Border Identities Nation and State at International Frontiers

This book offers fresh insights into the complex and various ways in which international frontiers influence cultural identities. The ten anthropological case studies collected here describe specific international borders in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, and bring out the importance of boundary politics, and the diverse forms that it may take. The frontier itself may be of great symbolic importance; in other cases the symbolism lies rather in the disappearance of the traditional border. A frontier may be above all a barrier against immigration, or the front line between hostile armies. It may reinforce distinctive identities on each side of it, or the frontier may be disputed because it cuts across national identities. Drawing on anthropological perspectives, the book explores how cultural landscapes intersect with political boundaries, and ways in which state power informs cultural identity.

1. Nation, state and identity at international borders; 2. State formation and national identity in the Catalan borderland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; 3. A western perspective on an eastern intepretation of where north meets south: Pyrenean borderland cultures; 4. The 'new immigration' and the transformation of the European/Africa frontier; 5. Transnationalism in California and Mexico at the end of empire; 6. National identity on the frontier: Palestinians in the Israeli educational system; 7. 'Grenzregime': the Wall and its aftermath; 8. Transcending the state? Gender and borderline constructions of citizenship in Zimbabwe; 9. Borders, boundaries, tradition and state on the Malaysian periphery; 10. Markets, morality and modernity in north-east Turkey; 11. Imagining 'the south': hybridity, heterotropies and Arabesk on the Turkish Syrian border.

This book offers fresh insights into the complex and various ways in which international frontiers influence cultural identities. Ten anthropological case studies describe specific international borders in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, and bring out the importance, and diverse forms, of boundary politics.