Homeland vs Ethnoscape. The Symbolic Emplacement of Cultural Identity in a Cosmopolitan Order

摘要

Ethnoscape, a term coined by Arjun Appadurai, a term that belongs to the anthropology of globalization, represents an equivocal concept for the common sense. It can mean the symbolic place for the emplacement of the ethno-cultural identity, an identitary landscape of the ethnic community, but can also mean the arrangement of transnational elements into a configuration comparable to a landscape. On the one hand, it evokes the homeland, which ethnic communities traditionally try to identify themselves; on the other, it doesn't describe a place, an emplacement and a delimitation of the inherited collective identity, but a place of transit, a non-place, following the words of the anthropologist Marc Auge. I intend to scrutinize some transformations of the postmodern social imaginary: to what extent the nowadays multicultural, dynamic and complex societies are seen as places, how they still nostalgically dream to the homogeneity and the cohesion of the traditional Gemeinschaft, why homelands as imagined communities are still alive in the collective mind and how they resist to the setting up of an individualistic and cosmopolitan order