Afterword: 'ethnicity' and anthropology

Today many nations, once believed to be completely consolidated, are challenged by “sub”-nationalisms and separatist movements within and across their borders. The essays in this volume occupy a space opened up by the increasing intensity of this ethno-nationalism, directing our attention to the insurrections and rebellions of, amongst others, the Shan, Karen, Hmong, and Wa. The authors represented here also draw on recent theoretical developments, developments which suggest that it is no longer possible to regard “ethnicity” as unproblematic, that to do so is to ignore a process of cultural construction that is integral to the working out of relations between ethnic minorities and the nation-states within which they are encompassed. While these analytical profiles do not present any unified problematic they are all concerned with the dynamics of change, pointing, I will argue, to the possibility of a suspension of belief in fixed identities of either the cultural or the political kind.