Hastings Donnan

Nation, state and identity at international borders

According to some scholars, we are living in a world where state borders are increasingly obsolete. This view holds that international borders are becoming so porous that they no longer fulfil their historical role as barriers to the movement of goods, ideas and people, and as markers of the extent and power of the state. This withering away of the strength and importance of international borders is linked to the predicted demise of the nation-state as the pre-eminent political structure of modernity. The threatened passing of the state, in turn, heralds the weakening of most of the worlds existing political, social and cultural structures and associations. As a result, the role of individuals in these structures is called into question, especially in terms of their loyalties and identities. In line with this fall-off in the determinative power of traditional political statuses is the rise of the new politics of identity, in which the definitions of citizenship, nation and state vie with identities which have acquired a new political significance, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, among others, for control of the popular and scholarly political imaginations of the contemporary world. Moreover, these processes are supposedly accelerating, continually shifting the ground upon which nation-states once stood, changing the framework of national and international politics, creating new and important categories of transnationalism, and increasing the significance and proliferation of images and a host of other messages about the relevance of ‘other’ world cultures in the everyday lives of us all.

Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers.

Investigates how ethnicity, nationalism and cultural identity are marked in everyday life at international borders. This anthropological study covers West Africa, the Turkish-Syrian border, India and the proposed Khalistan, the German-French border, the Portuguese-Spanish border, and Ireland.

Material Identities: Fixing Ethnicity in the Irish Borderlands

This article explores the problem of fixing ethnicity in a politically violent national context, among a population generally overlooked in the anthropological literature, Northern Irelands border Protestants. Focusing on narratives of violence and intimidation, it shows how Protestants articulate their identity through a reading of the Irish border landscape that stresses the atrocities carried out there over the last thirty years or so. Place is central to their atrocity narratives and knowledge of the violence associated with specific sites—a particular field, farm building, or country lane—both constitutes and reflects their sense of themselves in the escalating cultural war precipitated by wider political transformation in Northern Ireland since the late 1990s. The emphasis on the materiality of landscape and place, this article argues, is crucial both to the credibility of Protestant claims for social justice, as well as a central element in the passage from personal to public memory. This article was first presented in Belfast in May 2002 as part of a public lecture and subsequently at a seminar in the University of St. Andrews and as a lecture in the Centre for Border Studies in the University of Glamorgan and at Charles University, Prague. I am grateful to all of those who offered comments on these occasions. I am most especially grateful to Suzel Reily, who assisted with the images and sound that accompanied the lectures; to Graham McFarlane and Fiona Magowan, who both commented in detail on various drafts; and to the editors of Identities and three anonymous referees for suggestions on how to strengthen the argument. Figure 8 is reprinted from Murray 1982: 315, with permission from Elsevier.

Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border Protestants

ABSTRACT Developing recent ethnographic work on the subjective experiences of those involved in traumatic events, this paper examines the stories that Protestants tell about their experiences of violence along the Irish border in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories are only now beginning to surface, and the paper considers the transition from the private experience of suffering to its public telling. It focuses on how people find a voice for their telling and what happens as a result of breaking the silence. Of special interest is the language and style in which the narratives enter the public domain, and the silences that remain. The paper argues that the narratives are shaped as much by the demands of communalidentity as byindividualexperience, and thereby complements the trauma literature that tends to emphasise the latter.

Economy and Culture in Pakistan: Migrants and Cities in a Muslim Society.

Family and low income housing in Karachi, Frits Selier security and value - squatter dwelling in Karachi, Jan van der Linden the impact of migration on Pakistans economy and society, Omar Noman marriage and power - tradition and transition in an urban Punjabi community, Michael Fischer Pakistani women in a changing society, Hamza Alavi competing doctors, unequal patients - stratified medicine in Lahore, Wenonah Lyon nationhood and the nationalities in Pakistan, Hamza Alavi factionalism and violence in British Pakistani communal politics, Pnina Werbner Ulema and Pir in the politics of Pakistan, Saifur Rahman Sherani migration, death and martyrdom in rural Pakistan, Akbar S. Ahmed.

Politeness and social signals

In the literature, politeness has been researched within many disciplines. Although Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness (1978, 1987) is often cited, it is primarily a linguistic theory and has been criticized for its lack of generalizability to all cultures. Consequently, there is a need for a more comprehensive approach to understand and explain politeness. We suggest applying a social signal framework that considers politeness as a communicative state. By doing so, we aim to unify and explain politeness and its corresponding research and identify further research needed in this area.

Migrating Borders and Moving Times: Temporality and the Crossing of Borders in Europe

iStock by Getty Images Dnan, Hurd nd Leut-Grandits (ds) M IGATING BODERS ND M OVING IM ES This book explores how crossing borders entails shifting time as well as changing geographical location. Space has long dominated the field of border studies, a prominence which the recent spatial turn in social science has reinforced. This book challenges the classic analytical pre-eminence of space by focusing on how border time is shaped by, shapes and constitutes the borders themselves.

Borders, Anthropology of

This article examines the frontiers and borders in which anthropologists have been interested, from cultural borders which separate and connect different worlds of meaning and identity to borders that mark out geopolitical space and borders that order social relations and define membership of ‘community.’ It shows how these cultural, territorial, and social dimensions often overlap and how all three have been integral to an anthropology of borders. The article suggests that the social sciences have increasingly converged in their emphasis on borders as relational and dynamic, no longer confined to political margins but embedded throughout everyday life, a perspective that anthropology has long been adept at exploring.