This volume addresses the marked influence that African borders and boundaries, whether real or imaginary, have on the lives of those inhabiting the borderland. How do political and symbolic borders take concrete shape, and how do they bear on daily life? Conversely, how does life in the borderland shape the borders that characterize it? The book recognizes borderlands as shifting places, times, or domains where competing discourses and regimes of power overlap. Characterized by overt contradiction and paradox, they are often imagined at the outside. Yet, they pertain to and define the center. The collected case studies challenge the assumption that states and anonymized institutions are the principal actors in border-making. Instead, they argue for an actor-oriented perspective, while drawing attention to the "physicality" of the borderscape. (Series: African Studies / Afrikanische Studien - Vol. 40)

Introduction / Tobias Wendl & Michael R(c)œsler -- The internal African frontier : cultural conservatism and ethnic innovation / Igor Kopytoff -- Where is the border now? : the new politics of identity in South Africa / Carolyn Hamilton -- Island as borderland : such as R(c)ơgen and Usedom / Ina-Maria Greverus -- Power versus knowledge : smugglers and the state along Ghana's eastern frontier / Paul Nugent -- Shopping and sectarianism at the Irish border / Hastings Donnan -- Smuggling as a border way of life : a Mediterranean case / Henk Driessen -- Multiple legal construction of socio-economic spaces : resource management and conflict in the Central Moluccas / Franz von Benda-Beckman -- Limits on the access to land, cattle and women among some West African peoples / R(c)ơdiger Schott -- Boundaries between African customary law and the constitution in South Africa / Tom W. Bennett -- Frontier languages, language boundaries / Klaus Schubert -- Separation through unification : changing cultural models in a East German factory / Heike Wieschiolek -- Toward an anthropology of borderlands : the Mexican-US border and the crossing of the 21st century / Robert R. Alvarez.

The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both This book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop of many where Americans chased capitalist dreams beyond the United States. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how these frontier spaces could glitter with grandiose visions, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that indigenous people summoned when threatened. Linking together a series of stories about Boer exiles who settled in Mexico, a global network of protestant missionaries, and adventurers involved in the parallel displacements of indigenous peoples in Rhodesia and the Yaqui Indians in Mexico, Offenburger situates the borderlands of the Mexican North and the American Southwest within a global system, bound by common actors who interpreted their lives through a shared frontier ideology.

With comparative frontier history and pioneering use of indigenous sources, Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest. He focuses on the Tai domains of the Yunnan frontier on the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.

Explains the history of England's northern borderlands in the fifteenth century within a broader social, political and European context.

We are used to the idea that each state has clearly defined borders, which cleanly separate different nationalities from one another. What, though, were frontiers like before the evolution of the modern nation state? The nine essays in this book seek to answer this question across a thousand years of Eurasian history.

Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.