Abstract
A border is but a line extending infinitely, widthlessly, and abstractly; yet the moment this line is delimited and inscribed upon a map or etched within the earth, it takes on new social meaning. Borders are found nowhere in nature but where human beings impose them, and they are imposed with a purpose. A border, then, may be better understood as being more than a line: it is a physical limit. Useful, it locates the division between things, their beginnings, and their endings. We draw borders between nation states, transforming rivers, mountains, and other arbitrary features into the difference between the sovereignty of “us” and “them.” We build fences around property to distinguish between that which we possess and that which we do not. We delimit with borders those things which we identify as part of our self from those things that we have rejected as “outside.”
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Notes
- 1.
Josiah McC. Heyman , “The Mexico -United States Border in Anthropology: A Critique and Reformulation.” Journal of Political Ecology 1 (1994): 43–44.
- 2.
Ibid., 47–48.
- 3.
Ibid., 60.
- 4.
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson . “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space , Identity , and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 1 (1992): 7.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid., 17.
- 8.
Ibid., 18.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Victor Turner , The Ritual Process (New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction, 1997): 15.
- 11.
Ibid., 125.
- 12.
Ibid., 103.
- 13.
Gloria Anzaldúa , Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1999): 25.
- 14.
Turner, Ritual, 95.
- 15.
Anzaldúa , Borderlands, 44.
- 16.
Ibid., 60–61.
- 17.
Gloria Anzaldúa , “(Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces ,” The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009): 248.
- 18.
Gloria Anzaldúa , “Speaking Across the Divide,” The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009): 291.
- 19.
Gloria Anzaldúa , “Bearing Witness,” The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009): 278.
- 20.
Anzaldúa , “(Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces ,” 247.
- 21.
Chela Sandoval , Methodologies of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 32–33.
- 22.
Ibid., 57.
- 23.
Ibid., 58.
- 24.
Homi Bhabha . The Location of Culture . (London: Routledge, 1994): 53.
- 25.
Ibid., 54.
- 26.
Ibid., 71.
- 27.
Ibid., 56.
- 28.
Jacques Derrida , On the Name , trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995): 92.
- 29.
Plato , Timaeus , trans. R.G. Bury (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1929), 50c.
- 30.
Parmenides DK 6, Kingsley’s translation in Reality (Inverness: Golden Sufi Press, 2003), 83.
- 31.
Kingsley , Reality, 99–101 and notes on 565. The Ancient Greek word trihodos, literally “three ways,” refers to a crossroads shaped like a “Y” where a traveler must choose between two paths forward (“twin-heads ”).
- 32.
Mitchell Miller , “Ambiguity and Transport: Reflections on the Proem to Parmenides’ Poem,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 30, (2006): 3. “The goddess picks out or highlights ‘is’ by pointedly suppressing its subject (and, possibly, predicate). The effect is to reverse the usual order of the conspicuous and the inconspicuous: by eliding the normally conspicuous subject (and, possibly, predicate), the goddess brings the normally inconspicuous ‘is’ to the front and centre and challenges us to reflect upon it.”
- 33.
Parmenides poem DK 8, Kingsley’s translation in Reality, 190–191.
- 34.
Parmenides poem DK 7, Kingsley’s translation in Reality, 120.
- 35.
Karen Warren , “Quilting Ecofeminist Philosophy” in Environmental Ethics: Convergence and Divergence, eds. Richard G. Armstrong and Susan J. Boltzer (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004), 418.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Donna J. Haraway , Simians , Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books Ltd., 1991), 151–153.
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Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (2017). Introduction: Borderlands and Liminality Across Philosophy and Literature. In: Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (eds) Borderlands and Liminal Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_1
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