Dr Mathijs Pelkmans OLD6.13

This course is available on the MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Anthropology and Development (Management) and MSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

How do territorial borders influence human behaviour and thinking, and how, in turn, do citizens manage and manipulate such borders? These questions have become pressing in the current age of globalization and intensifying trans-national connections. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of the USSR are but a few of the changes that have rendered ideas of borders as the self-evident limits of notions of society and culture problematic. At the same time, increased porosity of borders may make cultural differences more salient in everyday social and symbolic practice. Moreover, because of the tenuous relations between border dwellers and the state, border studies highlight blind spots in our understandings of concepts as society, identity, culture, ethnicity, and nation. As such, the study of borders links up with central anthropological questions. Whether dealing with ideas about purity, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, or the (partly artificial) separation of modern society into "spheres," boundaries are being drawn, enlivened, and contested.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT. 1 hour of lectures in the ST.

Anthropology students taking this course will be encouraged to submit a tutorial essay for this course to their personal tutors. For non-Anthropology students taking this course, a formative essay may be submitted to the course teacher.

Barth, Frederick. 1969. "Introduction." In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, edited by F. Barth, 9-38. Boston: Little, Brown. Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland, Introduction. University of California Press. Bornstein, Avram. 2002. Crossing the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cole, John, and Eric Wolf. 1999 [1974]. The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press. Donnan, Hastings, and Thomas M. Wilson. 1999. Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Oxford: Berg. Driessen, Henk. 1992. On the Spanish-Moroccan Frontier: A study in ritual, power, and ethnicity. Oxford: Berg. Green, Sarah F. 2006. Notes From the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton University Press, 2006. Kearney, Michael. 2004. Changing fields of anthropology: from local to global. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours) in the main exam period.