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The territorial integrity of nations is often taken as the premise for a functioning, unifying national identity. Yet, the economic and technological developments of recent decades have made it necessary to question this assumption. It can no longer be taken for granted that the people who identify with a given nation inhabit the same space, nor can it be assumed that cultural homogenisation takes place at the level of the nation through mass media. When the Internet appeared, many social scientists and commentators predicted that it would threaten the cultural integrity of nations; that the non-territorial character of the Internet would lead to fragmentation and unprecedented cultural differentiation, making it difficult, eventually impossible, to uphold a collective sense of national identity based on shared images, representations, myths and so on. Although it is too early to draw any conclusions regarding the longterm effects of the Internet, experiences so far suggest that such predictions were mistaken. In fact, nations thrive in cyberspace, and the Internet has in the space of only a few years become a key technology for keeping nations (and other abstract communities) together. Nations which have lost their territory (such as Afrikanerled South Africa), nations which are for political reasons dispersed (such as Tamil Sri Lanka or Kurdistan), nations with large temporary overseas diasporas (such as Scandinavian countries, with their large communities in Spain during winter), or nations where many citizens work abroad temporarily or permanently (such as India or Caribbean island-states), appear in many sites on the Internet -from online newspapers and magazines to semi-official information sites and 'virtual community' homepages. In a 'global era' of movement and deterritorialisation, the Internet is used to strengthen, rather than weaken, national identities. Although many disagree with various elements of his theory, nobody contests Ernest Gellner's central place in the research on nationalism over the last few decades. His elegant theory, developed and refined over a period of several decades, from the early 1960s until his death in 1995, famously, and with a

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Man.Discarding simplistic conceptions of 'cultures' as bounded entities for research, recent social anthropological studies have descnbed ethnicity as those aspects of social relationships and processes in which cultural difference is communicated. This approach is endorsed here, but it is argued that it is also necessary to understand vanrations in the forms of cultural difference communicated through ethnicity. Thus, variations in the significance of cultural differences in otherwise comparable inter-ethnic situations must be understood comparatively. Drawing on the Wittgensteinian concept of language-games, the article demonstrates and discusses such vanations as they are expressed in different inter-ethnic contexts in Trinidad and Mauritius. It is argued that a concept of culture which fully acknowledges the contextual character of shared meaning in any society must be dual: culture is continuously created and re-created through intentional agency, but it is simultaneously a necessary condition for all agency to be meaningful.The objective of this article is to contribute to the development of analytical devices for dealing comparatively with cultural differences made relevant in systems of interaction. First, the strengths and limitations of a leading social anthropological perspective on ethnicity are considered. Thereafter, certain aspects of ethnicity in two so-called poly-ethnic societies, Trinidad and Mauritius, are described and contextualized analytically. Finally, a general classification of inter-ethnic contexts is suggested. The criterion suggested to distinguish contexts in this respect is the varying cultural significance of ethnicity. The proposed classification is not, however, incompatible with certain other attempts to compare ethnic phenomena.Although my point of departure is a concept of ethnicity which is relational and processual, that is what I call a formalist view, I nevertheless insist that an understanding of the scope of cultural differences must supplement an appreciation of the formal features of ethnicitywhether they are to be localized to the level of the social formation or to the level of interaction. In order to achieve this, I shall draw on Wittgenstein's (1983 [1953]) concept of language-games. An implication of the analysis of ethnicity, briefly discussed at the end of the article, is that a sensible concept of culture must depict culture both as an aspect of concrete, ongoing interaction and as the meaning-context for the very same interaction. Conceptualizing ethnicity: a critical reviewOne of our most wides...

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