Ethnologia Europaea

The introductory essay suggests that for too long theories of nationalism and the state have taken a top-down approach which denies agency to local actors. One way to redress this bias is to study state borders, for here it is possible to generate insights into how people who are apparently at the periphery of the state may actively influence its policy and direction. The essay reviews existing border studies in different disciplinary fields and, to contextualise the papers that follow, argues that an anthropological approach in particular can shed much light in the cultures of the borderland, as well as on the formation and management of identities there. Special attention is paid to Europe, both to the way in which border studies as a field of intellectual inquiry were implicated in national policy in mid-twentieth century Germany, and to how our contributors suggest borderland cultures have negotiated the changes brought about by the European Union.

The paper shows the Finnish-Russian border changing from a political periphery into a focus for international ecopolitics, because of how landscapes either side have been treated under different geopolitically informed regimes of government. On the Finnish side landscape was transformed into industrially managed forests, whereas the Russian border zone was left largely unmanaged. Historical social links across the border were reactivated after the end of the Cold War, and young Finnish forests activists in particular have created social links here. Their activities challenge accepted ideas of sovereign territory and beg revisions of the analytical tools for addressing processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization such as those at play in ecopolitics.

ln what could be considered a paradox in the present globalisation era, political borders, frontiers and boundaries in general, have become more than ever a point of interest and research focus of an increasing number of scholars, as the extensive and burgeoning literature on the topic highlights (Alvarez 1995, Donnan and Wilson 1999, Pujadas 1999). Now that national structures seem to be overwhelmed by the enforcement and consolidation of all kind of supranational structure and organisations, economic and political among others, talking about borders as sovereignty limits would not seem to make much sense. However, states are not as eager to relinquish their grip on territory and control on its borders as could be expected. This article aims to point out how borders can be considered significant places in the political arena, stages at which divergent representations of sovereignty and territoriality are performed.

While it has long been recognised that borders are prime sites for the defining and redefining of nations and states, it is only comparatively recently that it has been thought worthwhile to examine closely the social reality of those actually living on international borders. This paper looks at some of the oral history –‘the stories they tell about themselves’ – of the inhabitants of a part of the Portuguese-Spanish border; specifically an area of the frontier between the Portuguese region of Trásos-Montes and the Spanish region of Galicia. Tales of bandits, of smugglers, of the Spanish Republican maquis and of the police of both sides reveal the often surprising fluidity of who is 'us' and who is 'them', as well as perhaps helping us to understand just how much the new 'Europe without Frontiers' is rhetoric and how much is – or might become – reality.

This article explains the relatively neglected topic of how borders influence the habitus and body styles of border populations. It extends notions of habitus and performativity to the field of national identification. Using data from the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar, it examines two contexts in which the dominant body styles of men and women shaped as forms of resistance to political harassment enacted by the neighboring country, Spain, at the colonies border: smuggling and beauty contests.Smuggling is both economically lucrative and part of the Gibraltarians’ struggle for political recognition and self-determination. The image of ‘the smuggler' and his or her behaviour have become emblematic of this conflict. Related to the question of sovereignty and the border is the exclusion of Gibraltar from participation in many international events such as the Olympics and the Eurovision Song Contest. The only such event in which Gibraltar participates on an equal footing with other nations is the Miss World Contest, the preparatory heats for which have become major occasions in the Gibraltarian calendar, spawning a mass of local beauty contests. These examples illustrate not only how borders create and maintain national differences and distinctions, but also how such differences can come to be inscribed on the bodies of those who live at borders.

The Caribbean island St Martin, with a land area of about 90 km, is divided by an international border.' The northern part forms an integral part of the French Republic, the southern area belongs to the Netherlands Antilles, an autonomous constituent of the Dutch Kingdom. Despite the partition which exists already for 350 years, Martiners conceive themselves as one people. A people which shares a language (English), a national anthem, and many interests. In my paper I will describe St Martin as a special borderland case. Special because in this small demarcated space, centre and periphery overlap. The whole of St Martin may be conceived as a borderland. On the other hand, St Martin does not stand on its own, each of the two sections of the island forms part of a larger country. In this respect St Martin is like other borderlands, which are the peripheries of larger entities. I will indicate what makes St Martin a unity, and I will indicate that differences between the French and the Dutch part. It will become clear that the impact of the attachment to the centres, the two European states, forms a threat to the unity of the island. This impact increased concomitantly with the move towards unification in Europe. Luckily there are countervailing forces of which the awareness of the local population forms one of the elements.

Practices of movement between Morocco and Spain have for centuries been a common economic, social and political livelihood strategy for thousands of individuals and families inhabiting the border area of Tetmin/Yebala, Morocco. However, only few studies have approached the border as object for anthropological inquiry. This essay analyses the Spanish-Moroccan border from the perspective of three male crossers, as well as from the perspective of Spanish and Moroccan ethno-landscaping in Tetuan. I argue that the common Tetuani ambivalence towards Spain as well as towards the Spanish Protectorate era must be understood within the wider context of the impress of the Moroccan stale on Northern Moroccan identities.

The post 1948 history of the Kirad Bedouins of the Hula valley in Northern Israel is a series of mass border-crossings between Israel, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. These migrations came concurrently with a staggered process of dispossession, in which the Kirad lost ownership of their ancestral lands, and ended up as diaspora scattered over four states. The upheavals experienced by the Kirad are historicized and analyzed as a ‘small scale diasporic situation’. This, I argue, is an exceedingly widespread situation in a world characterized as ‘glocalized’, in which powerful globalizing trends combine with ethno-national fervor that accentuates territoriality and state borders. The Kirad’s own perception of their world, fragmented and disturbed beyond recognition by impermeable and often hostile state borders since 1948, is contextualized in terms of the analogy between the recent, vivid past, and ancient history, only vaguely remembered and invoked. Wolfe’s (1982) notion that world systems are by no means new phenomena, the place of diachronic reckoning and subjective historical perceptions, and the place of fate and repetition in the Kirad’s identity inform the theoretical trajectory of the analysis.

The paper argues that the emotional aspects of identity construction at international borders, and the ways in which different feelings and sentiments affect border people’s perceptions and actions, have in the main remained an underexplored field of research. The analyses focus on the Bohemian-Bavarian frontier zone, and shows that the inhabitants’ perceptions of those on the other side have been strongly affected by memories of the horrors of the Second World War and the post-war Sudeten German expulsion. Emotional displays and discourses of emotions have been actively used in the negation of social reality in the first post-Cold War decade. Introducing an analytical distinction between ‘evoked’, ‘remembered’, and ‘re-experienced’ emotions, the paper outlines how emotionally complex memories can become a political force, weakening or strengthening both national and transnational identities.