted among refugees, tourists,
guest workers, transnational intellectuals, scientists, and undocumented migrants
whose lives are experienced through identities and aspirations which are not always
rooted in, or to, national coordinates. This was a view shared particularly in the case
of global elites who were held as the archetypal exemplars of disembeddedness
accompanying the shift in relationships between mobility, territory and national
affiliation (Hannerz 1996).