ABSTRACT
Surprisingly, given the amount of attention afforded to current and historical nation building processes, anthropological inquiries into the nature and effects of borders themselves have been largely absent (see, though, Wilson and Donnan 1998a, 1998b, Donnan and Wilson 1999, Haller and Donnan 2000). Anthropologists mostly stress that cultures, the objects of their science, cannot be clearly demarcated. However, anthropological findings are often communicated in ways that reify the existence of specific “cultures.” Whether the cultures being investigated are geographically distinguishable (as in most “traditional” anthropological studies), are shared over great distances (as in studies of diasporic situations), or constitute flows and processes in a global context (a scientific endeavor, George Marcus has challenged anthropologists to pursue since 1998), most of these studies, often following in Barth’s footsteps (1969), treat cultural processes as demarcating practices.
