Last(ing) Frontier (original) (raw)
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Journal of World-Systems Research
This paper examines ways in which world-system analysis can be employed fruitfully to explore frontier social processes. Conversely, it also examines how frontier social processes and events can be very valuable explorations of highly localized processes geographically and temporally of world-systems. The study of frontier regions can help to uncover the ways in which many world-systemic contexts shape local human agency. Conversely, the study of these highly localized human practices offers ways to gain insights to how individual actions constantly reconstruct world-systems. Finally, many of the lessons learned here with respect to frontiers, especially in regard to ethnic and national identity formation and transformation can be extended to other social concerns.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Anthropology [open access], 2020
The term “frontier” is generally taken to mean an area separating two countries, or a territorial limit beyond which lies wilderness. But frontier is also used symbolically to refer to the limit of knowledge and understanding of a particular area, as in “frontiers of science” or in the idea of outer space as the “final frontier.” A certain elasticity therefore inheres in the term. Scholarship on frontiers generally examines geographical and cultural “peripheries”—zones that are viewed both as political barriers and sites of contact and exchange. However, the frontier as an empirical object as well as a scholarly heuristic is intertwined with long and often violent histories of colonialism, imperialism, and resistance. Anthropological concepts of the frontier are developed in relation to neighboring terms such as border, boundary, and line and methodologies for its empirical investigation in relation to other social science disciplines like history, international relations, geography, and gender studies. Drawing on a multidisciplinary perspective, ethnographic research aims to destabilize conventional notions of the frontier as the limit of settlement or as a space of statelessness, anarchy, or disorder in order to attend to the diverse cultural and political institutions that produce distinctive ideas of sovereignty, mobility, commerce, and community in such spaces.
The invisible (a-)frontier: paths of thought
2010
In the 19th century, a time in which territorial borders were most clearly manifested, Catalonia as a transfrontier space was a privileged zone of exchanges. Networks between people, conceptual transfers and forms of reception paradoxically constitute this period that shaped the writing of thought without proprietorship. It was a tradition that took on a nomadic form, woven of a thousand encounters and highly fecund. It was thought that did not set frontiers but crossed them. The conceptual mesh to which it gave rise still remains quite unknown. To this unawareness, disorientation mingled with the ongoing dismissal of 19 century philosophical thought has had a great influence, along with the absence of a theoretical model for studying it. The words pronounced by Pere Coromines in the Ateneu Barcelonès (Athenaeum of Barcelona), even though they were published in 1930, are quite revealing in this regard. Jordi Riba