Borders and Boundaries and Barriers, Oh My!

Some borders, like the one between the United States and Mexico, are marked with barbed wire and armed guards. Others are simply marked with a sign next to the interstate, such as the one welcoming travelers to Indiana, "The Crossroads of America." These geographical borders are political creations meant to distinguish between distinct political entities. However clearly defined, borders fail to confine the influence of culture. North of the border between Mexico and the United States, street signs are in both English and Spanish; and on the south side of the border travelers can visit American restaurant chains such as Denny's. The Northern influence on the industrial economy of Louisville, situated on the border between Kentucky and Indiana, is omnipresent, yet residents in Southern Indiana speak with a Southern accent. Essentially, borders are at once decisive and elusive.

Historians, political scientists, and cultural and literary critics have recently begun examining this curious relationship between geographical borders and cultural boundaries. Rather than designating cultural limits, these studies have argued that geographical borders create a unique third country in between. Out of their interactions, residents of these borderlands create regions defined by their hybridity. There are two keys to these studies. First, they have focused the analytical lens on the fringes, testing the relationship between the center and periphery. In so doing, these studies have demonstrated that borderlands are complicated zones of cultural and physical confrontation and accommodation where interaction shapes policy.

Second, researchers distinguish between politically defined geographical borders and culturally defined boundaries. Borders are externally created physical divisions meant to divide a region. Cultural boundaries, on the other hand, are internally created distinctions aimed at erasing hybridity. Imagining this mathematically, boundaries mark the zero limit of culture. However, mathematical limits can only be approached, never reached. A line gets closer and closer to a limit, but theoretically never reaches the limit point. Thus, if boundaries mark the zero limit, then cultural influence grows weaker and weaker as it approaches its boundary but never reaches it. Residents, therefore, create distinctions where cultural influence is at its weakest point. The distinction is meant to curb this blurriness between cultural concepts in order to create stability. The relationship between externally created borders and internally created boundaries forms the fundamental dynamic of borderlands. Borders give new meaning to existing interactions by problematizing border crossing. In response, residents establish boundaries to solve the problem of border crossing, creating difference where similarity had previously ruled the day. Simply put, the liminality and hybridity of borderlands is a function of the border itself.

In the introduction to Conflict on the Michigan Frontier: Yankee and Borderland Cultures 1815-1840, James Schwartz promises to examine how Yankee settlers' attempts to create boundaries in Michigan yielded a new borderland culture that contained both Eastern Yankee and Western colonial elements. This promise places the work within the realm of borderland studies, as Schwartz states that he will examine the creation of both formal legal borders and informal cultural boundaries. Creating legal boundaries meant establishing "the rule of law, as well as a host of such lawmaking and law-enforcing bodies as courts, local government, and rudimentary police forces" (p. 4). Yankee settlers used informal cultural boundaries, on the other hand, to "win the hearts and minds of their fellow settlers" (p. 5). Reformers relied on schools, churches, and the press to establish boundaries between a wild frontier and a civilized new world. In juxtaposing these two types of boundaries and processes, Schwartz seeks to build "a bridge between the literature on state formation and the 'new western' history" (p. 7).

Ultimately, Schwartz' effort to distinguish between these two types of boundaries and his attempt to trace the processes that led to their creation are the greatest strengths of his work. Schwartz' ability to highlight boundary creation in the settlement process offers a fresh perspective on the Yankee settlement of Michigan. Rather than focusing on how thoroughly Yankee migrants...