Despite the range of challenges in discussing race in online forums, for young people, participating in dedicated social networking sites is especially important because they can be useful vehicles for strengthening their cultural identities, for teaching them how to navigate both public and private dimensions of their racial lives, and for providing them access to a more globalized yet unfixed conversation about their community histories.

Talking Race and Cyberspace Interview with Lisa Nakamura By Geert Lovink

The theory of ethnic relations has developed ad hoc on an interdisciplinary basis. It has dealt with ethnicity in small communities, larger ethnic groups or "ethnies", ethnic nations, modernising nation states, subordinate nationalisms, the establishment of empires, post- imperial situations, transnational migrant communities and the political problems facing modernising nation states in dealing both with subordinate nationalisms and with migrant ethnic minorities.

That portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web has been riding an exponential growth curve since 1994 (Network Wizards 1998; Rutkowski 1998), coinciding with the introduction of NCSA’s graphically-based software interface Mosaic for “browsing” the World Wide Web (Hoffman, Novak, and Chatterjee 1995).

It is arguable that the "gloom and doom" phase, particularly in North American Anthropology, could not have come at a more inopportune time.  The motivation in making this observation stems from the transformation of the realities that ethnographers research into more complex subjects, requiring new methods, broadened analytical frames, and taking us into new fora of communication and cultural and interpersonal interaction.  Ethnography has become more challenging and promises richer insights than ever before as a result of phenomena such as community building in cyberspace and the transnationalization of putatively local, Indigenous communities and issues.  In this paper I examine these subjects through reflections on my twenty-one months of field research among the Caribs of Trinidad (still underway), by moving back and forth between the description of a reconstructed indigenous ritual, and the field methods that are used in gathering the data necessary for the description.  In this ritual I see a renegotiation of symbolic capital that spans local, national, regional and global levels.

There’s a story behind this essay. David Silver, who runs the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, requested that I review Nakamura’s book for RCCS. I’d reviewed a couple of books for Silver before, and we were on friendly terms. I agreed, but the review was more negative than he expected. He at first agreed to publish it with a couple of revisions. I made them and resubmitted. Then Silver reversed himself at the last minute. I finally withdrew the essay when he requested yet another revision, with very fuzzy parameters, and no assurance that it would be accepted even then. He doubtless has his own explanation for the rejection, but I think it was a failure of nerve—this is sure to be a controversial piece and not everybody likes to take heat.