Description:
Through an ethnography of social and spatial practice at the limits of the state, this book explores the contested work of producing and policing territorial integrity when significant stretches of new international borders remain to be conclusively demarcated or effectively policed.
Brief description: Madeleine Reeves is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is the coauthor of Surviving the Transition? Case Studies of Schools and Schooling in the Kyrgyz Republic Since Independence, editor of Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia and Beyond: Contested Trajectories, and coeditor of Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics.
Review Quotes:
Reeves's fascinating insights on the Ferghana Valley borderlands bespeak of the systematic, long-term, on-site fieldwork that she has carried out, but also of her genuine personal interest and commitment to listen to and to understand the lives of her interlocutors. In the course of the book, we meet border guards, traders, farmers, taxi drivers, teachers, NGO workers, demobilized soldiers.... Her theoretically informed analysis draws on case studies from very different geographical and historical settings. This approach encourages comparison and makes the book relevant far beyond the field of Central Asian Studies.... Border Work is a brilliant ethnography which has much to offer to those interested in the state and its borders.
-- "Society and Space"