The contributions to this volume suggest just how complicated commonsensical notions of “locality” or “community” actually turn out to be. Liisa Malkki’s essay elegantly demonstrates that concepts of locality or community can appear natural and unproblematic because of what she calls “a metaphysics of sedentarism,” in which the rootedness of peoples and cultures in “their own” territories is taken as the normal state in the taken-for-granted “national order of things.” This pervasive, implicit vision of a natural world of “peoples” unproblematically rooted in their proper soils, Malkki argues, has powerfully shaped the ways in which such things as displacement and mobility have been conceptualized by anthropologists and others.