One may wonder what research on extinct societies can actually contribute to our current knowledge and society. The means of interaction, the seizing of prestigious goods, the performance of power, strategies of order and legitimacy, the rise and decline of the state, and the state’s responses to inner crises and outer pressure, as reflected in contemporary Egyptological evidence, find many parallels in our modern world. The position and character of Egyptology has traditionally been mainly a philological one for objective historical reasons. Only over the recent two decades or so has Egyptology gained its proper place among anthropological disciplines (for...

The introduction to this volume urges us to think of borderlands as evolving and mobile. This idea may seem counterintuitive, as most borders are characterized by a persistent fixity. However, the conceptualization is sound, reminding us that borders are dynamic institutions that determine both political control over territory and restrict access to that territory. To treat borders and borderlands as dynamic processes is to heed Newman’s cogent reminder that “it is the process of bordering, rather than the course of the line per se, which is important to our understanding of how boundaries affect the nature of interaction, cooperation, and/or...

Over the last forty years of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and southern Arabia, the borderland constituted a central arena of political, economic, and cultural transformation. For much of the empire’s history, the regions in question—roughly along present-day borders separating Albania, Kosova, and Monte negro and, until 1990’s reunification, North and South Yemen—were not frontiers at all. It was during the course of the nineteenth century that military defeat and economic vulnerability resulted in the retraction of Ottoman territorial possessions in the Balkans and Arabia, leading to the creation of a borderland phenomenon in Albania and Yemen respectively....

A multitude of studies and research projects dealing with the state in Africa have led to a better understanding of the nature of statehood on the continent.¹ But many “construction sites” with regard to internal dynamics and state-society relations still remain in states labeled as weak or fragile according to Western standards. By analyzing borderland case studies, this chapter attempts to gain better insights into the center-periphery relations “on the margins” of the African state where concepts of space, identity, and social networking interact in a specific way. The reason to have a special interest in borderlands is that “...

This chapter is a brief summary of the very complex contemporary situation along the U.S.-Mexico border, the nature of cross-border trade and interaction, and the impacts that the fifteen-year-old North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has had on the border and border life. We begin with a discussion of applicable border theory and modifications to such theory in the case of this particular border (for more detail, see Rosenau 1993), relating this to the introductory theme and continuing with the characteristics of this border and its major problems, the nature and nurture of NAFTA, and several topics specific to this...

A major argument of this book is that borderlands are social processes, products of their contexts and producers of future contexts. In the following chapter I argue that the boundaries that regulate behavior within these borderlands are just as context dependent. These boundaries are not the neat, linear divisions that appear on a map and that we might imagine separating political entities. Instead, they are fluid, porous, and are continually being negotiated and renegotiated between the various communities living in the borderland. They include both zones of mixing and zones of separation on either side (Muldoon 2003, 4).

Thus, an...

If “borderlands are inhabited territories located on the margins of a power center, or between power centers, with power understood in the civilizational as well as the politico-economic sense,” as the introduction to this book asserts, then Macedonia is a borderland par excellence. Present-day Macedonia is a territory partitioned by four power centers: the eponymous country, which became an independent political entity only recently; Greece, which claims to hold the historical “copyright” to the name Macedonia; Bulgaria, the principal contender to Greek claims at the turn of the twentieth century, which now contains the territory known as Pirin Macedonia; and...

This chapter deals with the Jordan River or Jordan Rift Valley. The valley stretches from the Sea of Galilee/Kinneret in the north to the Dead Sea in the south and forms a border both natural and political that distinguishes the East (Transjordan) and West Banks (Cisjordan) as well as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the state of Israel. It is the site of a fluctuating borderland. Although the river’s northern course from sources in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel into the Sea of Galilee is of interest as the western demarcation of the disputed Golan Heights, a borderland experience exists...

The U.S.-Mexico border has many dimensions and a multitude of effects on the lives of those living in its borderlands. In its most basic capacity a borderline serves to divide two countries, as in the case of the United States and Mexico, where the border simply functions to delineate where one nation-state ends and the other begins. The intensity of transnational migration from Mexico to the United States also challenges the defining power of the nation-states. Michael Kearney reminds us that “members of transnational communities similarly escape the power of the nation-state to inform their sense of collective identity” (1998,...

Borders, boundaries, frontiers, and margins are important tropes in contemporary research. Each suggests particular relations between place, space, and people and generates creative opportunities and innovative ways to think about state rule, state formation and interstate relations, nationalism, community, and, significantly, identity and belonging. Importantly, each trope generates distinct bodies of literature and new and exciting empirical foci. Frontiers, for example, as the formalization of the boundaries of empire, are sites of analysis that challenge the naturalization of national space to reveal the cartographic imagination of rulers and kings, of mapmaking as a social and political project, and of the...