Frontiers and Borderlands: Anthropological Perspectives

Studies of frontiers and borderlands become crucial to understanding the predicament of humankind as we enter the 21st century. Borders do not only divide. They also connect and serve as interfaces of multicultural contact. They provide insights into our post-modern world in which globalization, diversity, border crossing and conditions of in-betweenness shape our experience. Old borders are contested and eradicated, and new ones - often forcibly - appear. This book questions what is at stake in contemporary invocations of real and figurative borders. Case studies from Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia look at frontiers and borders as distinct culture types and explore the meanings of boundaries within ethnic, economic, legal, cognitive, and linguistic arenas. Border discourses and the practices of border crossing are taken into account, as are the ways in which they are inscribed into cultural imagination and memory.