International Orders and International

Borders: Anthropological Perspectives

Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology ofCulture, John Borneman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).341 pp., cloth (ISBN: 0-7914-3583-0), $59.50; paper (ISBN: 0-7914-3584-9),$19.95.

Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, Thomas M.Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998). 301 pp., cloth (ISBN: 0-5215-8315-2), $59.95; paper (ISBN:0-5215-8745-X), $23.95.

A s has been the case with many disciplines of late, long-standing con-ceptual and topical boundaries between anthropology and internationalstudies have begun to blur. For example, scholars concerned with inter-

national organization and politics have increasingly borrowed anthropologicaland sociological concepts such as identity and culture. Similarly, until just a fewyears ago the concept “international” was not part of the anthropological lexicon.

Practitioners of the discipline tended to focus on small, primitive, andprenational societies. They employed the culture concept rarely beyond theboundaries of groups defined in terms of ethnicity, or examined single nationalstates only to the extent that one could coterminously map single cultures ontothem. Furthermore, anthropology’s methodological claim to being a disciplinewith a comparative dimension tends not to be borne out in single studies of mul-tiple cases. Rather, it is realized through its emphasis on single ethnographic,microscale, or local-level studies carried out with one eye on how the particularcan be understood in universal terms and vice versa. In short, theory guides orframes fieldwork, and fieldwork data refine theory.

This being said, scholars and practitioners trained in one discipline do notalways employ concepts and units of analysis inspired by the conventions ofanother discipline to everyone’s satisfaction, or even comprehension. How wellequipped are anthropologists for addressing international order, a macrolevelconcept that has tended to fall within the boundaries of international relations

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theory? The answer is poorly, if we limit our understanding of what internationalorder is to the norm-creating framework of international law or to how territorialsovereignty is organized.

But as John Borneman in hisSubversions of International Orderand theauthors in Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan’s edited bookBorder Identities:Nation and State at International Frontiersdemonstrate, there is more thanmeets the eye when nation, state, identity, and border are framed within an inter-or transnational context. Both books offer novel approaches to thinking aboutthese concepts and should be credited for their ambitious and provocativeattempts to engage in dialogue with both international relations (or studies)specialists and anthropologists.

Borneman raises some excellent questions: What constitutes (our) under-standings of international order? Whose order? Whose versions? How do socialscientists capture the ways people make sense of sudden and rapid social andpolitical change? Borneman’s subversive approach entails turning constructionsof reality, or social order—boundaries, nations, states—inside out by pointingout their contradictions.

Two examples follow. First, in his chapter “American Anthropology asForeign Policy,” Borneman shows how in American anthropology, as well aspopular culture, Native Americans were represented as foreigners within theUnited States. This cultural lumping of indigenous populations under a singlecategory of “foreigner” allowed European colonists in North America to createa national domestic space for themselves. Foreign policy, he argues, should notbe isolated from an understanding of the broader historical and political contextof how the category “foreign” comes to be constructed and employed.

A second example comes from chapter 4, one of five chapters on (East)Germany, where Borneman has conducted most of his ethnographic research.Here he shows how representations of East and West Germany were mutuallyconstituting and that, from the perspective of culture, it makes little sense toconceptualize national identity solely within the confines of state borders. Thus,“international order does not exist as a practice outside of local categories.Rather, local practices [e.g., of representation] generate national and inter-national political orders, which in turn work to refashion the local into asimulacrum of the international” (p. 12). While this particular point underliesthe book’s broader theoretical argument, it is most explicitly made in chapter3 (“Race, Ethnicity, Species, Breed”).

Borneman clearly lays out in his introduction the following calls for method-ological changes, which are necessary if anthropologists are going to study thecultural constitution and construction of international order as manifested inexisting and emergent forms of authority, identity, and power. These includerefinement of techniques of participant observation and long-term fieldworkby addressing the question of how to conduct face-to-face research in an

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“international” field, use of a wider variety of documentary forms (e.g., poetry,film, journalism, legal texts), and reformulation of vocabulary to conceptualizecontemporary processes. Borneman then proceeds to map what he calls a “newthematic matrix,” which includes globalization, nationalism, queer theory, andnarrative theory. By globalization, he means the imposition of politicallymotivated definitions and characterizations of social change and transition andthe degree to which particular views of history (and territoriality) are tied to stateprojects and power (chaps. 2, 4, 8, 10).

In looking at nationalism, he examines kinship metaphors that make imag-ined communities more intimate and, therefore, commanding of one’s loyalty(chaps. 3, 7). In drawing on queer theory, Borneman interrogates hegemonic andstate-linked notions of sexuality (chaps. 6, 10) and how constructions of hetero-sexuality as normal are then symbolically appropriated to justify foreign policypositions (chap. 9). He draws on narrative theory to highlight rhetorical strate-gies of how individuals and governments represent time and space and to exposethe contradictions of literal interpretations of ideological representations (chaps.5, 6). As Borneman notes,

Today, when national and international political orders are unstable and disinte-grating . . . anthropological knowledge produced through fieldwork is limitedonly if one seeks fixed, self-reproducing cultures and unchanging traditions.Alternatively, if anthropologists pay attention to struggles for articulation . . .then they are positioned to observe or document firsthand the processes of disin-tegration and reconstruction of order. (p. 16)

In terms of applied value—pedagogical and policy informing—these twobooks are unequal. I do not recommendSubversionsfor classroom use becauseof its elusive consistency and overly playful style. Having used it once in a politi-cal anthropology class, I found that its eclectic contents merely frustrated thestudents, despite their appreciation of many of its subversive twists and turns.The book also thwarted my own desire to question effectively the boundaries ofthe discipline.

I have similar reservations about its utility for policymakers. Borneman’sdefensive tone is ultimately self-defeating and restricts the book’s appeal to avery limited audience (of anthropologists) whose theoretical difficulties withthe culture concept the author appears to be struggling to transcend. As ayoung scholar, I appreciated the novelty of Borneman’s candor in addressinghis evaluators and critics in his introduction; it revealed a side of academic(if not always particularly intellectual) practice that is often, perhaps deliber-ately, underexposed.

Furthermore, there is clearly something to be said for a scholar’s efforts toidentify, characterize, and critically reflect upon his intellectual trajectoryover a period of active research, thought, and writing. Borneman explicitlyattempts to do this in his introduction to Subversions, a collection of articles

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mostly published elsewhere between 1986 and 1995. In the end, the author’sgoal of subverting disciplinary boundaries inter alia is not clearly achievedand the attempt may have even subverted itself. Too much time spentresponding to and redressing the wrong questions may have left too little timefor a successful and coherent movement toward the right ones. This is a pitybecauseSubversionsoffers much food for thought.

Border Identitiesis a more consistent and focused book, even though it ismultidisciplinary and multiauthored. Its interrogation and exploration of ways oflooking at identity formation on, in, around, and across nation-state bordersmake it a valuable comparative project and a book I recommend for classroomuse. My only reservations have to do with general difficulties of using editedbooks for pedagogical purposes.

Wilson and Donnan’s book points out that the study of international stateborders is important “because borders inflect a whole range of identities in waysnot found elsewhere in the state” (p. 25). At the same time, they should not beprivileged over other foci of research. In their introduction, the editors suggesthow the combined conclusions of these ten studies are relevant and contribute topolitical anthropology in the following ways: “borders are not homogeneous”;the focus on borders helps us to theorize

changing definitions of peripheries and their relationships to their centres;frontiers are territorially and temporally defined zones linked to borders,and have heuristic utility beyond the metaphorical; borders are physical,literal structures of the state, which also structure a range of meanings andbelongings associated with a variety of identities; borders help us to under-stand the imprecise fit between nations and states; and the study of territorialborders is part of a wider ensemble of studies of border-crossings andfrontiers of identity. (p. 25)

These studies address issues of identity construction with respect to inter-national borders among three categories of people: traders or “shoppers” (Hannand Bellér-Hann, Cheater, Carsten); (im)migrants (Driessen, Kearney, Carsten);and ethnic minorities (Douglas, Stokes, Rabinowitz). Among these, I foundCheater’s analysis of constructions of gender and citizenship among womentraders from Zimbabwe to be the best supported ethnographic piece and to havethe most utility for informing future policymaking. Sahlins, a historian, makesthe strong argument that French and Spanish national identities emerged morefrom dynamics at their respective peripheries—their shared border—than fromtheir “centers”—Paris and Madrid.

Borneman’s chapter “Grenzregime,” published in both collections underreview, is a fascinating study of what happens when a border is removed, erased,or deconstructed. In analyzing a life history—an individual’s unique experienceof German unification, before, during, and after—Borneman suggests that thereis more to borders than their apparent geopolitical status. This approach reveals

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how the social significance of borders shifts over time among the territorial,economic, political, cultural, and legal.

To examine only the territoriality of borders is to miss a rich hinterland ofnonliteral social meanings (and the practices they inform). For example, asBorneman demonstrates, the fall of the Berlin Wall cannot be equated with thefall of all boundaries between the two Germanys. Social boundaries continued toexist and may even have strengthened as East Germans became painfully awareof the economic discrepancies and power differentials between them and theWest. Perhaps the most important contribution here to the study of internationalrelations is the methodological question it raises of how to deal with the transi-tion of international to intranational relations. What exactly does the absorptionof one nation-state by another indicate? And how unbiased and nonideologicalare characterizations of and claims about “transition”?

What I found missing from this collection—and it is a small quibble—is acase study of a border or frontier zone during war. There are numerous examplesand studies to draw on. Recent long-term wars, genocides, and ethnic cleansingswithin, on, and across the borders of Rwanda and the multiple borders of theformer states of Yugoslavia, to name just two examples, reveal the extremes towhich people will go to rid demographic impurities from “their” territories.

The advantage of reviewing these two books together is that they represent awide range of uses of concepts such as state, culture, and identity. Also, theyshare the goal of investigating international order from different perspectives,albeit anthropological ones, and in so doing they are provocative attempts toengage anthropology and international relations. Both books are useful andlargely successful examples of anthropology’s attempt to escape from locally,territorially, and nationally grounded notions of culture without abandoning andthereby losing the benefits of small-scale ethnography. They make much prog-ress in the direction of studying translocal institutions such as states and theformation of interstate (interstitial) identities.

—David AbramsonBrown University

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