Description

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Central Asia’s Isfara valley, this paper critically engages with questions of time and contingency in the study of international borders. It argues that while the emergence of biometric technologies and offshore policing have led to a critical exploration of the distributed spatiality of international borders in geography and anthropology, less attention has been given to what Little (2015) refers to as borders’ complex temporality: the “disorderly manner and the uneven tempo in which change takes place in the real world.” The paper asks how we might explore such uneven tempi ethnographically. Focusing on a particular moment of heightened tensions in the wake of disputed borderland road construction in the Isfara valley, it tracks a moment of border materialisation and its aftermath to argue for an account of borders attentive both to history and the contingencies of local political dynamics.

Madeleine Reeves teaches Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and is a Visiting Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki. She is the author of Border Work (Cornell 2014), which won the 2015 Rothschild Prize in nationalism and ethnic studies of the Association for the Study of Nationalities. With Johan Rasanayagam and Judith Beyer she has edited Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics (Indiana 2014) and with Mateusz Laszczkowski she has edited a special issue of Social Analysis on ‘Affective States’ (Berghahn 2016). Her interests lie in the anthropology of politics, infrastructure and space.