Borderlands

Borderlands are often seen as zones of instability, uncertainty, marginality, and danger. Yet, they increasingly attract the attention of ethnographers as a unique lens through which to view the intersections of the national, transnational, and global forces that shape the securities and insecurities of our globalizing age. The contributors to this volume examine how different kinds of (in)security manifest and interconnect at state borders, encompassing the personal and the political, the social and the economic, in ways that reinforce or undermine the identities of those whose lives these borders frame. Drawing upon case studies from the Southern Cone, the U.S.-Mexico border, and borders in Greece, Ireland, and southeast Asia, the authors show that borders raise questions of security not just for those who live and cross them, including ethnographers, but also for the sustainability of the physical environments and wildlife disturbed by the passage, movement, and containment borders generate.

Hastings Donnan is professor of social anthropology at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Thomas M. Wilson is professor and chair of anthropology at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Together, they have authored or edited many books and journals on borders, including Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers (UPA 1994), Border Identities: Nation and State as International Frontiers (Cambridge University Press 1998), Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation, and State (Berg 1999, 2001), European States at Their Borderlands (Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 2003), and Culture and Power at the Edges of the State: National Support and Subversion in European Borderlands (Lit Verlag 2005). Contributors include: Matthew Amster (Gettysburg College), Josiah Heyman (University of Texas at El Paso), Hilary Cunningham (University of Toronto), Carmen Ferradás (Binghamton University), Mélissa Gauthier (Binghamton University), Ioannis Manos (University of Western Macedonia).

Borderlands are often seen as zones of instability, uncertainty, marginality, and danger. Yet, they increasingly attract the attention of ethnographers as a unique lens through which to view the intersections of the national, transnational, and global forces that shape the securities and insecurities of our globalizing age. The contributors to this volume examine how different kinds of (in)security manifest and interconnect at state borders, encompassing the personal and the political, the social and the economic, in ways that reinforce or undermine the identities of those whose lives these borders frame. Drawing upon case studies from the Southern Cone, the U.S.-Mexico border, and borders in Greece, Ireland, and southeast Asia, the authors show that borders raise questions of security not just for those who live and cross them, including ethnographers, but also for the sustainability of the physical environments and wildlife disturbed by the passage, movement, and containment borders generate.

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