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.

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.

Other anthropologists have already done important work in de-essentializing the state. Reeves builds on their insights, confidently inserting her own analytical voice in the ongoing conversations. The book's main strength... lies in the author's exceptional weaving of theory with meticulous ethnographic detail.

Reeves's thorough analysis of the processes and practices of the socio-politics that comprise the continual creation and recreation of borders makes a significant contribution to the anthropological investigation of the state. Her close attention to the temporal trajectory leading to the current political complexities in the southern Ferghana Valley... make this book specifically valuable to specialists of Central Asia. In general, however, this clearly written book is of great interest to any lecturers and students interested in political anthropology, borderland studies, and globalization.

Reeves's fascinating insights on the Ferghana Valley borderlands bespeak of the systematic, long-term, on-site fieldwork that she has carried out, but also of her genuine personal interest and commitment to listen to and to understand the lives of her interlocutors. In the course of the book, we meet border guards, traders, farmers, taxi drivers, teachers, NGO workers, demobilized soldiers.... Her theoretically informed analysis draws on case studies from very different geographical and historical settings. This approach encourages comparison and makes the book relevant far beyond the field of Central Asian Studies.... Border Work is a brilliant ethnography which has much to offer to those interested in the state and its borders.

Reeves's book will be read with much interest not only by scholars of post-Soviet Central Asia, but also by those interested in borderland and borderscape, critical cartography, postcolonial geographies and anthropologies, gender studies (there is a good, short discussion on women, reproductive rights, and borders), and ethnographic modelling.... This book is a clarion call 'border work’ that stretches our disciplinary, gender, historical, and political worlds and imaginations. These are challenges for those in the social sciences and humanities, but also those who study ‘border’ healthcare, policy, security, development and environmental awareness.

Reeves puts this very rich ethnographic material into critical conversation with a broad range of theory, working across numerous boundaries of a different kind: those between academic disciplines. What emerges is an original argument about the productivity of borders: a rethinking, through the prism of these particular 'margins' of the state, of how space is turned into territory, how sovereignty is produced through daily impersonations and improvisations at the border, and how state-formation is forever a work-in-progress. Border Work is essential for anyone interested in theorising and critiquing the state and sovereignty, as well as for all students of the politics of space. It offers a set of novel, incisive arguments grounded in first-class ethnography. Finally, thanks to Reeves's light and elegant prose, the book is a page-turner. A must-read.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

George Gavrilis, author of The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries:

While many scholars study Central Asia through the political dynamics of cities and capitals, Madeleine Reeves ventures into the remotest corners of Batken and the Ferghana to craft a textured account of life in rural borderlands. Her book shows rural populations to be far more globalized and politically savvy than is often expected. Central Asian officials and development officials should take note.

Andrew Barry, author of Material Politics:

In this brilliant ethnography of the state, Madeleine Reeves shows us how a border can be materialized in particular moments and settings, ruptured and remade by everyday acts, and stabilized and destabilized by movements elsewhere. The border is a work in progress that can easily be undone. Border Work is wonderfully observed and beautifully written. It is a major contribution to our understanding of politics as event.

Jessica Pisano, The New School for Social Research, author of The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth:

Border Work is a fascinating and original fieldwork-based account of the making and remaking of borders in the Ferghana Valley. In this empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated book, borders are not taken as given, but are themselves objects of ethnographic inquiry. Such an approach permits Madeleine Reeves to construct a sustained critique of the ways in which politicians, scholars, and others conceptualize statehood, the making and performance of state power, and nationality.

Border Work is an extraordinary account of the relationship between the state and society.... Reeves successfully captures the messy history of territory and border construction during the twentieth-century in Soviet Central Asia.... Her deep engagement with the people of these border towns, coupled with her sophisticated theoretical analyses of gendered lives demonstrates the previously unexplored capabilities of the people of this region. This remarkable book enriches the scholarship on the study of borders by engaging everyday practices of rural populations and their interactions with authority figures.