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• The recognition that people are increasingly "moving targets" of anthropological inquiry

  • Anthropologists are now focusing on boundaries and borderlands

  • Boundaries and their transgression reflect a concern with the "cultural displacement" of people, things, and cultural products

• The metaphorical concept of having roots involves intimate linkages between people and place

  • Anthropology recognizes the importance of these linkages and explores them

• Examining the place of refugees in the national order of things is a clarifying exercise

  • Understanding the circumstances of refugees illuminates the complexity of how people construct, remember, and lay claim to particular places

  • Examining how refugees become an object of knowledge and management reveals the unique nature of their displacement

• The study of refugees is informative in understanding the socio-political construction of space and place

• This essay explores taken-for-granted ways of thinking about identity and territory and their consequences for refugees

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• Exile and territorial displacement are not exclusively "postmodern" phenomena

• People have always moved, whether through desire or violence

• The study of nations, nationalism, and refugees can benefit from deeply territorializing concepts of identity

• The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to the analytic consequences of such concepts for those classified as "displaced"