The challenge to spatially territorialized notions of culture leads the contributors of this volume to emphasize processes and practices of place making. Anthropologists have long studied spatial units larger than the “local,” and a well-established anthropological tradition exists that has emphasized interrelations and linkages between local settings and larger regional or global structures and processes. Such studies have led to rich and informative accounts that have deepened the collective disciplinary understanding of particular regions or “peoples,” enlivening the methods and techniques of fieldwork as traditionally conceived. Too often, however, anthropological approaches to the relation between “the local” and something that lies beyond it (regional, national, international, global) have taken the local as given, without asking how perceptions of locality and community are discursively and historically constructed. In place of the question, How is the local linked to the global or the regional? Then, we prefer to start with another question that enables a quite different perspective on the topic: How are understandings of locality, community, and region formed and lived? To answer this question, we must turn away from the commonsense idea that such things as locality and community are simply given or natural and turn toward a focus on social and political processes of place making, conceived less as a matter of “ideas” than of embodied practices that shape identities and enable resistance (see also Bird et al. 1993; Friedland and Boden 1994; Harvey 1993; Massey 1994; Morley and Robins 1995; probyn 1990; Pratt 1984; and Pred and Watts 1992).