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Deepening Divides

Deepening Divides

How Physical Borders and Social Boundaries Delineate our World

Edited by Didier Fassin

Series: Anthropology, Culture and Society

A non-Eurocentric, interdisciplinary collection arguing that boundaries and borders are best understood as overlapping categories.
At a glance, 'borders' and 'boundaries' may seem synonymous. But in the real (geopolitical) world, they coexist as distinct, albeit overlapping entities: the former a state's delimitation of territory; the latter the social delineation of differences.

The refugee crisis in Europe showed how racial and ethnic boundaries are often instrumentalised to justify the strengthening of state borders - regardless of the cost in human life. But there are other, less tragic, examples that illustrate this overlapping as well, and ultimately demonstrate that the oft-differentiated spheres of borders and boundaries are best understood through their relationship to one another.

Deepening Divides explores this relationship from many distinct perspectives and national contexts, with case studies covering five continents and drawing on anthropology, gender studies, law, political science and sociology for a truly interdisciplinary collection.


This book is available to download through the Open Access programme.

Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is the author of numerous books including The Will to Punish (2018), Life: A Critical Users Manual (2018), Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (2016) and Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing.

1. Introduction: Connecting Borders and Boundaries - Didier Fassin
PART I: POLITICAL AND MORAL ECONOMIES
2. What Money Can Buy: Citizenship by Investment on a Global Scale - Kristin Surak
3. Monitoring International Labor Precarity: The State Management of Migrant Domestic Workers - Rhacel Parreñas
4. When Migrants Claim Blood Kinship: Constructing Hierarchies of Human Worth - Ays¸e Parla
5. Family Resemblances: Binational Marriage, Muslim “Communalism,” and the Patriarchal State - Mayanthi Fernando
PART II: LEGAL DISBARRING
6. An Earlier Ban: Chinese Exclusion and Plenary Power - Mae Ngai
7. Manners of Exclusion: From the Asiatic Barred Zone to the Muslim Ban - Sherally Munshi
8. Brave New Worlds: The Racial Regimes of the Americas - Michael Hanchard
9. The Outlawed: Landscapes of Human Rights - Tugba Basaran
PART III: CREATING SPACES
10. Protection: Sanctuary and the Contested Ethics of Presence in the United States - Linda Bosniak
11. Ruination and Rebuilding: The Precarious Place of a Border Town in Gaza - Ilana Feldman
12. Symmetry and Affinity: Comparing Borders and Border-Making Processes in Africa - Paul Nugent
Notes on Contributors
Index

Published by Pluto Press in Dec 2019
Paperback ISBN: 9780745340432

135mm x 215mm