At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.

Jaro Stacul was awarded his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He has been a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Wales, Swansea, and currently lectures at Roehampton University, London. Berghahn Books also published his The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley (2003).

Christina Moutsou received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and has been working on Greek-Turkish relations, cosmopolitanism and the European Union. She is Research Associate at the University of Cambridge and a fully qualified psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Currently she is working on the links between anthropology and psychotherapy.

Helen Kopnina was awarded her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Currently she lectures at the Vrije Universiteit and the Fashion Institute, Hoogeschool, both in Amsterdam. Her postdoctoral research examines small businesses in Singapore and Malaysia. Her publications include the book East to West Migration (Ashgate 2005).

Regionalism is one of the most debated issues in contemporary western Europe. Yet why the region, rather than the nation state, can have such a strong appeal for the construction of social and political identity remains largely unexplored. Drawing on data collected in the mountainous Trentino region of northern Italy, the author investigates how ideas about village boundaries and private property form the background against which regionalist ideologies are understood. In suggesting that ideas about regionalism largely reflect views about private property, he provides an alternative to theories of nationalism that overlook the articulation between official ideologies and discourses at the local level.

At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.

Regionalism is one of the most debated issues in contemporary Western Europe, yet why the region, instead of the nation-state, is appealed to in certain areas as a compelling formulation of selfhood remains largely unexplored. Drawing on ethnographic information collected in an Alpine valley in Trentino (northern Italy) in the 1990s, The Bounded Field explores issues of national, regional and local identity, and particularly the impact of the advent of regionalist political movements which stress northern Italy's partaking of a 'European culture'. It looks at the ways the ideologies of these movements are accommodated to local-level discourses, and particularly at how a post-peasant society interprets political symbols and other ideological messages emanating from regional, national and other centres. It focuses on how the imagery of the 'bounded field' is used by the inhabitants of an Alpine valley to describe their community in relation to a nation-state perceived as intrusive. identity in Europe, which look at local identity either as an 'invention' of political leaders, or as a concept that is constructed locally independently of outside forces. By examining how local identity is articulated on these different levels, The Bounded Field points to the dialectical process between 'above' and 'below' that accounts for the appeal of specific constructions of local identity. This dialectical process is examined by focusing on how elements of personal experience, ideas about gender, views about landscape, and particularly ideas about private property and community boundaries (expressed by the imagery of the 'bounded field') may form the background against which political issues are debated and understood. In examining this articulation, the book moves beyond a vision of politics as over and above social relations, and provides an alternative to theories of nationalism which take little account of the articulation between nationalist/regionalist ideologies and local-level discourses.