AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	86. Invited AEGIS panel: Borderlands Identities and Bureaucratic Practices: Emerging Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
Paper ID	733
Author(s)	Brambilla, Chiara
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	The study of borders involves an interdisciplinary reflection, able to keep its distance from the traditional approaches that view them as limits of sovereignty or naturalized and static lines. A new perspective is needed to reflect more sensitively upon the dynamic relations between the social and spatial that take place through borders. Borders, according to this reading, can not anymore be seen as a grid ordering the world mosaic, they should rather be considered as paradoxical structures that, created in order to separate and distinguish, become "continuously crossed" an expression of culture and territory multi-polarity, generating a transnational flow of narrations and images. Within this framework of reflection, this research focuses on the case of the African border between Angola and Namibia, offering a study of the structural and ideological constituents of it and its invention. But we will also try to reflect on its cultural and identity values, being sensitive to the ethnographies of daily life where borders are ultimately produced and reproduced. More precisely, the research looks at the territorial and human consequences of the Angola/Namibia border invention on the Kwanyama people, considering how a new borderland has taken and is currently taking shape. In particular, we discuss the discursive construction of identity and the role of border narratives in this process. In so doing, we deal with two narratives that express the Kwanyama identity along and across the border: the one constructed by traditional authorities and that of "common people" who live in the many villages divided by the border.

Borders and Identities / Border Identities: Invention of the Angola/Namibia border and the pluri-vocality of Kwanyama identity