Global Yokels: Indochinese Cosmopolitanisms in Western Sydney
Ashley Carruthers, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University
This paper grounds the concept of global yokelism in an ethnography conducted in Western Sydney with Lao and Cambodian Australians. The research focuses on the axes of intercommunal and transnational engagement among the communities under study. The ethnography attempts to assess the extent to which the communities engage with each other across cultural, communal and historical boundaries. It asks also how contemporary Indochinese border dynamics inform these interactions. The intercommunal and transnational engagements of Indochinese and other migrant subjects in Western Sydney place them in a complex and arguably new relation to the Australian nation and its policies and practices around governing cultural difference. They have histories and identities grounded in tiny local spaces within the city and nation, and yet construct and engage with huge symbolic and social formations beyond the nation’s borders.
