Frontier Effects and Tidemarks: A Commentary in the Anthropology of Borders

Abstract

Dealing with the issue of transformation at borders, this paper is aimed at a critical review of some contributions to the scholarly field known as the anthropology of borders. Taking a position against some of the assumptions this literature has developed, it claims that the border is not only enacted, but also an actant. It argues for conceiving the frontier as an activity and agentive capacity itself, beyond the state or an assumed centre to which it is usually referred as a margin. Consequently, unlike much of the body of work undertaken so far, the border is hereby considered beyond the territorial dimension and appears as a multiplicity of spaces imbued with subjectivity reflected in areas of crossing and dwelling, a space in its continuous becoming, a tidemark, to use the Green’s (2009) suggestion. The border is therefore much more than as a fixed geographical, marginal location, concentration of state institutions or site of culturally-patterned negotiations. The chapter argues that there are important contributions from anthropology that open borders to full spatio-temporal consideration and multiplication at different scales. The border, as my ethnographic vignettes show, is both a conscious and unconscious domain, both visible and invisible. The border, through its subjective productions of dwelling and crossing, is multi-form, representable and unrepresentable, known and unknown – a view that can stimulate further visions of spatiality and give way to more everyday subjective modes to relate to the edges of the state. Subjectivity and various spatial practices, representations of space and representational spaces involved in crossing and dwelling constitute traces of the continuous transformation of the border-object.