CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Urbanowicz, Roman |
|---|---|
| Title | A Nonsense of Border and Ontologies in the Making: Production of Difference on the Belarusian-Lithuanian Borderland |
| Summary | Although the fact that borders themselves do not reflect pre-existing divisions, but rather produce them is well established in anthropology, the particular mechanics of the border work upon the production of differences is not so often examined. It is especially true if difference and differentiation are conceived at the level of optics – entailing emerging and circulating classifications and conceptions of (in)commensurability – instead of representations. The state border between Belarus and Lithuania, in many of its parts inhabited by Polish population from both sides, constitutes a distinctive example of a restricted geopolitical border – the external one of the EU – that replaced clearly formal and not corresponding to any existed cultural division – yet not inconsequential – administrative line from the Soviet times. The local effect of the state-work in the production of estrangement is examined in the thesis, as well as the circulating notions of the meaning(lessness) of the border. One scrutinised dimension of this process is the emotional experience of the factual separation, established by restrictive visa regimes and border control. On the other hand, emotional modalities, through which personal experiences of the divide are expressed, are tightly interconnected with ‘the sense of border’ at its ideational level. This, in turn, leads to further exploration of the dynamics of the popular conceptualisation of the emerged difference, expressed through the vocabulary of ‘civilizational’ and geopolitical meanings produced by the states and utilised by popular political imagination. Further on, possibiliеties of critical engagement with both existing scholarship on post-socialist borders and the ontological turn in anthropology are outlined. The thesis is based on fieldwork materials, collected in July-September 2016 in Žagarai, Lithuania, and in April 2018 in Rojsty, Belarus – two towns in the distance of 18 km, separated by the state border. |
| Supervisor | Monterescu, Daniel; Geva, Dorit |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/urbanowicz_roman.pdf |
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