| Where the World Ended: Re-Unification & Identity German Bo Contributor(s): Berdahl, Daphne (Author) |
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ISBN: 0520214773 ISBN-13: 9780520214774 Publisher: University of California Press OUR PRICE: $30.64 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 1999 Annotation: "Berdahl's vibrant book tackles core themes and weaves together pressing issues in dynamic ways. . . . It is theoretically sophisticated and well-written, [and] there are, to my knowledge, no books quite like this in the field at present. Its contribution will be original, its scholarship unquestioned."--Uli Linke, author of "Blood and Nation |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Law | International |
| Dewey: 341.42 |
| LCCN: 98007099 |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 5.9" W x 8.9" (1.00 lbs) 307 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 1990's - Cultural Region - Germany - Ethnic Orientation - German |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference? Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life-including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality-in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland. |