Anthropology and border studies: from critique to contingency

Sarah Green

Chapter 6 in Border Studies, 2025, pp 106-123 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Anthropologists have always studied how people create borders, focusing mostly on social and cultural diversity in how peoples around the world understood the differences that their borders marked. The discipline only began paying attention to wider border studies in the 1970s, after critiques that anthropology was depicting the peoples they studied as if they lived in a different world, one without international borders: one in which colonialism and capitalism were absent. Critiques were also made against anthropological theories concerning the difference between Us (the anthropologists) and Them (the others that anthropologists studied), which implied that They lived in a different time and place from Us, one that existed before modernity. Border studies provided one means to bring these artificially separated worlds together, showing how the lives of the peoples anthropologists studied were part of the same world that created anthropology, one that was full of geopolitical borders that affected both the anthropologists and the peoples they studied. Once that coexistence was acknowledged, anthropology developed a distinctive range of approaches towards the question of political borders, which provided a means to show how border dynamics not only involve those who build the borders, but also those who encounter them and engage with them.

Keywords: Social borders; Ethnographic borders; Classification; Colonial borders; Temporal borders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781800375383
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