<p>In <i>Border Work</i>, Madeleine Reeves brings a granular ethnographic analysis to the daily practices that surround the border between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikstan as it snakes its way up and down through the remote Ferghana Valley.... She interprets the habitual transgressive acts of border-dwellers who negotiate, appeal to, assert, or bribe their way through the border not as acts of resistance towards a coherent sovereign state, but rather as participating in a particular kind of border work, in which the territorial state is both invoked and undermined.... An important contribution to the anthropology of borders.</p> (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) <p>Madeleine Reeves does an excellent job of contextualizing the meaning of border and statehood. Perhaps most crucially, her work encourages reflections on how we might push further the collaboration between political anthropology and political science.</p> (The Russian Review) <p>Madeline Reeves' <i>Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia</i> is an important contribution to the literature on borders and borderland cultures. It also makes an important methodological contribution and presents to the reader what Clifford Geertz refers to as 'thick description' of what goes into the making of a border. The most striking aspect of the book is the vivid descriptions of the complex geography in Central Asia, which is brought forth through a careful choice of words and articulated with the help of lucid semantics.</p> (Border Criminologies: Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford) <p>Madeline Reeves's <i>Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State</i> <i>in Rural Central Asia</i> details the intersections of interests, state authority, and boundaries between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan in the southern Ferghana region. Highlighting the urge to have determinant borders while remaining conflicted over "anxieties about what a demarcated and barbed wire–bounded state might mean in practice" (249), this work provides compelling insights into how residents of a border region reconstruct spatial realities while negotiating shifting economic, social, and political terrains. Through a wide variety of ethnographic portraits, detailed observations of changing market patterns, and the careful examination of residents' constructing and adjusting perceptions of legality and illegality, Reeves's account of this highly contentious region is able to delve deeply into a specific border region while maintaining theoretical linkages to the studies of boundaries, the limitations of state administrative control, identity, and mobility across the globe.</p> (Slavic Review) <p>Reeves embraces complexity, illustrating widely varied experiences of the border through captivating accounts of Tajiks and Kyrgyz who live in this zone of boundaries.... Reeves's engaging storytelIing and thoughtful analysis are compelling reasons for a wide audience of those interested in post-Soviet Central Asian states and peoples, as well as ethnographers, human geographers, and scholars of borders and frontiers.</p> (International Journal of Turkish Studies) <p>Reeves puts this very rich ethnographic material into critical conversation with a broad range of theory, working across numerous boundaries of a different kind: those between academic disciplines. What emerges is an original argument about the productivity of borders: a rethinking, through the prism of these particular 'margins' of the state, of how space is turned into territory, how sovereignty is produced through daily impersonations and improvisations at the border, and how state-formation is forever a work-in-progress. <i>Border Work</i> is essential for anyone interested in theorising and critiquing the state and sovereignty, as well as for all students of the politics of space. It offers a set of novel, incisive arguments grounded in first-class ethnography. Finally, thanks to Reeves's light and elegant prose, the book is a page-turner. A must-read.</p> (Allegra: A Virtual Lab of Legal Anthropology) <p>Reeves's book will be read with much interest not only by scholars of post-Soviet Central Asia, but also by those interested in borderland and borderscape, critical cartography, postcolonial geographies and anthropologies, gender studies (there is a good, short discussion on women, reproductive rights, and borders), and ethnographic modelling.... This book is a clarion call 'border work' that stretches our disciplinary, gender, historical, and political worlds and imaginations. These are challenges for those in the social sciences and humanities, but also those who study 'border' healthcare, policy, security, development and environmental awareness.</p> (Central Asian Survey) <p>Reeves's fascinating insights on the Ferghana Valley borderlands bespeak of the systematic, long-term, on-site fieldwork that she has carried out, but also of her genuine personal interest and commitment to listen to and to understand the lives of her interlocutors. In the course of the book, we meet border guards, traders, farmers, taxi drivers, teachers, NGO workers, demobilized soldiers.... Her theoretically informed analysis draws on case studies from very different geographical and historical settings. This approach encourages comparison and makes the book relevant far beyond the field of Central Asian Studies.... <i>Border Work</i> is a brilliant ethnography which has much to offer to those interested in the state and its borders.</p> (Society and Space) <p>Reeves's thorough analysis of the processes and practices of the socio-politics that comprise the continual creation and recreation of borders makes a significant contribution to the anthropological investigation of the state. Her close attention to the temporal trajectory leading to the current political complexities in the southern Ferghana Valley... make this book specifically valuable to specialists of Central Asia. In general, however, this clearly written book is of great interest to any lecturers and students interested in political anthropology, borderland studies, and globalization.</p> (Social Anthropology) <p>Other anthropologists have already done important work in de-essentializing the state. Reeves builds on their insights, confidently inserting her own analytical voice in the ongoing conversations. The book's main strength... lies in the author's exceptional weaving of theory with meticulous ethnographic detail.</p> (Polar: Political & Legal Anthropology Review)

Drawing on extensive and carefully designed ethnographic fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley region, where the state borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikizstan and Uzbekistan intersect, Madeleine Reeves develops new ways of conceiving the state as a complex of relationships, and of state borders as socially constructed and in a constant state of flux. She explores the processes and relationships through which state borders are made, remade, interpreted and contested by a range of actors including politicians, state officials, border guards, farmers and people whose lives involve the crossing of the borders. In territory where international borders are not always clearly demarcated or consistently enforced, Reeves traces the ways in which states' attempts to establish their rule create new sources of conflict or insecurity for people pursuing their livelihoods in the area on the basis of older and less formal understandings of norms of access. As a result the book makes a major new and original contribution to scholarly work on Central Asia and more generally on the anthropology of border regions and the state as a social process. Moreover, the work as a whole is presented in a lively and accessible style. The individual lives whose tribulations and small triumphs Reeves so vividly documents, and the relationships she establishes with her subjects, are as revealing as they are engaging. Border Work is a well-deserved winner of this year's Alexander Nove Prize.

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Through an ethnography of social and spatial practice at the limits of the state, this book 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.
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Introduction: On Border Work
1. Locations: Place and Displacement in Southern Ferghana
2. Delimitations: Ethno-Spatial Fixing in the Twentieth Century
3. Trajectories: Mobility and the Afterlives of Internationalism
4. Gaps: Working a "Chessboard" Border
5. Impersonations: Manning the Border, Enacting the State
6. Separations: Conflict and the Escalation of Force
Conclusion

Les mer
Border Work is an extraordinary account of the relationship between the state and society.... Reeves successfully captures the messy history of territory and border construction during the twentieth-century in Soviet Central Asia.... Her deep engagement with the people of these border towns, coupled with her sophisticated theoretical analyses of gendered lives demonstrates the previously unexplored capabilities of the people of this region. This remarkable book enriches the scholarship on the study of borders by engaging everyday practices of rural populations and their interactions with authority figures.
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A series edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries
The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest growing and theoretically challenging areas in the humanities and social sciences. A decade after perestroika, it is possible to begin to chart the topography of a diverse realm of new scholarship, built on the theoretical and methodological foundations of cross-disciplinary work. Culture and Society after Socialism, a series edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries, looks to present the very best of this body of writing. Providing close-up perspectives on the lived experience of socialism and its aftermath, this series advances innovative work that fundamentally rethinks the cultural projects of socialist states and their outcomes. Through detailed readings of historical and cultural contexts, these works bridge the study of power systems and cosmologies, material practices and social meanings, political economies and the mythic forces that sustain them. Series Editors Bruce Grant is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Nancy Ries is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University. Note: This series has completed its roster of titles and is no longer seeking submissions.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780801477065
Publisert
2014
Utgiver
Vendor
Cornell University Press
Vekt
454 gr
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
155 mm
Dybde
19 mm
Aldersnivå
01, G, 01
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
277

Forfatter

Biografisk notat

Madeleine Reeves is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is the coauthor of Surviving the Transition? Case Studies of Schools and Schooling in the Kyrgyz Republic Since Independence, editor of Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia and Beyond: Contested Trajectories, and coeditor of Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics.