At a time when cultural difference is increasingly becoming deterritorialized because of the mass migrations and transnational culture flows of a late capitalist, postcolonial world (as Arjun Appadurai, Ulf Hannerz, and others have pointed out), there is obviously a special interest in understanding the way that questions of identity and culture difference are spatialized in new ways. The circumstances of an accelerating “global cultural ecumene” (Hannerz 1989; Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988a:3; Appadurai 1990; Foster 1991), of a “world in creolization” (Hannerz 1987), make the project of exploring the interwined processes of place making and people making in the complex cultural politics of the nation-state an especially vital part of the contemporary anthropological agenda. Certainly, such real-world developments do much to account for the increased academic visibility of these theoretical issues.