Returning then to the ethnoscapes with which I began, the central
paradox of ethnic politics in today's world is that primordia (whether of
language or skin color or neighborhood or kinship) have become globalized.
That is, sentiments, whose greatest force is in their ability to ignite
intimacy into a political state and turn locality into a staging ground for
identity, have become spread over vast and irregular spaces as groups
move yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media capabilities.
This is not to deny that such primordia are often the product of invented
traditions ( Hobsbawm and Ranger 1 98 3 ) or retrospective affiliations,
but to emphasize that because of the disjunctive and unstable
interplay of commerce, media, national policies, and consumer fantaSies,
ethnicity, once a genie contained in the bottle of some sort of locality
( however large) , has now become a global force, forever slipping in and
through the cracks between states and borders.