29. The Ethnography of Borderlands
Convenors:
Michael Barrett and Beppe Karlsson, University
of Uppsala
Discussant:
Harri Englund,
University of Helsinki
harri.englund@helsinki.fi
This
panel will consider national borders in the literal (geopolitical) sense and in
terms of the cultural and social categorisations that adhere metaphorically to
these borders. This means, firstly, an exploration of borderlands as social,
political and economic spaces that receive their dynamics both from the reality
of the borders and from personal relationships transcending borders (involving
regional histories and cultures). Secondly, this entails scrutiny of the ways
that social categorizations (like ‘citizen’, ‘native’,
‘refugee’, ‘stranger’) are ascribed and embodied among
people inhabiting the social landscapes surrounding borders. In view of this,
we invite papers addressing one or more of three related fields of enquiry:
1. How the unity
of borderlands (seen as cultural and historical regions) poses a challenge to
state boundaries and to state-led strategies of categorization and control.
2. How the social
practice of migration (forced or otherwise) figures in the life histories of
people living in the borderlands.
3. How
borderlands, involving the interface between two or more marginalized spaces in
terms of state influence and state amenities, often are alive with practices
and aGhents of “shadow economies”. Especially in situations of
violent conflict, these transnational networks of politics and economy are part
of the mainstay of everyday life and it is important that they receive our
attention.
At the Margins:
Social Exclusion of the Manjo in Sheka Society, Southwest Ethiopia
Judith Bovensiepen, Ecole
Normale Supérieure, Paris and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris
The
Border from "above" and the Borders from "within": A Case
Study of Palestinian Refugees in Gaza
Gudrun Kroner,
Austrian Academy for Science
Schleswig
- an ethnographic region?
Martin
Klatt, University of Southern Denmark
Negotiating home
and identity across the border ”road” of the Aegean Se: lives of
elders who forcibly migrated to Chios, Greece in 1922
Athena McLean and Thea
McLean
Central Michigan
University, University of Chicago
“We
used to be so international”: everyday cross-border relations at the new
EU border facing Russia
Laura
Assmuth, University of Helsinki
Willem van
Schendel, University of Amsterdam
Buddhist marginal
cultures in the Thai-Malaysian Borderland
Alexander
Horstmann, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
Essen