In Search of Boundaries

In this age of global communication, local identities and nation-states reassert themselves when cultural boundaries are dissolved and reconstructed. This collection of essays by noted scholars in many fields provides a wide range of theoretical approaches and empirical studies that, together, shed light on how local cultural identities resist the forces of globalization by virtue of tradition, transculturation, domestication and hybridization. Examining how people make sense of the world and their own identities as cultural and national boundaries are crossed, In Search of Boundaries transcends many traditional dichotomies between East and West and, more importantly, between tradition and modernity.

Interest in the study of boundaries has grown in sociology, anthropology, geography, and other social sciences, but it has not focused on communication processes. This book fills that void with a series of wide-ranging approaches, from the critical to the liberal, the empirical to the cultural, and the Occidental to the Oriental, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the increasingly global nature of nationality, culture, and identity.