Archaeologists without Borders

What does it mean to manage an archaeological heritage that is outside the neighborhood, the culture, or even the nation of the archaeologist manager?     

Borders and banknotes: the national perspective

Replacing a banknotes series is meaningful for politicians and the general public even today, while most transactions are executed through virtual means. The choice of images carried on banknotes represents the limits of the State's sovereign border and becomes a means of banal nationalism. Moreover, by utilising scopic regimes, the hegemony portrays the cultural and political borders: historical figures from the country's past on one side, and an imagined or physical border, expressed through the illustrations on the back. This paper addresses the latter and examines the case of the State of Israel. The analysis of sites and landscapes that appear on national banknotes can decipher the construction process of a ‘territorial identity’ which, along with struggles for maintaining identity, provides the basis of the nation‐state. Using Williams's typology of selective tradition, we argue that Israeli banknotes demonstrate a mixture of residual and new cultural content.     

Borders and belongings in Nordic feminisms and beyond

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with feminist grassroots groups and women’s organizations in a Nordic context, this article aims to explore how feminist enactments shape multiple layers of spatiality and belonging. I analyse autoethnographic reflections from two feminist events, both taking place in Malmö in June 2014. Rather than understanding Nordic feminisms as a stable object, I follow in this article the initiative of decolonial scholars to analyze how feminist communities are shaped by affects, enactments and inhabitations which both ‘speak back’ to located conditions and transgress beyond them. I use phenomenology in my engagement with the material and employ a palimpsestic reading mode to trace the multi-layered constructions of spatiality and belonging in feminist performances, identifications and affiliations. As affective value shaped the effects of surfaces or borders of bodies and spaces, theorizations on affect helped me to grasp how complex forms of belonging became entwined with particular performances of geography and history.     

Transcending Borders: Objects on the Move

Does the demand for archaeological artefacts in the legal marketplace in Israel increase the looting of archaeological sites in the region? Through the course of investigating this question it became apparent that while consumer demand may be at the heart of the trade in antiquities, the nature and driving forces behind looting are far more complex than is often understood. The motivations for looting involve notions of nationalism, the forces of globalism, conflicting preservation and management plans, colonialism, and long-entrenched traditional practices. It is an examination of this complexity (i.e. the multiple forms of and incentives for looting), which forms the focus of this paper. This is an exploration of the multivocality of the various agents who make it possible for objects to transcend borders.     

对剩余价值范畴的重新界定

传统政治经济学对剩余价值范畴的定义在其存在的条件、来源和剩余价值的分配等方面均过于狭窄,且界定时采用了非经济的标准,这既有悖于马克思的有关论述,也与当前的实际情况不完全吻合.本文以马克思的有关经典论述为依据,并结合经济生活的实际,对传统剩余价值范畴进行深入思考,以澄清人们的模糊认识.     

Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence against people on the move sits uncomfortably with the liberal, post-racial self-image of the European Union. Drawing upon the work of postcolonial scholars and theories of violence, we argue that the various violent technologies used by EU states against migrants embodies the inherent logics of liberal governance, whilst also reproducing liberalism’s tendency to overlook its racial limitations. By interrogating how and why border violence manifests we draw critical attention to the racialised ideologies within which it is predicated. This paper characterises the EU border regime as a form of “liberal violence” that seeks to elide both its violent nature and its racial underpinnings.     

Borrowing Across Borders: Migration and Microcredit in Rural Cambodia

This article explores an unexpected and overlooked consequence of the expansion of microcredit: how it interacts with migration patterns. Drawing on qualitative research in northwest Cambodia, this study explores the uses, meanings and implications of ‘migra‐loans’ — microcredit loans that are used in tandem with household strategies of international migration. Using microcredit in combination with migration allows households to immediately meet consumption goals and utilize the credit being actively promoted by microfinance institutions, while also retreating from insecure and less profitable local livelihood strategies. These strategies problematize expectations about the developmental potential of microcredit, and highlight the importance of local context in framing rural livelihood choices.     

远离古桥建新桥：江苏古桥保护模式

江苏古桥是江南大地上的历史文化符号,在现代城市建设中,珍视古桥是现代文明的重要标志,保护古桥就是保护一座城市的地标性建筑,也是保护物质文化遗产的一大要务。文物部门要为古桥保护把好脉,定好弦,水乡人要自觉地守护好自己的精神家园,使古桥与现代城镇建设和谐共存,相映生辉。     

Robert Frost's ambivalence: Borders and boundaries in poetic and political discourse

Phrases from Robert Frost's well-known poem “Mending Wall” are often used to frame discussions of borders in academic and political discourse. Used by some to justify the construction of physical barriers, others have used excerpts from the poem to fundamentally question the truism it appears to project. In light of recent interest in borders, our paper returns to Frost's full poem and its contexts in order to define, theorize, and critically mobilize what we take to be a useful ambivalence regarding fences. We use Frost's formulations to address the universal difficulty of moving beyond the borders of our daily lives, whether imposed at the edges of the nation-state, inscribed in our social relations, or inferred within the formal dimensions of a poem. Working at the crossroads of political geography, psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis we argue that addressing the central role of borders in our lives and Frost's deep ambivalence about fences and borders is a useful step in any political and aesthetic movement forward. We cannot be “good neighbors” in other words or even good co-inhabitants until and unless we acknowledge that we are ambivalent not only toward the Other, but also about the very concept of borders and boundaries itself. Ideas presented about ambivalence provide border scholars and political geographers with an opportunity to re-evaluate our positionality and recognize how our own humanity intersects with that of others.     

Riding Routes and Itinerant Borders: Autonomy of Migration and Border Externalization

Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, “Fortress Europe” continues to fail as an effective means of controlling irregular migration. As a consequence, European states are restructuring their border regimes by externalizing migration management to non‐EU countries beyond the border and creating new programs and policies to do so. Autonomy of Migration (AoM) offers a distinct way for thinking about border control mechanisms and goals of managing mobility. AoM does not read this off‐shoring of borders through the lens of centralized and coordinated state powers, but develops an autonomous gaze that supplements these institutional readings of apparatuses of capture with a view that takes as its starting point the ways in which border architectures, institutions, and policies interact with and react to the turbulence of migrant mobilities. By engaging current EU externalization policies, this paper illustrates the shifting relationship between border control and mobility.