Border Lives

Richly detailed, BORDER LIFE captures the intimate universe of those who colonized Kentucky and southern Ohio during the Revolutionary era. In reconstructing the mental world of border inhabitants, Elizabeth Perkins draws on the records of an Ohio clergyman who conducted hundreds of interviews with survivors in the 1840s to provide a vivid portrait of pioneer life in the words of the settlers themselves. 10 illustrations.

'Border Lives' tells the story of former, current, and future border crossers who live in Tijuana and use the border as a resource to construct their livelihoods. Drawing on almost a year and a half of ethnographic data, Sergio Chávez demonstrates the ways in which the border can be both a resource and a constraint on people's lives.

Traces the development over the past hundred years of the urban working class in northern Sonora. Drawing on an extensive collection of life histories, Heyman describes what has happened to families over several generations as people left the countryside to work for American-owned companies in northern Sonora or to cross the border to find other employment.

Looks at life on the Mexican border, including the ethnicity, attitudes, and place of residence of those who live there, and how they interact with other residents

Border Lives offers an in-depth account of how people in Arsal, a northeastern town on the border of Lebanon with Syria, experienced postwar sociality, and how they grappled with living in the margins of the Lebanese state in the period following the 1975-1990 war.

In Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley, where Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan meet, state territoriality has taken on new significance in these states’ second decade of independence, reshaping landscapes and transforming livelihoods in a densely populated, irrigation-dependent region. Through an innovative ethnography of social and spatial practice at the limits of the state, Border Work explores the contested work of producing and policing “territorial integrity” when significant stretches of new international borders remain to be conclusively demarcated or effectively policed. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Madeleine Reeves follows traders, farmers, water engineers, conflict analysts, and border guards as they negotiate the practical responsibilities and social consequences of producing, policing, and deriving a livelihood across new international borders that are often encountered locally as “chessboards” rather than lines. She shows how the negotiation of state spatiality is bound up with concerns about legitimate rule and legitimate movement, and explores how new attempts to secure the border, materially and militarily, serve to generate new sources of lived insecurity in a context of enduring social and economic inter-dependence. A significant contribution to Central Asian studies, border studies, and the contemporary anthropology of the state, Border Work moves beyond traditional ethnographies of the borderland community to foreground the effortful and intensely political work of producing state space.

"The twin cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, for years straddled an indistinct border," but with the maquiladora industry, a crackdown against undocumented immigrants, and drug smuggling, "neither Nogales will ever be the same."--Cover.

From the refugee crisis to the 'hostile environment', what do borders look and feel like in Brexit Britain?