Border Work

Drawing on extensive and carefully designed ethnographic fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley region, where the state borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikizstan and Uzbekistan intersect, Madeleine Reeves develops new ways of conceiving the state as a complex of relationships, and of state borders as socially constructed and in a constant state of flux. She explores the processes and relationships through which state borders are made, remade, interpreted and contested by a range of actors including politicians, state officials, border guards, farmers and people whose lives involve the crossing of the borders. In territory where international borders are not always clearly demarcated or consistently enforced, Reeves traces the ways in which states' attempts to establish their rule create new sources of conflict or insecurity for people pursuing their livelihoods in the area on the basis of older and less formal understandings of norms of access. As a result the book makes a major new and original contribution to scholarly work on Central Asia and more generally on the anthropology of border regions and the state as a social process. Moreover, the work as a whole is presented in a lively and accessible style. The individual lives whose tribulations and small triumphs Reeves so vividly documents, and the relationships she establishes with her subjects, are as revealing as they are engaging. Border Work is a well-deserved winner of this year’s Alexander Nove Prize.

In Border Work, Madeleine Reeves brings a granular ethnographic analysis to the daily practices that surround the border between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikstan as it snakes its way up and down through the remote Ferghana Valley.... She interprets the habitual transgressive acts of border-dwellers who negotiate, appeal to, assert, or bribe their way through the border not as acts of resistance towards a coherent sovereign state, but rather as participating in a particular kind of border work, in which the territorial state is both invoked and undermined.... An important contribution to the anthropology of borders., Madeleine Reeves does an excellent job of contextualizing the meaning of border and statehood. Perhaps most crucially, her work encourages reflections on how we might push further the collaboration between political anthropology and political science., Madeline Reeves' Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia is an important contribution to the literature on borders and borderland cultures. It also makes an important methodological contribution and presents to the reader what Clifford Geertz refers to as 'thick description’ of what goes into the making of a border. The most striking aspect of the book is the vivid descriptions of the complex geography in Central Asia, which is brought forth through a careful choice of words and articulated with the help of lucid semantics., Madeline Reeves's Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia details the intersections of interests, state authority, and boundaries between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan in the southern Ferghana region. Highlighting the urge to have determinant borders while remaining conflicted over "anxieties about what a demarcated and barbed wire–bounded state might mean in practice" (249), this work provides compelling insights into how residents of a border region reconstruct spatial realities while negotiating shifting economic, social, and political terrains. Through a wide variety of ethnographic portraits, detailed observations of changing market patterns, and the careful examination of residents’ constructing and adjusting perceptions of legality and illegality, Reeves’s account of this highly contentious region is able to delve deeply into a specific border region while maintaining theoretical linkages to the studies of boundaries, the limitations of state administrative control, identity, and mobility across the globe., Reeves embraces complexity, illustrating widely varied experiences of the border through captivating accounts of Tajiks and Kyrgyz who live in this zone of boundaries.... Reeves's engaging storytelIing and thoughtful analysis are compelling reasons for a wide audience of those interested in post-Soviet Central Asian states and peoples, as well as ethnographers, human geographers, and scholars of borders and frontiers.

Madeleine Reeves is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is the coauthor of Surviving the Transition? Case Studies of Schools and Schooling in the Kyrgyz Republic Since Independence, editor of Movement, Power and Place in Central Asia and Beyond: Contested Trajectories, and coeditor of Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics.