open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/57845

Borders and Culture: Zones of Transition, Interaction and Identity

英語

2014

Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University

Eurasia Border Review

5(1)

41-57

In the twenty-first century, both culture and borders remain over-determined concepts in human efforts to imagine and comprehend a world that is increasingly characterized by both flows and barriers. Culture is everywhere yet nowhere; culture is an idea ever more produced and re-produced by society. Borders are expanding prodigiously worldwide yet people in global interaction are increasingly straddling borders. Geographers have contributed substantially to our understanding of how borders work in globalization and also to how borders and cultures interact. In this paper, I explore the intersection of borders and culture in three inherently geographical contexts displayed in the Canada-United States borderlands. The first is that culture inhabits the borderlands as well as the borderlines to display and express increasingly extended zones of transition beyond borders between states, regions and communities. The zones of transition have spatial characteristics and cultural signatures. Secondly, these borderlands landscapes convey the dialectic of cultural continuity and cultural discontinuity in a zone of interaction that is neither here nor there to confront the meaning of border. And, finally, in these borderlands, identity is formed and re-formed among those who claim indigeneity and others who cannot. Here, in the borderlands, pressures toward homogeneity in cultural identity vie with more extensive forces of heterogeneity to diffuse identities. Borderlands culture conveys plural expressions of identity and singular imperatives of belonging.

紀要論文

Version of Record

1884-9466

AA12497353