Borderlands: Ethnographic Approaches to Security, Power, and Identity

by Hastings Donnan (Editor), Thomas M. Wilson (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761851233
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	04/16/2010
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.13(h) x 0.46(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v

Contributors vii

Chapter 1 Ethnography, security and the 'frontier effect' in borderlands Hastings Donnan Thomas M. Wilson 1

Chapter 2 US-Mexico border cultures and the challenge of asymmetrical interpenetration Josiah McC. Heyman 21

Chapter 3 Security and ethnography on the Triple Frontier of the Southern Cone Carmen Alicia Ferradás 35

Chapter 4 Researching the border's economic underworld: The 'fayuca hormiga' in the US-Mexico borderlands Melissa Gauthier 53

Chapter 5 Symbols of security and contest along the Irish border Hastings Donnan Thomas M. Wilson 73

Chapter 6 Borderland tactics: Cross-border marriage in the highlands of Borneo Matthew H. Amster 93

Chapter 7 Fieldwork on the border: Ethnographic engagements in south-eastern Europe Ioannis Manos 109

Chapter 8 Gating ecology in a gated globe: Environmental aspects of 'securing our borders' Hilary Cunningham 125

Index 143