Social Anthropology

Based on analysis of a bordering encounter that took place in the offices of the Latvian State Border Guard, I trace how bordering produces connections at the same time as it effects separations. Despite being separated by state‐based lines of power, participants of the bordering encounter – all former Soviet citizens – recognised each other as ‘normal people’ striving to obtain a ‘normal life’. This connection was enabled by historically formed understanding of shared conditions of life and critical awareness of global power hierarchies. The sociality formed during the bordering encounter invites a rethinking of how distribution of life is negotiated through bordering, and how politics is imagined in relation to borders.

Iceland's increased involvement in global economic markets in the early 2000s came to a sudden halt in autumn 2008 when Iceland became at the time the worst case of the global financial crisis. The discussion focuses on anxieties in relation to the aftermath and how they reflect internal Icelandic discussions that are entangled with Iceland's past as a Danish dependency. The closing of McDonald's restaurants in a year after the crash is a vivid example of anxieties in regard to Iceland's global circumstances, simultaneously reflecting persistent geopolitical order of an unequal world.

This article concerns post‐conflict interventions as technologies of future making, and their intersection with children as temporalised figures. Global concepts of childhood undergird a discourse of ‘lost childhoods’ as endangering both children and liberal time itself. After Sierra Leone's civil war, child protection agencies and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to restore children ‘out of sequence’ to a presumed childhood origin and thereby re‐set the timeline of both children and nation. A politics of future‐making emerged in the unequal encounter through which children and post‐conflict interventions each sought to achieve a desired future through the other.

Labour activation is an integral part of neo‐liberal policies that attempt to tackle the problem of employment and employability in the context of the drastically changing institution of work. Reflecting the difficulty of sustaining old frameworks, labour activation, as this ethnography reveals, is anchored in circles of simulative performances of employability and work. People's motivations to work blur the boundaries between the ‘simulative’ and the ‘real’ and are turned into . This fuels activation programmes in particular and nourishes neo‐liberal doctrine in general. But where does it leave the actors themselves?

Sadly, Gerd Baumann passed away in January 2014. This paper aims to briefly delineate his personal and intellectual trajectory, from his early years in Germany, throughout his period in Great Britain, to his last years in Amsterdam. It focuses on some of the key events of his life, as well as on some of his key publications. It also introduces the role played by his mentors on his career as a way of situating his figure within a broader genealogical history of social anthropology.