Intimate Engagements of the Public Kind

Abstract

Cultural intimacy, both the book and the concept, privileges the nation-state as the site of doing and writing ethnography and understanding sociality in a world customarily designated "globalizing." Not only have we placed our lives and sociality increasingly outside the privacy of our homes and offices; importantly, intimacies are experienced in virtual worlds where privacy proper as well as conventional idioms of ethnographic practice are no longer operational. This paper deploys public intimacy as the opposite, not as a kind, of cultural intimacy in a way to explore and elucidate new formations of intimacy in a world saturated with globalizing economies of circulation, imitation, and sociability.