VANISHING BORDERS AND THE RISE OF CULTURE(S)
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The article analyses some emerging new functions of “local cultures” and new meanings of socalled “national cultures” in contemporary public discourses. In recent years, we have witnessed the disappearance of old certainties, as the previously-fixed boundaries defining nations and states have become more ambiguous; meanwhile, new cultural frontiers have been erected around other territorial spaces. The argument advanced in this paper mainly in relation to spatiality and local cultures could be extended to values, morals, religion, etc. This is not the return of romantic nineteenth-century ideas; rather, it is suggested here that this phenomenon draws upon the work of folklorists and ethnologists, whose descriptions and mapping of folk cultures is taken as scientific evidence of distinctive local and regional differences.