Borders are where wars start, as Primo Levi once wrote. But they are also bridges - that is, sites for ongoing cultural exchange. Anyone studying how nations and states maintain distinct identities while adapting to new ideas and experiences knows that borders provide particularly revealing windows for the analysis of 'self' and 'other'. In representing invisible demarcations between nations and peoples who may have much or very little in common, borders exert a powerful influence and define how people think as well as what they do. Without borders, whether physical or symbolic, nationalism could not exist, nor could borders exist without nationalism. Surprisingly, there have been very few systematic or concerted efforts to review the experiences of nation and state at the local level of borders. Drawing on examples from the US and Mexico, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Spain and Morocco, as well as various parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, this timely book offers a comparative perspective on culture at state boundaries. The authors examine the role of the state, ethnicity, transnationalism, border symbols, rituals and identity in an effort to understand how nationalism informs attitudes and behaviour at local, national and international levels. Soldiers, customs agents, smugglers, tourists, athletes, shoppers, and prostitutes all provide telling insights into the power relations of everyday life and what these relations say about borders. This overview of the importance of borders to the construction of identity and culture will be an essential text for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, nationalism and immigration studies.

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 of boundary politics, and the diverse forms that it may take. As a contribution to the wider theoretical debates about nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization, it will interest to students and scholars in anthropology, political science, international studies and modern history.

Originally published in 1994, this book considers one of the enduring themes of social science. How is a national identity forged and sustained? How does it change over time? Who is included in the body politic and who is socially excluded? How do the established population, opinion-makers and politicians react to more marginal people, including long-spurned minorities and recent migrants? This original analysis shows how the British as a people are constantly defined and redefined through their interactions with several ‘frontiers of identity’, namely Celts, expatriates, Americans, Europeans, citizens of the Commonwealth and more crucially with ‘aliens’. The alien-British relationship is particularly loaded with uneasiness, aversion and hostility. ‘Aliens’ a category created by what the author calls ‘the frontier guards’ of British identity, are frequently deported or detained. Their sanctuaries are invaded, their legal and humanitarian claims for asylum minutely examined and often denied. This searching exploration of these processes shows how the meaning of who one is depends crucially on who one rejects. Drawing on a wealth of historical scholarship, research compiled at the time of the original publication and contemporary social theory and now reissued with a new Preface this book exposes the unstated assumptions and hidden meanings in the relationship between the ‘British’ and ‘the others'. It uncovers how the British and their rulers seek to reshape their national identity in a difficult period of post-imperial adjustment, relative economic decline and the European integration of the 1990s. The book will be of use to students of sociology, politics, history and European studies.

This book explores how the diverse and fiercely independent peoples of Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one particular national community or another in the years leading up to the Mexican-American War. Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans made agonizing and crucial identity decisions against the backdrop of two structural transformations taking place in the region during the first half of the 19th century and often pulling in opposite directions.

In Learning at the Museum Frontiers, Viv Golding argues that the museum has the potential to function as a frontier – a zone where learning is created, new identities are forged and new connections made between disparate groups and their own histories. She draws on a range of theoretical perspectives including Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Foucauldian discourse on space and power, and postcolonial and Black feminist theory, as well as her own professional experience in museum education over a ten-year period, applying these ideas to a wide range of museum contexts. The book offers an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the debate on the value of museums and what they can contribute to society. The author reveals the radical potential for museums to tackle injustice and social exclusion, challenge racism, enhance knowledge and promote truth.

David Tobin analyses how Chinese nation-building shapes identity and security dynamics between Han and Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

A staple of postwar academic writing, “nationalism” is a contentious and often unanalyzed abstraction. It is generally treated as something “imagined,” “fashioned,” and “disseminated,”as an idea located in the mind, in printed matter, on maps, in symbols such as flags and anthems, and in collective memory. Between Frontiers restores the nation to the social field from which it hasbeen abstracted by looking at how the concept shapes the existenceof people in border zones, where they live between nations. Noboru Ishikawa grounds his discussion of border zones in materials gathered during two years of archival research and fieldwork relating to the boundary that separates Malaysian from Indonesian territory in western Borneo. His book considers how the state maintains its national space and how people strategically situate themselves by their community, nation, and ethnic group designated as national territory.Examining these issues in the context of concrete circumstances, where a village boundary coincides with a national border, allows him to delineate the dialectical relationship between nation-state and borderland society both as history and as process. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences will learn from this masterful linking of history and ethnography, and of macro and micro perspectives.