Between Frontiers
Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland
Published on 1. August 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
280 pages
978-87-7694-050-8 (ISBN)
Description
A staple of post-war academic writing, "nationalism" is a contentious and often unanalyzed abstraction that has come to be treated as something "imagined", "fashioned", and "disseminated".
Between Frontiers restores the nation to the social field from which it has been abstracted by looking at how the emergence of national space shapes the existence of people living in border zones, where they live between nations.
Based on the fieldwork in, and archival research on, the borderland between Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Borneo, this book explores what happens when the state actualizes its territoriality. How does the state maintain national space, and how do people strategically situate themselves as members of a local community, nation, and ethnic group in a social field designated as national territory?
By posing such questions in the context of concrete circumstances where a village boundary coincides with a national border, this study delineates state-society dialectics and the production of the nation viewed from the margins both as history and process.
Between Frontiers restores the nation to the social field from which it has been abstracted by looking at how the emergence of national space shapes the existence of people living in border zones, where they live between nations.
Based on the fieldwork in, and archival research on, the borderland between Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Borneo, this book explores what happens when the state actualizes its territoriality. How does the state maintain national space, and how do people strategically situate themselves as members of a local community, nation, and ethnic group in a social field designated as national territory?
By posing such questions in the context of concrete circumstances where a village boundary coincides with a national border, this study delineates state-society dialectics and the production of the nation viewed from the margins both as history and process.
Reviews / Votes
"'This is such a marvellous book. I love the way it brings a structural analysis of capitalism and the state into a deep reading of history and ethnography.... I will enjoy teaching it and will recommend it to many - far beyond the boundaries of SE Asian studies.' (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (U. California, Santa Cruz) 'Ishikawa has a deep and long-term knowledge of his subject. The mixture of historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches is inspiring, and Ishikawa mixes these genres skilfully. A detailed and impressive thick description permeates the book from the first page to the last, but it is also theoretically sophisticated. This combination sets it apart from quite a few other studies that accomplish one or the other but not both.' (Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University)"More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Copenhagen
Denmark
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
21 tables, 18 figures
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-87-7694-050-8 (9788776940508)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Noboru Ishikawa is associate professor with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. The Japanese version of this book won the 2008 Kashiyama Junzo Award for social sciences on Asia.
Content
Introduction; 1. The Geo-body in Transition; 2. Inscribing a Boundary at the Imperial Margin; 3. Contraband and Konfrontasi; 4. On the Periphery of the State; 5. The Genesis of Ethnic Displacement; 6. A Village in the Nation and the Nation in a Village; 7. Osmotic Pressure of the Nation-State; 8. Borderland Development; Conclusion; Appendix: Agriculture in Telok Melano; Bibliography; Index.