Flows and spaces. Anthropological view on identities in a global world

Kuligowski, Waldemar

doi:0137-4079

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Title: Flows and spaces. Anthropological view on identities in a global world

Abstract:

Since the 1990's cultural anthropology and different disciplines of the social sciences have witnessed an increasing number of studies and discussions on the Internet. The Internet and cyberspace raise new questions for anthropology because they transcend the boundaries of the nation-state and offer new ways of creating identities — ethnic, cultural, social, gender identities — and new spaces for self-representation. In this paper, I discuss a few contradictions in the relationship between tradition, identity and new media. An excellent example illustrating the specific nature of these contradictions concerns the marriage rules practiced by the Roma in modern Romania and Poland. I also analyze the Internet's potential for supporting contemporary ethnic identities (Kurds, Gottschee from Slovenia, Uyghurs, Aromanians). In the case of diasporic communities, cyberspace allows them, on the one hand, to transcend their isolation, their nostalgia, their displacement and their pain of dislocation and on the other, to mobilise and form themselves culturally and politically as they re-construct their space, place, and sense of home. This is facilitated through, among others, the articulation, re-telling and (re)construction of shared pasts, histories, stories and memories

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