This is a study of global interconnection, not only to the degree that the infrastructure and cultural flows of globalisation enable the kinds of imaginings and interactions I explore in the pages that follow, but equally in subjective perceptions of being connected to others, both far back in time and widely around the globe.

While imagination is a faculty of the individual, imaginaries - "shared, socially transmitted representational assemblages" of people, places, and events - are a collective resource, the sum total of available imagery and ideas circulating in media, advertising, literature, word of mouth, and the like.

In many cultural contexts, shared emotion is a potent medium through which people come to feel connected and, over time, to see one another as kin.

Both commensality, the act of eating together, and the sharing of food are powerful means by which human beings create, express, and solidify feelings of mutual trust, intimacy, and kinship.

What is empathy, after all, if not an act of concentrated emotional engagement? And is that emotional engagement, however briefly expressed, not a potential step toward a lasting bond?

From an anthropological perspective, identities are neither fixed nor inherent, but are created and reproduced continuously through social practice and in interaction with others.

Relatedness - whether imagined or lived out face-to-face - is a social fact, and it is not limited to "kinship" as mapped in the traditional genealogical chart. It is precisely the term's flexibility that makes it so analytically useful.

Belonging, after all, is a particular kind of relation, one that arises amidst subjective experiences of mutual connection.