  String theory leads to a flavor scheme where modular symmetries play a
crucial role. Together with the traditional flavor symmetries they combine to
an eclectic flavor group, which we determine via outer automorphisms of the
Narain space group. Unbroken flavor symmetries are subgroups of this eclectic
group and their size depends on the location in moduli space. This mechanism of
local flavor unification allows a different flavor structure for different
sectors of the theory (such as quarks and leptons) and also explains the
spontaneous breakdown of flavor- and CP-symmetries (via a motion in moduli
space). We derive the modular groups, including CP and R-symmetries, for
different sub-sectors of six-dimensional string compactifications and determine
the general properties of the allowed flavor groups from this top-down
perspective. It leads to a very predictive flavor scheme that should be
confronted with the variety of existing bottom-up constructions of flavor
symmetry in order to clarify which of them could have a consistent top-down
completion.
