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quite the reverse. Richard Coyne (1999) has recently pointed to the romantic stream in digital narratives, which implicates them in notions of utopia through the discourse of the 'global village and the electronic cottage', the return to a tribal stage of freedom and a Golden Age equality, the ideal of preindustrial arts and crafts. It may well be, as Coyne argues, that such 'digital narratives', whether romantic or rationalist, necessarily provide spaces of interpretation rather than referring to contextual realities beyond language.
Perhaps as part of a general tendency in anthropology away from getting dirty hands by doing fieldwork in local sites, my more recent research has tended towards a great interest in the power of the Internet, and its World Wide Web, to forge new ties of community between Hmong in France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, French Guyana, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and China (Tapp 1999). Of course the Hmong voices represented on the Internet are the voices of those most in the position of being able to represent themselves in this way; that is, the most educated, most literate, and those with computer access. Yet these representations of themselves, both those aimed purely at other Hmong and those aimed at others, are of considerable interest for the way they so often speak directly of the losses and separations suffered by the Hmong community as a whole, and the need to reunite and re-bond, the memories of particular households and the life in Laos or Thailand, or an ancestral home in China. Evans (1998) also draws attention to the power of these nationalist images of homeland among groups of overseas Hmong refugees from Laos.29 These are moving, and deeply felt, images, and they are not necessarily emanating from those Hmong with a particular political agenda, or even from those Hmong who individually left Laos themselves, but often from members of the younger generations, college students who cannot themselves recollect such pasts or places.
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Coupled with the facts of overseas Hmong tourism to South East Asia and China, return family visits and the emergence of small-scale transnational businesses, we must I think see these Internet representations, these uses of the Internet together with other forms of telecommunication, as directly contributing to the formation of a new kind of Hmong identity and Hmong community, on a global scale, the kind of identity which more nearly approximates our understanding of a nationality or national group, perforce without a state or sovereign