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territory of its own, than it does to the communal assertion of a localized Hmong identity which nevertheless crosscuts national borders.30 We are witnessing the formation and crystallisation of an almost Herderian national consciousness, on a global scale, out of an ethnic consciousness, which was more closely tied to local (yet still importantly non-national, trans-national) roots. And yet it is the very displacement from those local roots which has given rise to this sense of a global, national identity and consciousness, and that national consciousness is importantly directed towards a rediscovery and resuscitation of what it imagines to be those local roots. It is therefore a veritable 'phenomenology of locality' (Lovell 1998), which we need in order to understand these processes.31
This is the idealistic view, which I tend to espouse; but there is also clearly a more cynical one, which I will put to you since the question is so often with us; in the form of Reader's Digest articles or whatever.32 It may be that these kinds of communication in cyberspace, through electronic mail and on-line chat, video conferencing and computer role games, these virtual encounters, actually prevent real relations and contacts taking place, and act as a kind of surrogate for them. We hear this sort of argument in mass media discussions about teen (and pre-teen) email and chat shows, and again, social science cannot provide us with any easy, ready-made answers. We have all heard of Internet ‘romances' where virtual communications led to real weddings, and we have heard of some of the tragedies too! Are these touristy visits, these Hmong chat-rooms, surrogates for something 'real' which could be happening, an unreal attempt to assert a sense of global unity among a community which is actually fractured and divided? Sydney Cheung (1998) deals similarly with some of the problems of distinguishing 'virtual' from 'real' communities in this respect, drawing attention to the emergence of a real-life 'Chinese Tea Association' from a Japanese cyber-group of Hong Kong devotees, while Lozada (1998) argues strongly for the ‘Hakka Global Network' as a real community.33
The question is actually ultimately one very similar to an age-old problem posed in classic aesthetics and theories of ideology; to what extent can art (and cultural production in general) fulfil a useful social function, opening new potential vistas for the future; to what extent does it provide a panacea, an unreal and distancing, or mystifying, substitute for 'real' experiences? It is easy to see that there can be no overall