Culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade and this is related to a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. At the same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized, the people studied by anthropologists are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities within global fields of relations.So far, much of the analysis of the role of place in culture has been carried out at a level of theoretical debate. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance of place in the global space of relations which mould the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture.

Introduction Kirsten Hastrup and Karen Fog OlwigPart I: Finding a key debate place for cultureCultural Sites: Sustaining a home in a deteritorialized world Karen Fog Olwig Imaginging a place in the Andes: In the borderland of lived, invented and analyzed cultures Karsten Paerregaard Which world? On diffusion of Algerian Rai to the West March Schade-Poulsen Seeking place: Capsized identities and contracted belonging among Sri lankan Tamil refugees Ann-Belinda Steen PreisPart II: The Culture and Politics of PlaceThe nation as a human being: A metaphor in a mid-life crisis? Notes on the imminent collapse of Norwegian national identity Thomas Hylland Eriksen Paradoxes of sovereignty and independence: 'real' and 'pseudo' nation-states and depoliticization of poverty James Ferguson The experience of displacement: reconstructing places and identities in Sri Lanka Brigitte Refslund Sorensen Localizing the American Dream: constructing Hawaiian homelands Ulla Hasager Picturing and placing Constable country Judith OkelyPart III: Topical Metaphors in Anthropological ThinkingSpeechless emissaries: refugees, humanitarianism and dehistoricization Liisa H. Malkki 'Roots' and 'Mosaic' in a Balkan border village: locating cultural production Jonathan Schwartz Simplifying Complexity: assimilating the global in a small paradise Jonathan Friedman There are no Indians in the Dominican Republic: the cultural construction of Dominican identities