Translocal Ethnography: Commuting Between Macrocosm and Microcosm
Rohit Wanchoo
COSMOPOLITAN CONNECTIONS: THE SINDHI DIASPORA, 1860-2000 by Mark-Anthony Falzon Oxford University Press, 2007, 289 pp., 650
February 2007, volume 31, No 2

Mark-Anthony Falzon’s book on the Sindhi diaspora is an ambitious project from the standpoint of a social anthropologist. It is based on fieldwork in three places, London, Malta and Bombay. The book explores and helps to define the field of translocal ethnography. After mapping the terrain and exploring the interaction between ethnicity and caste on the one hand, and business and entrepreneurship on the other, the author offers what he calls an ‘integrative model of commerce and diaspora’ at the end of the book. Falzon argues that his work “is in many ways an anthropology of the global, yet it is on the terminology of the local that it relies for its descriptions” (p 268).

Continue reading this review