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Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. “Beyond Culture: Space , Identity and the Politics of Difference,” in Cultural Anthropology 7, No. 1 (1992): 6-23.
 

Gupta and Ferguson’s essay introduces five thematic ethnographic articles in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 7:1; those themes being focused on the issues of space and place, including location, displacement, community and identity.  Gupta and Ferguson first describe how that the examination of these issues arose from the “renewed interest in theorizing space in postmodernist and feminist theory” [6]. This renewed interest, in examining the notions of surveillance, panopticism, simulacra, deterritorialization, postmodern hyperspace, borderlands and marginalism, has furthermore, forced anthropologists to re-evaluate the concept of cultural difference, if, indeed, it is based upon space.  The authors challenge the notion that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society, that is, the notion of cultures being “discrete, object-like phenomena occupying discrete space” [7].  They instead promote the study of cultural difference through connection, for several reasons.  Senses of locality and community have become obsolete to many (particularly to immigrants and displaced peoples) and are not “identifiable as spots on the map” [10].  Cultural space, instead, exists for the aforementioned peoples as imaginary spaces.  Gupta and Ferguson reveal this and relay methods for investigating such.  Through the article, the authors implore anthropologists to move away from locating the explicit differences of cultures and looking at cultures as isolated entities.  As a result, the authors ask anthropologists to move towards finding the “connection and contiguity” [18] of different cultures. [J. Hembree]