Where the World Ended - Re-Unification & Identity in the German Borderland (Paper)

1. Auflage 1999
ISBN: 978-0-520-21477-4
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 307 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 517 g

When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference?

Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life—including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality—in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Berdahl, Daphne

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Maps and Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction 1
1. The Village on the Border
2. Publicity, Secrecy, and the Politics of Everyday Life
3· The Seventh Station
4· Consuming Differences
5· Borderlands
6. Designing Women
7· The Dis-membered Border
Epilogue: The Tree of Unity

Glossary
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Daphne Berdahl is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.