Borders in Globalization Conference
September 25-27, 2014
Carleton University and University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Canada
Victor Konrad, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada victor.konrad@carleton.ca
CONCEPTUALIZING BORDERS AND
CULTURE
THE CULTURAL BORDER
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Anachronism of the
Wagah border ceremony
in the internetconnected world
Perform and ritualize
incised border
Border, territory and
culture all demarcated
BORDER CULTURE
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Talking Borders gives
voice to communities in
border areas of Sierra
Leone, Liberia and
Guinea
Territory, borders and
culture blurred after
years of war and
diaspora
Objectives:
1.
Interrogate critically the
interaction of borders and
culture, and to evaluate how
notions of border culture, cultural
borders and borderlands culture
emerged in the establishment
and successive development of
anthropology, geography and
geopolitics
2.
Explore the meaning of imagining
across boundaries: Imagine
intersection of borders and
culture? Articulation of imprints?
Manifestation of imaginaries?
3.
Assess border culture production,
materialization, building at border
and in borderlands
INTERACTION OF CULTURE AND BORDERS AND
THE EMERGENCE OF BORDER CULTURE
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The border is at the nexus of the
international and transnational,
territorial and extraterritorial, and
political and socio- cultural (Fein,
2003)
Borders ’work’ extensively in a
globalizing world of contact zones,
asymmetrical relationships,
increasing flows and displacements
Culture related to and influenced by
power (Mitchell, 2000) but need to
problematize and define how power
and culture interrelate
Not just ”all politics is cultural and all
culture is political”
Left unfulfilled in understanding of
how and what culture manifests as it
intersects with borders
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Transnational regimes of knowledge
(Foucault) key forms of international
power and also key elements in
defining border culture (Konrad and
Nicol, 2011)
Understanding border culture entails
relating international forces operating
between nations to transnational forces
produced by the presence of one nation
within another (Fein, 2003)
To capture both the ”essential” and the
”imagined” qualities of hybridization and
differentiation at borders and in
borderlands (Shimoni, 2006)
POWER, TERRITORY AND BORDERS
Thinking about border
culture and cultural borders
needs to be located within
the evolving thought about
territory, borders and culture
that has migrated vicariously
between the fields of
anthropology and geography
since their inception.
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If The Birth of Territory
(Elden, 2013) is a ”political
technology”, how do we
conceptualize border
culture emerging in a world
of increasing flows?
May border culture be
conceptualized as the
agency of political
technology enabling both
territorial delimitation and
amelioration?
In hindsight, one of the great misconceptions in both classical
geopolitics and cultural antropology was to view the nation and
the state as bounded territory.
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”Raum” is political and cultural space and container of
organic state which would ultimately expand and grow
beyond its boundaries
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Organic state theory to ”lebensraum” to ”weltmacht”
(influenced by Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, Turner)
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Culture becomes super organic
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Borders become insignificant and recede before the flow of
organized, enlightened, resourceful and entitled people
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Frontier is a zone of transition and peripheral organ of the
state (Cahnman 1944)
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Border culture and the cultural border born in Ratzel’s
intertwining of anthropology, politics and geography
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Ideologically extended and twisted by Kjellen and Haushofer
into ”lebensraum”
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Mackinder and Spykman bring frontiers back into the
discourse of geopolitics
•
Minghi (1963) rebuilds groundwork for border studies in
political geography; Meinig (1970) relates culture and
territory
RATZEL, THE ’SUPER ORGANIC’, AND CULTURE INHABITING AND OVERFLOWING
TERRITORY
CULTURAL BOUNDARIES COTERMINOUS
WITH ’NATION’ AND ETHNIC
DELINEATIONS
CONCURRENTLY SEPARATING CULTURE
AREAS AND DIFFERENTIATING CULTURAL
TRAITS
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
TRANSITION AND HYBRIDIZATION?
FRANZ BOAS
CULTURE DEVELOPS ITS OWN UNIQUE
STYLE SYSTEMS
STYLE SYSTEMS BECOME FIXED, CLIMAX,
FATIGUE AND DECLINE
TERRITORIES AND BORDERS IMPLICIT IF
NOT EXPLICIT
CULTURAL BOUNDARY COTERMINOUS
WITH NATIONAL BORDER
A. L. KROEBER
CULTURAL AND SPATIAL TURNS: IF CULTURES ARE SEPARATE
LONG ENOUGH A BORDER WILL FORM; IF CULTURES ARE
SEPARATE ENOUGH A BORDER WILL FORM
Border is symbol of power which differentiates it from
a boundary (Erickson 1997, Chang 2010)
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Differentiation of cultural border and cultural
boundary on basis of imagination as well as power
(Johnson and Michaelson 1997)
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Borderlands transnational imaginary (Saldivar 2006)
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Borderlands liminal and hybrid spaces (Bhabha 1994,
Kraidy 2005)
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Borderlands cultures do not revert (Gupta and
Ferguson 1992,1997)
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Influenced by post structuralists Foucault, Derrida,
Butler, Lacan, Deleuze and others
Cultural turn has liberated concept of border culture from
its anthropo-geographical anchoring at the intersection of
classical geopolitics, emergent geography and incipient
anthropology, refreshed with re-vitalized exploration of
identity, affinity and imagination
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EXPLORING THE CULTURAL IMAGINARY AT
BORDERS AND IN BORDERLANDS
Cultural research on borders and
borderlands seeks the meaning of
imagining across boundaries
 What clusters of attention and
thinking are emerging?
 Culture is socially constructed and
thus imagined
 Cultural imaginaries evolve in hybrid
forms and distinct expressions in
border areas
 Cultural rigidities become flexibilities
or stronger rigidities
 Border imaginaries vary greatly
 Imaginaries are constantly in motion
 But, there is a sense of boundaries
and people keep their cultural
borders not as essential but as
imagined phenomena
Cultural imaginaries at the border and in
the borderlands link with the cultural
meaning of landscape, aesthetics,
identities, belonging, settlement,
community, migration, work, play, stories
and other forms of borderlands
experience.
Many ways to organize and assemble
cultural expressions and affiliations.
Offer following groupings:
1.
2.
3.
Life sustaining
Life enriching
Life securing
1. LIFE SECURING CULTURAL IMAGINARIES
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Land and life in borderlands is
different than in heartland
Cultural imaginaries required to first
secure life in the cross-border region
(these are not the imaginaries of the
central state)
Protection of land and property in
resistance to appropriation from the
nation state, food security, confirmed
livelihood
Threats often visualized and
materialized as threats from the
nation-state, and resistance is to the
state (Juarez/El Paso; West
Bank/Israel)
Example: scaled engagement, linkage
of domestic and international at
Canada-US border
2. LIFE SUSTAINING CULTURAL IMAGINARIES
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Integral to the everyday routine of
managing flow of people, goods and
ideas of symbiotic if not integrated
economic, social and cultural zone of
interaction
Need to embrace imaginary of the
border as facilitation zone/line rather
than space of exclusion
Sustaining life in the borderlands
engages most border provinces and
communities
Illustration: the new New International
Trade Crossing bridge between Detroit
and Windsor
Locally grown and shared crossborder imaginary of life sustaining
interaction needs to emerge
3. LIFE ENRICHING CULTURAL IMAGINARIES
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Form through mutual engagement
and linkage of creative people and
agencies across boundary and in
borderlands
Cultural imaginaries more
characteristically developed in
borderlands in reaction to state
neglect or direct state suppression
Illustration: the NFL in Toronto,
Canada
Cultural imaginaries maintain and
cross other borders for both intragroup cohesion across international
boundary and extra-group display of
affiliation across the cultural border
Cultural imaginary that enriches life
becomes the crucible for life
sustaining and life securing
imaginaries as well
CULTURAL PRODUCTION, MATERIALIZATION AND
HERITAGE AT THE BORDER AND IN THE
Dramatic increase in walls, fences and
BORDERLANDS
barriers at boundaries, overall hardening of
borders to protect interests of privileged few
who actually live the promise of globalization
and defend its privileges through
teichopolitics (Rosiere and Jones, 2012)
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Growing attention devoted to cultural
implications of re-emergence of
border walls: walls do not work;
symbols of resistance to the
constructions themselves
Canvas for displaying reaction as both
a political act and a cultural
materialization (examples: Mexico,
Israel) Dear, 2013; Amilhat-Szary,
2012: hybridity, ’third nation’, new
border culture of intertwined identities
and daily transnational and
transcultural interaction, physical
manifestations of fear of incursion,
national identity, symbolic cohesion
THE PROBLEM WITH A WALL IS THAT IT MATERIALIZES AS A LOT
TO LEAVE BEHIND WHEN IT IS NO LONGER FUNCTIONAL OR ITS
PURPOSE HAS WANED.
 Essentialized or materialized
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Cultural production either
essentialized or imagined
Realization brings us to consider what
we bring to the border and what we
leave behind
Imaginaries either brought to border
or fashioned in borderlands
Expressed as cultural identity or
facets of transnational identities
performed or otherwise realized at
the border
These are extensive imaginaries
consistent with vast and growing
domains of transnationalism and
borderlands culture
components of cultural production
reinforce identity and belonging, and
work as symbols of border culture
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Both imagined and materialized border
culture is potentially border culture
heritage: statements and clues to who
we are and how we have negotiated the
borderlands
Some ephemeral: garbage of illegal
migrants (Sundberg, 2008)
Symbols of cold selectivity of U.S.
Mexico borderlands and Mediterranean
’death zones’
Era of security primacy commemorated
by an array of artifacts: heritage of why
we did this, and who we were!
BORDER CULTURE, CULTURAL IMAGINARIES
AND THE CULTURAL HERITAGE OF THE
BORDERLANDS
Fed by transnational flows, society and culture in
each of the world’s 200 nation states are
interconnecting with societies and cultures in all
other units to form transnational societies and
transnational cultures. What happens at the borders?
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Studies show that results are highly variable
Culture constructed both within and across boundaries
to galvanize nationalism and to extend beyond
nationalism
If culture precedes borders hybridization and restiching occur
Border culture, however, very difficult to define as is
culture
Re-thinking border culture led us back to emergence of
geographical and anthropological conceptualizations
of territory: seeds of several modern and post-modern
ideas about how cultures emerge and connect
Understanding border culture: relate international
forces operating within nations with transnational
forces produced by the presence of one nation within
another to capture both the material and imagined
hybridization and differentiation
Resonance of symbolic power
Cultural turn liberated concept of border culture, and
refreshed it with identity, belonging, affinity
considerations, and imaginaries
BORDERLANDS CULTURE
Cultural imaginary links with the meaning of
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identity
land and life to secure, sustain and enrich life
in borderlands and beyond
Security, sustainability and enrichment of vital
importance with re-emergence of walls,
fences, barriers: ‘third’ nations centered on the
wall that would divide them
Polarization, juxtaposition of secured and nonsecured spaces and places caused by these
dialectics
affinity
Yet,
imagination
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Crucible of Borderlands
Culture
Social cohesion works in isolation
Integration space grows and pulses
Communities and loops work
Mediation operates from bottom-up
Local and regional scale perseveres
Liminal culture spaces coalesce
Left with a cultural heritage of borders that is
problematical at best, potentially devastating if
border dialectic not addressed and mediated by
imaginaries that offer to secure, sustain and enrich
life at the border and in the borderlands
OUR GOAL, ULTIMATELY, IS TO UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT THE INTERPLAY OF
BORDERLANDS CULTURAL IMAGINARIES AND MATERIALIZATIONS AT THE
PLACES AND IN THE SPACES WHERE NATION-STATES MEET AND INTERACT.
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Approach goal with social scientific
conceptualizations and sensitivities
gained from humanities
Salter (2013) argues that the suture
better captures the dual worldcreating functions of the border:
suture (or /) conveys evocative
knitting together inside and outside,
signifies and empowers the role of /
in cybernetic world, both as agent of
separation and integration
Will borders become a bewildering
array of binary cues linked to bar
codes intelligible only to computers?
Or, does interplay of borders and
culture create melodies, songs and
perhaps symphonies of interaction to
interprete? (Border Songs, Lynch,
2008)
THE LANGUAGE AND STRUCTURE OF BORDER SONGS MAY BE ELUSIVE AND
DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND BUT WE CAN ALL COMPREHEND AND
APPRECIATE THE MUSIC.