Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (review)

According to the introduction, this book draws on anthropological perspectives to offer insights into the complex and various ways in which international frontiers influence cultural identities. The eleven chapters are entirely distinctive and make their arguments clearly, with little concession to the recent deconstruction of anthropological discourse. In the first chapter, the editors emphasize the permeability of frontiers, and the “imprecise fit between nations and states,” and most of the ensuing chapters take up this theme in one way or another (10).

The chapter by Peter Sahlins is of particular interest, clearly demonstrating that in the Catalan borderlands, new nationalities did not displace old allegiances. Sahlins’ methods are those of the historian, as indeed are those of William Douglass, who interestingly contrasts developments in the eastern and western Pyrenees. Hank Driessen uses both historical and less formal sources in his analysis of how successive Spanish governments “denied and repressed ethnic pluralism,” thus contained with difficulty within formal political boundaries (111).

In dealing with “transnationalism in California and Mexico,” Michael Kearney has recourse to notions of “Self and Other,” fruitfully applied here to such problems as the emergence of a distinct Chicano identity within an unwelcoming political unit. The chapter by Dan Rabinovitz deals with the contemporary problem of national identity on the frontier, as it concerns Palestinians in the Israeli system. His argument largely relies, by necessity, on interviews and field investigations. John Borneman’s “Grenzregime” (borders regime—the Wall and its aftermath) carries this tendency further, using his “relationship” with “Heidi” to commentate “the Wall and its aftermath,” while “keeping method and theory sensitive to the historical exactness and density of human life” (189).

The final four chapters enter regions less familiar to most Western readers. A. P. Cheater uses recent material in an attempt to analyse the allegiances of Zimbabwe’s female cross-border traders. Janet Carsten emphasizes the permeability of borders in present and historical Malaysia, drawing, to a great extent, upon fieldwork. Chris Hann and Ildiko Beller-Hann also rely upon personal experiences to assess the way in which “the Other” comes to be defined in northeast Turkey, and finally Martin Stokes studies Turkey’s frontier with Syria, trying to assess the relationship between the Turkish state and the phenomenon known as “Arabesk” popular culture and music. These final chapters are less grounded in traditional sources than some of the early ones, but they all offer different approaches to a problem both historical and current.