Sources and References

Primary textbooks — Khosravi, Shahram. 2010. Illegal Traveler: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Palgrave MacMillan. | De León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. University of California Press. | Kalman, Ian. 2021. Framing Borders: Principle and Practicality in the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory. University of Toronto Press.

Supplementary texts — Pelkmans, Mathijs. 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Cornell University Press. | Green, Sarah. 2012. “A Sense of Border.” In A Companion to Border Studies, edited by Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, 573–592. Wiley-Blackwell. | Fassin, Didier. 2011. “Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries: The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 213–226. | Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press. | Ben-Yehoyada, Naor. 2017. “Follow me, fishers of men: The Mediterranean as a Relational Frontier.” In The Mediterranean Frontier of Europe. | Lì, Darryl. 2020. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford University Press. | Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press. | Chu, Julie Y. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Duke University Press. | Andersson, Ruben. 2014. “Time and the Migrant Other: European Border Controls and the Temporal Economics of Illegality.” American Anthropologist 116(4): 795–809. | Obeid, Michelle. 2015. “Sovereignty at what price? The border and governance in Lebanon.” Contemporary Levant 1(1): 58–69. | Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Duke University Press. | Ticktin, Miriam. 2016. “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders.” Social Research 83(2): 255–271. | Gaibazzi, Paolo. 2015. “Frontiers of Exodus: Making Sense of Mobility in the Gambian Border Village of Kuli Kunda.” In The Art of Life in South Africa. | Ticktin, Miriam. 2018. “Borders: A Story of Political Imagination.” Social Text 36(3): 1–14. | Mignolo, Walter, and Madina Tlostanova. 2006. “Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge.” European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 205–221.

Online resources — Various open-access anthropological databases and research resources on border studies, political anthropology, and the ethnography of migration.

Chapter 1: Introduction to the Anthropology of Borders

Why Borders Matter to Anthropology

Borders are far more than lines on a map. They are lived realities, politically charged institutions, sites of violence and creativity, and deeply consequential structures that shape the possibilities of human life. For anthropology — a discipline committed to understanding human experience in all its cultural and political complexity — borders represent a uniquely productive object of study. They sit at the intersection of sovereignty and everyday life, of law and its transgression, of belonging and exclusion.

This course, Borders, Boundaries, and Crossings, approaches border studies from a distinctly anthropological vantage point. Rather than treating borders as fixed geographic features or merely as policy instruments, anthropologists attend to the ways borders are enacted, experienced, contested, and reproduced in daily practice. The anthropological study of borders is inherently ethnographic: it demands close attention to the lives of people who live near, cross, are stopped by, or are produced through borders. It asks how borders feel, how they are narrated, and how they shape subjectivities.

Boundaries Versus Borders

An important conceptual distinction organizes much of the course material: the difference between boundaries and borders. In the broadest terms, boundaries refer to social, symbolic, and cultural lines of differentiation — the categories through which groups distinguish themselves from one another (e.g., ethnic boundaries, religious boundaries, class boundaries). The classic anthropological treatment of boundaries comes from Fredrik Barth’s 1969 work on ethnic groups, where he argued that boundaries are maintained not by the content of cultural difference but through the social processes of boundary-making themselves.

Borders, by contrast, are more explicitly tied to territorial sovereignty and the apparatus of the state. Borders are boundaries that have been mapped onto territory, backed by legal force, and enforced through policing, walls, checkpoints, and documentary regimes. The relationship between boundaries and borders is neither simple nor static: symbolic boundaries can harden into territorial borders, and state borders can produce new forms of social boundary. A central task of the anthropology of borders is to trace these entanglements.

Ethnographic Reading and Thinking

One of the core learning objectives of this course is to develop ethnographically-oriented reading, research, and thinking skills. Ethnography — the extended, immersive study of social life in particular settings — is anthropology’s signature method and its primary mode of knowledge production. Reading ethnographically means attending not only to the arguments an author makes but also to the evidence they marshal, the voices they include, the situations they describe, and the positionality from which they write.

Several of the course’s key texts are themselves extended ethnographies: Khosravi’s auto-ethnography of his own border crossings, De León’s multi-year fieldwork along the U.S.-Mexico border, Kalman’s study of the Akwesasne Mohawk territory. Reading these texts requires grappling with the relationship between personal experience and structural analysis, between particular lives and general claims about how borders work.

Chapter 2: From Boundaries to Borders

Boundaries, Frontiers, and the Making of Difference

The transition from studying boundaries to studying borders marks a significant shift in the anthropological literature. Early anthropological interest in borders was largely subsumed within the study of ethnic and cultural boundaries. Anthropologists asked: how do groups come to see themselves as distinct from their neighbors? How are lines of inclusion and exclusion drawn and maintained?

Sarah Green’s influential essay “A Sense of Border” pushes this inquiry in a productive direction. Green argues that borders are not simply located at the edges of territories; rather, they produce a particular sense or feeling that permeates social life. Borders create what she calls a “sense of border” — an awareness of difference, of separation, of the possibility that things could be otherwise on the other side. This sense of border is not confined to the physical border zone itself. It can be felt in capital cities, in bureaucratic offices, in the everyday encounters between citizens and non-citizens. Green’s contribution is to show that borders are as much about perception and affect as they are about geography and law.

Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity

Mathijs Pelkmans’ ethnography Defending the Border provides a rich case study of how borders produce and transform social identities. Pelkmans conducted fieldwork in the Ajarian region of Georgia, along the border with Turkey. This border, drawn in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s formation and then redrawn after its collapse, cut through communities that had previously shared language, kinship networks, and religious practices.

Pelkmans demonstrates that the border between Georgia and Turkey was not merely a political line but a productive force. It generated new categories of identity (Christian Georgian versus Muslim Turk), new forms of loyalty (Soviet citizenship versus Ottoman subjecthood), and new patterns of everyday life. When the border was opened after the Cold War, Pelkmans observed a complex interplay of curiosity, nostalgia, suspicion, and economic opportunism on both sides. The border had done its work: even once it was physically traversable, the social and psychological divisions it had created persisted.

Pelkmans’ work complicates any simple narrative of borders as either barriers or bridges. Instead, he shows that borders operate on multiple registers simultaneously: they are political instruments, economic barriers, identity-producing machines, and sites of emotional investment. His ethnography is attentive to the temporal dimension of borders — how their effects accumulate over decades, shaping not just current interactions but inherited dispositions and memories.

Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries

Didier Fassin’s article “Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries” offers a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between state power and social differentiation. Fassin argues that border policing is not simply about controlling the movement of bodies across territorial lines. It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, about producing boundaries — creating and maintaining categorical distinctions between those who belong and those who do not.

Fassin draws on Foucauldian concepts of governmentality to analyze how immigration enforcement operates. Governmentality refers to the complex ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections through which populations are managed. In the context of immigration, governmentality operates through documentary regimes (passports, visas, residence permits), through policing practices (identity checks, raids, deportation), and through the production of knowledge about migrants (statistics, risk assessments, categorization schemes).

Fassin’s analysis has important implications for understanding how borders relate to race, class, and other forms of social inequality. He shows that border policing disproportionately affects racialized populations, even those who are citizens or legal residents. The border, experienced through identity checks and bureaucratic scrutiny, becomes a daily reality for some people while remaining invisible to others. This uneven distribution of border experiences is a recurring theme throughout the course.

Chapter 3: Borders and Legal-Political Regimes

Sovereignty, Law, and the Border

Borders are the material and symbolic infrastructure of sovereignty. The modern state system is premised on the idea that sovereignty is territorial: states exercise authority within defined borders, and borders mark the limits of that authority. But as anthropologists have shown, the relationship between sovereignty and borders is far more complicated than this model suggests. Sovereignty is not a given; it is a claim that must be continually performed, contested, and negotiated. Borders are among the most important sites where this work of sovereignty takes place.

Mohawk Interruptus: Sovereignty at the Colonial Border

Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus is one of the most important recent contributions to the anthropology of sovereignty and borders. Simpson, herself a Kahnawake Mohawk, examines how Mohawk political life is lived “across the borders of settler states” — specifically, across the U.S.-Canada border that bisects Mohawk territory.

Chapter 5 of Mohawk Interruptus focuses on the concept of refusal as a political and analytical strategy. Simpson argues that Mohawk people refuse the authority of both the Canadian and American states to define their identity and regulate their movement. This refusal is enacted at the border itself, where Mohawk individuals may insist on using Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) passports rather than Canadian or U.S. documents, and in everyday political life, where Mohawk governance structures operate alongside and sometimes against state institutions.

Simpson’s work raises fundamental questions about the nature of borders in settler colonial contexts. The U.S.-Canada border is not simply a line between two sovereign states; it is a colonial imposition that disrupts pre-existing Indigenous political geographies. When Mohawk people cross this border, they are not simply moving between two foreign jurisdictions; they are moving within their own territory. The border, from a Mohawk perspective, is an illegitimate intrusion — a daily reminder of the dispossession that underlies the settler colonial order.

The Mediterranean as Relational Frontier

Naor Ben-Yehoyada’s work on Mediterranean fishermen offers a strikingly different case study of the relationship between borders and legal-political regimes. Ben-Yehoyada examines how Sicilian fishermen navigate the maritime borders of the Mediterranean, where national jurisdictions overlap with international waters, European Union regulations, and customary fishing practices.

The Mediterranean, as Ben-Yehoyada shows, is not a border in the conventional sense — it is not a line but a space, and a deeply relational one at that. Fishermen’s practices create connections across national boundaries even as state authorities seek to enforce them. Ben-Yehoyada’s concept of the “relational frontier” captures this dynamic: the Mediterranean is a zone of contact, exchange, and mutual entanglement that cannot be reduced to the borders that states project upon it.

This case study illuminates a crucial point about borders and law: legal regimes are not simply imposed from above but are enacted, interpreted, and sometimes subverted by the people who live within them. Fishermen develop practical knowledge of where borders are, how they are enforced, and when they can be safely crossed. This practical border knowledge — what might be called a vernacular jurisprudence — is an important object of anthropological inquiry.

Jihad, Empire, and Transnational Legal Orders

Darryl Lì’s The Universal Enemy examines the lives of foreign fighters in the Bosnian War, tracing how these individuals navigated multiple and sometimes contradictory legal-political orders. Chapter 7 explores how borders and legal regimes intersect with transnational ideologies of solidarity, particularly Islamic universalism.

Lì demonstrates that the fighters he studies did not simply cross borders; they inhabited a world in which multiple sovereignty claims — state, imperial, religious — coexisted and competed. The Bosnian case reveals how borders can be simultaneously hard (enforced through military checkpoints and international sanctions) and soft (permeable to flows of ideology, money, and combatants). Lì’s work pushes the anthropology of borders beyond its typical focus on migration and labor to encompass questions of war, ideology, and the limits of the international legal order.

Chapter 4: (Il-)legal Economies of Human Circulation

Border as Method

Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s Border as Method is a foundational theoretical text for contemporary border studies. In Chapter 1, they propose that borders should be understood not as objects of study but as a method — a lens through which to analyze broader processes of capitalism, sovereignty, and subjectivity. Their central argument is that borders are sites of the multiplication of labor: rather than simply blocking or permitting movement, borders create differentiated legal statuses (citizen, permanent resident, temporary worker, undocumented migrant) that produce a hierarchically segmented labor force.

This theoretical framework has profound implications for how we understand migration. Rather than seeing migration as a movement from one side of a border to the other, Mezzadra and Neilson encourage us to see borders as ongoing processes that accompany migrants throughout their journeys and settlement. The border is not left behind at the checkpoint; it travels with the migrant in the form of legal status, documented or undocumented identity, and the precarity that comes with differential inclusion.

Cosmologies of Credit: Desire, Mobility, and Destination

Julie Chu’s Cosmologies of Credit offers an ethnographic study of emigration from Longyan, a rural area in Fujian Province, China. Chapter 3 examines the complex economic and spiritual economies that surround transnational mobility. Chu shows that migration from Longyan to the United States and other destinations is embedded within local cosmologies — systems of meaning that connect mobility to moral worth, social status, and cosmic order.

In Longyan, the desire to migrate is not simply a rational response to economic deprivation. It is intertwined with local understandings of fate, fortune, and the moral economy of debt and credit. Families invest enormous resources — financial, social, and spiritual — in sending members abroad. These investments create complex chains of obligation and expectation that bind migrants to their home communities even as they move across borders.

Chu’s ethnography complicates the dominant frameworks for understanding migration, which tend to emphasize either push factors (poverty, violence) or pull factors (economic opportunity, freedom). Instead, she shows that migration is motivated by locally specific desires and cosmological understandings that cannot be reduced to utilitarian calculation. The border, in Chu’s account, is not simply a barrier to be crossed but a threshold within a larger moral and cosmological landscape.

Time and the Migrant Other

Ruben Andersson’s article “Time and the Migrant Other” examines the temporal dimensions of European border control. Andersson argues that border enforcement does not simply operate in space — blocking movement across territorial lines — but also in time. Border regimes produce distinctive temporal experiences for those who are subjected to them: waiting, detention, deportation, and the perpetual uncertainty of undocumented life.

This temporal analysis adds an important dimension to the study of borders. It shows that borders do not only separate spaces but also produce distinctive temporalities. The experience of crossing a border is fundamentally different for a business traveler with a valid passport than for an undocumented migrant hiding in the back of a truck. These differential temporalities — speed versus stasis, predictability versus uncertainty — are themselves forms of inequality that borders produce and maintain.

Chapter 5: Borders in War and Postwar Times

Sovereignty at What Price?

Michelle Obeid’s article on the Lebanese border examines how sovereignty operates in conditions of state fragility and contested authority. Lebanon’s borders — with Syria, Israel, and the Mediterranean — have been sites of intense political and military conflict throughout the country’s history. Obeid asks: what does sovereignty mean in a context where the state’s capacity to control its borders is deeply compromised?

Obeid’s ethnographic material reveals that sovereignty at the Lebanese border is not a binary condition (present or absent) but a negotiated practice. Local communities, political factions, and armed groups all participate in the production and contestation of sovereign authority at the border. The Lebanese state’s claim to sovereignty over its territory coexists with — and is sometimes challenged by — alternative sovereignty claims made by Hezbollah, by Palestinian refugees, and by the geopolitical interventions of neighboring states.

This case study underscores an important theoretical point: sovereignty is not a property that states possess but a claim that they perform. And borders are among the most important stages on which this performance takes place. When a state controls its borders effectively, it performs sovereignty convincingly; when it loses control of its borders, its sovereignty claim is weakened. But as Obeid shows, “losing control” is itself a complex and politically charged judgment — one that different actors may assess very differently.

The Make-Believe Space: Affect and the Postwar Border

Yael Navaro-Yashin’s The Make-Believe Space examines the affective dimensions of life in northern Cyprus, a territory that has existed in a state of political liminality since the Turkish military intervention of 1974. Chapter 6 focuses on the concept of affect as it relates to borders and territorial sovereignty.

Northern Cyprus is a “make-believe space” in Navaro-Yashin’s analysis: it is a territory with its own government, institutions, and daily routines, yet it is recognized as a sovereign state by virtually no one except Turkey. This condition of unrecognized sovereignty produces distinctive affective experiences for the people who live there — a pervasive sense of unreality, of being trapped in a political fiction that nevertheless constitutes their everyday world.

Navaro-Yashin’s work extends the anthropology of borders into the domain of emotion and subjectivity. She shows that borders produce not only legal categories and political structures but also feelings — feelings of belonging and alienation, of legitimacy and illegitimacy, of home and exile. These affective dimensions are often overlooked in policy-oriented border studies, but they are central to how borders are experienced by the people who live with them.

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders

Miriam Ticktin’s article “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders” critically examines the relationship between humanitarianism and border regimes. Ticktin argues that humanitarian interventions at borders — rescue operations, refugee camps, asylum procedures — do not simply mitigate the violence of border enforcement but are themselves implicated in the production and maintenance of border regimes.

Ticktin shows that the humanitarian framework constructs migrants as either victims (worthy of compassion and assistance) or threats (deserving of detention and deportation). This binary categorization mirrors and reinforces the legal distinction between refugees and economic migrants, between those with legitimate claims to cross borders and those without. Humanitarianism, in Ticktin’s analysis, does not challenge the border regime; it provides the moral vocabulary through which the border regime justifies itself.

Chapter 6: Framing the Border of Settler Colonial States

Akwesasne and the Colonial Border

Ian Kalman’s Framing Borders provides an ethnographic study of the Akwesasne Mohawk territory, which straddles the borders of Ontario, Quebec, and New York State — and thus the international boundary between Canada and the United States. Chapters 1, 6, and 7 develop Kalman’s central argument about the framing of borders: the ways in which borders are interpreted, negotiated, and given meaning by the communities that live with them.

Akwesasne is a particularly revealing site for the study of borders because it is subject to multiple, overlapping jurisdictions. Mohawk residents must navigate not only the U.S.-Canada border but also provincial, state, and tribal governance structures. This jurisdictional complexity creates both challenges and opportunities: it complicates everyday activities like shopping, working, and visiting family, but it also creates spaces for Mohawk assertions of sovereignty and self-determination.

Principle and Practicality

Kalman’s concept of framing refers to the ways in which Mohawk residents of Akwesasne interpret and respond to the border that bisects their territory. He identifies a productive tension between principle and practicality in these framings. On the level of principle, many Mohawk residents reject the legitimacy of the colonial border entirely. They assert that Akwesasne is Mohawk territory, governed by Mohawk law, and that the U.S.-Canada border is an illegitimate imposition that violates their inherent sovereignty.

On the level of practicality, however, Mohawk residents must navigate the border on a daily basis. This practical navigation involves a range of strategies: carrying multiple forms of identification, timing crossings to avoid long waits, developing relationships with border agents, and cultivating knowledge of the rules and rhythms of border enforcement. These practical strategies do not necessarily imply acceptance of the border’s legitimacy; they represent a pragmatic accommodation to a reality that cannot simply be wished away.

Kalman’s ethnography resonates strongly with Simpson’s work on refusal. Both authors show that Indigenous sovereignty claims persist in the face of settler state impositions, and that the colonial border is experienced by Indigenous peoples not as a natural feature of the political landscape but as an ongoing act of dispossession. But Kalman adds a crucial dimension by attending to the practical, everyday negotiations through which Mohawk residents manage the tension between principled rejection and pragmatic accommodation.

Settler Colonialism and Border Studies

The Akwesasne case highlights a broader challenge for the anthropology of borders: the need to incorporate settler colonial perspectives into border analysis. Much of the border studies literature focuses on borders between nation-states, treating these states as given entities whose borders are to be analyzed. But settler colonial theory reminds us that many state borders were established through processes of Indigenous dispossession, and that the sovereignty these borders perform is itself built on the denial of prior Indigenous sovereignty.

This recognition has important implications for how we think about borders, sovereignty, and justice. If state borders are colonial impositions, then border enforcement is not simply an exercise of legitimate sovereignty but a continuation of colonial violence. And if Indigenous sovereignty is prior to and independent of settler state sovereignty, then the border is not the limit of sovereignty but the site of its contestation.

Chapter 7: Smuggling, Hospitality, and Autoethnography

Shahram Khosravi’s Auto-Ethnography

Shahram Khosravi’s Illegal Traveler is a distinctive contribution to the anthropology of borders. It is an auto-ethnography: a work that uses the author’s own experiences as the primary ethnographic material. Khosravi, an Iranian-born anthropologist based in Sweden, draws on his personal history of border crossing — including an unauthorized crossing from Iran to Pakistan as a young man — to develop a broader analysis of borders, illegality, and the experience of being an “illegal traveler.”

The auto-ethnographic method raises important questions about positionality, objectivity, and the relationship between personal experience and structural analysis. Khosravi does not claim that his experience is representative; rather, he uses it as a starting point for theoretical reflection on the nature of borders and the production of illegality. His personal narrative is woven together with historical analysis, theoretical argument, and the stories of other migrants he has encountered in his research.

The Production of Illegality

In the Introduction and Chapters 1 through 3, Khosravi develops a detailed analysis of how borders produce illegality. He argues that illegality is not a property of individuals but a product of legal and political systems. People do not become “illegal” through any inherent quality; they become illegal through the operation of visa regimes, immigration laws, and border enforcement practices that construct some forms of movement as authorized and others as unauthorized.

Khosravi’s account of his own border crossing is vivid and harrowing. He describes the physical dangers of unauthorized movement — crossing deserts, evading border patrols, relying on smugglers — and the psychological toll of living in a state of perpetual vulnerability. But he also describes moments of unexpected kindness: the hospitality of strangers, the solidarity of fellow travelers, the small acts of resistance that make unauthorized movement possible.

Smuggling and Hospitality

Khosravi’s treatment of smuggling is particularly nuanced. He resists the dominant narrative that casts smugglers as uniformly predatory criminals. While acknowledging the exploitation and violence that can characterize smuggling operations, Khosravi also shows that smuggling networks often operate according to their own moral codes and social logics. In some contexts, facilitating unauthorized border crossing is understood not as a criminal act but as an act of hospitality — an extension of the moral obligation to assist travelers in need.

This framing challenges the criminalization of migration facilitation that characterizes most state responses to unauthorized border crossing. If smuggling can be understood as a form of hospitality, then the legal framework that criminalizes it is not simply enforcing the law but imposing a particular moral vision — one that prioritizes state sovereignty over human solidarity. Khosravi’s analysis does not romanticize smuggling, but it does insist that we understand it within its social and moral context rather than through the lens of criminal law alone.

The concept of hospitality connects Khosravi’s work to a broader philosophical tradition. Jacques Derrida’s distinction between conditional hospitality (hospitality that is offered on terms set by the host) and unconditional hospitality (hospitality that is offered without conditions) provides a useful framework for thinking about borders and welcome. State immigration policies represent a form of conditional hospitality: they offer welcome to some (skilled workers, investors, approved refugees) while excluding others. The unauthorized border crosser, by entering without invitation, challenges this conditional hospitality and raises the question of whether a more unconditional welcome is possible.

Chapter 8: Invisible Borders, Home, and Exile

Beyond the Territorial Border

In Chapters 4 through 7 and the Coda of Illegal Traveler, Khosravi extends his analysis beyond the physical act of border crossing to examine the invisible borders that follow migrants into their new lives. Even after arriving in a destination country, migrants continue to encounter borders in the form of bureaucratic procedures, legal status distinctions, social exclusion, and racial discrimination.

Khosravi introduces the concept of the border within: the internalized sense of illegitimacy and vulnerability that unauthorized migrants carry with them. This inner border is produced by the constant threat of detection, detention, and deportation. It shapes how migrants move through space (avoiding certain areas, certain times of day, certain interactions with authorities), how they present themselves (concealing their origins, their accents, their histories), and how they relate to others (maintaining secrecy, limiting trust, living in social isolation).

Home and Exile

Khosravi’s reflections on home and exile are among the most poignant passages in Illegal Traveler. He explores the paradox of exile: the exiled person is simultaneously attached to a home that is no longer accessible and forced to make a new home in a place that may never fully accept them. This double displacement — from the homeland and within the host country — produces a distinctive experience of belonging and unbelonging.

The concept of home is itself complicated by border crossing. For Khosravi, home is not a fixed place but a set of relationships, memories, and attachments that are both sustained and transformed by displacement. The exile carries home within them even as they are separated from it. And the new country, however long one lives there, may never fully become home if the border — in its legal, social, and psychological dimensions — continues to mark one as a stranger.

Khosravi’s auto-ethnography also addresses the experience of obtaining legal status and eventually citizenship. One might expect that legalization would resolve the experience of border-ness, but Khosravi shows that this is not necessarily the case. Even with papers, the formerly undocumented migrant may continue to feel the border within — a residual sense of vulnerability, of conditional belonging, of being tolerated rather than welcomed. The border, once experienced, leaves its marks on the body and the psyche.

Chapter 9: Violence and Border-Crossing

The Land of Open Graves

Jason De León’s The Land of Open Graves is a powerful ethnography of unauthorized migration across the U.S.-Mexico border. De León conducted extensive fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, where U.S. border enforcement policy has deliberately funneled unauthorized migrants into the most dangerous and remote terrain. The result, De León argues, is a system of structural violence that uses the desert itself as a weapon against migrants.

In the Introduction and Chapters 1 through 3, De León lays out his central analytical framework. He introduces the concept of the “Prevention Through Deterrence” (PTD) policy, which has been the backbone of U.S. border enforcement strategy since the mid-1990s. PTD works by sealing off relatively safe and accessible crossing points (such as those in urban areas), thereby forcing migrants to cross through increasingly dangerous terrain. The logic of PTD is that the dangers of the crossing will deter future migrants.

The Desert as a Weapon

De León draws on the concept of necroviolence — violence performed on dead bodies — to analyze what happens to migrants who die in the desert. The Sonoran Desert is not a neutral landscape; it is an active agent in the border enforcement apparatus. Extreme heat, lack of water, and exposure to the elements kill migrants, and then the desert environment destroys their bodies — through decomposition, animal scavenging, and scattering of remains. This destruction of the body is a form of violence that continues after death, making identification difficult and denying families the possibility of recovering and mourning their dead.

De León’s archaeological methodology adds a distinctive dimension to his ethnography. As a trained archaeologist, De León conducts systematic surveys of the desert landscape, documenting the material traces left by migrants: water bottles, backpacks, clothing, personal effects, and human remains. These traces constitute what De León calls the material record of migration — a physical archive of the journeys, sufferings, and deaths that the border produces.

Ethnographic and Archaeological Methods

De León’s combination of ethnographic and archaeological methods is a significant methodological contribution to border studies. Ethnography allows him to document the lived experiences of migrants — their motivations, strategies, fears, and hopes. Archaeology allows him to document the material consequences of migration — the objects, landscapes, and bodies that border crossing produces.

This dual methodology is important because it captures dimensions of the border experience that neither method alone could access. Ethnographic interviews reveal migrants’ subjective experiences, but they are limited to the perspectives of those who survive the crossing. Archaeology reveals the traces of those who did not survive, giving voice (however indirectly) to the dead. Together, these methods produce a more complete picture of the violence that the U.S.-Mexico border inflicts on unauthorized migrants.

Chapter 10: Traces and Undocumented Migration

The Material Culture of Border Crossing

In Chapters 4 and 5 of The Land of Open Graves, De León deepens his analysis of the material culture of migration. He examines the objects that migrants carry with them across the desert: backpacks, food, water, medicine, clothing, identification documents, family photographs, and religious items. These objects are not merely utilitarian; they carry emotional and symbolic significance. They represent migrants’ connections to home, their hopes for the future, and their strategies for survival.

De León’s archaeological surveys reveal massive accumulations of migrant belongings in the desert — what he calls artifact scatters. These scatters mark the places where migrants rested, where they discarded heavy or unnecessary items, where they changed clothes to blend in after crossing, and where they were apprehended by Border Patrol. The scatters constitute a material archive of border crossing, recording patterns of movement, strategy, and abandonment that complement and complicate the narratives gathered through ethnographic interviews.

The Station and the Shelter

Chapter 7 of The Land of Open Graves examines the institutional infrastructure of the border enforcement apparatus, focusing on Border Patrol processing stations and migrant shelters. De León documents the dehumanizing conditions in Border Patrol facilities — the overcrowding, the cold temperatures, the inadequate food and water — and the contrasting warmth and solidarity of the shelters operated by humanitarian organizations on the Mexican side of the border.

These institutional spaces represent different ways of encountering the border. The Border Patrol station is a space of sovereign power, where migrants are processed, categorized, and removed. The shelter is a space of care, where migrants are fed, clothed, and supported as they recover from the crossing or prepare for another attempt. The juxtaposition of these spaces illustrates the broader tension between enforcement and humanitarianism that characterizes the U.S.-Mexico border regime.

Chapter 11: Ramifications of Crossing and Researching the Border

The Human Costs of Border Enforcement

In Chapters 8, 10, and 11, and the Epilogue of The Land of Open Graves, De León examines the broader ramifications of the U.S.-Mexico border regime — for migrants, for their families, and for the communities on both sides of the border. He documents the lasting physical and psychological effects of the crossing: injuries, illness, trauma, and the grief of those who have lost loved ones in the desert.

Chapter 10 centers on the story of Maricela, a young woman whose body was found in the desert. De León traces Maricela’s journey from her hometown in Ecuador, through Central America and Mexico, to the Sonoran Desert, where she died of heat exposure. Maricela’s story is told in vivid, painful detail — not to sensationalize her death but to insist on her humanity in the face of a system that renders migrants anonymous and disposable.

The Ethics of Border Research

The Epilogue of The Land of Open Graves reflects on the ethical challenges of researching the border. De León acknowledges the discomfort and moral complexity of his position as a researcher: he documents suffering that he cannot prevent, he builds an academic career on the stories of people whose lives are shaped by violence and deprivation, and he makes representational choices that have political consequences.

De León’s ethical reflections touch on broader questions about the politics of ethnographic representation. Who has the right to tell stories of border violence? How should researchers navigate the power asymmetries between themselves and the people they study? What obligations do researchers have to the communities that share their lives with them? These questions do not have easy answers, but De León’s willingness to engage with them honestly is itself a contribution to the methodology of border studies.

The combination of ethnographic, archaeological, and forensic methods that De León employs also raises questions about evidence and truth in border studies. The desert is simultaneously a site of death and a site of evidentiary destruction: the same processes that kill migrants also destroy the evidence of their deaths. De León’s methodology is in part an attempt to recover this evidence — to make visible what the border regime seeks to render invisible.

Chapter 12: Borders and Political Imagination

Frontiers of Exodus

Paolo Gaibazzi’s “Frontiers of Exodus” examines how borders and mobility are understood in a Gambian border village. Gaibazzi shows that for the residents of Kuli Kunda, the border is not primarily a barrier but a threshold — a site of possibility and transformation. Emigration is understood not as escape from an intolerable situation but as a morally loaded journey with spiritual dimensions.

Gaibazzi’s ethnography reveals that the meaning of borders is not fixed but varies across cultural contexts. In Western policy discourse, borders are typically understood in terms of control and security. In Kuli Kunda, borders are understood in terms of destiny, adventure, and moral development. This divergence of meaning has important implications for border policy: it suggests that the assumptions underlying Western border enforcement — that migration is driven by deprivation and can be deterred by danger — may not hold across cultural contexts.

A Story of Political Imagination

Miriam Ticktin’s “Borders: A Story of Political Imagination” offers a sweeping historical and theoretical reflection on the concept of borders. Ticktin argues that borders are products of political imagination: they are not natural features of the landscape but human creations that reflect and enforce particular visions of political order.

Ticktin traces the historical development of borders from the Westphalian state system of the seventeenth century through the colonial partitions of Africa and Asia to the contemporary border regimes of Europe and North America. She shows that borders have always been political projects — attempts to impose order on messy, fluid, and contested geographies. And she argues that they have always produced resistance: people have never simply accepted the borders imposed upon them but have found ways to cross, subvert, and reimagine them.

Theorizing from the Borders

Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova’s “Theorizing from the Borders” provides a decolonial perspective on border studies. They argue that the dominant frameworks of social theory — including much of the border studies literature — reproduce the epistemological assumptions of Western modernity. These assumptions include the universality of the nation-state model, the naturalization of territorial sovereignty, and the privileging of European intellectual traditions.

Mignolo and Tlostanova propose an alternative: border thinking, a mode of theorizing that takes the perspectives of those who inhabit the borders of the modern/colonial world system as its starting point. Border thinking does not accept the categories of Western modernity as given but interrogates them from the standpoint of those who have been subjected to colonial power.

Border thinking connects the anthropological study of borders to broader critiques of colonialism, capitalism, and Eurocentrism. It suggests that the borders we study are not simply contemporary political arrangements but products of a long history of colonial world-making. Understanding borders, from this perspective, requires understanding the colonial history that produced them — and imagining alternatives that do not reproduce colonial logics of exclusion and domination.

Toward a Critical Anthropology of Borders

The readings in this final chapter collectively suggest that the anthropology of borders is not merely an academic exercise but a form of political engagement. By documenting the violence of border regimes, amplifying the voices of those who are marginalized by borders, and imagining alternatives to the current order, anthropologists contribute to a broader project of social justice.

This critical orientation does not mean that anthropologists should abandon scholarly rigor in favor of advocacy. Rather, it means that the questions anthropologists ask, the methods they employ, and the frameworks they develop are always already political. The choice to study borders is a choice to engage with some of the most pressing questions of our time: who has the right to move? Who has the right to stay? How should the boundaries of political community be drawn? And who gets to decide?

These questions do not have easy answers, and the anthropological literature on borders does not pretend to resolve them. But it does offer something valuable: a set of ethnographically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and ethically engaged perspectives that challenge simplistic narratives and insist on the complexity of borders as lived realities.

Chapter 13: Synthesis — Key Themes and Debates

Sovereignty and Its Limits

Throughout the course, sovereignty emerges as a central and contested concept. The readings reveal that sovereignty is not a fixed property of states but a claim that is performed, contested, and variously experienced. Simpson and Kalman show that Indigenous sovereignty persists beneath and against the sovereign claims of settler states. Obeid shows that sovereignty can be fragmented and negotiated even within a single state. De León shows that sovereignty is performed through the violence of border enforcement. And Mezzadra and Neilson show that sovereignty is entangled with capitalism in ways that complicate any simple narrative of state control.

The Production of Difference

Borders do not simply separate pre-existing differences; they actively produce differences. Pelkmans demonstrates this with particular clarity: the Georgian-Turkish border created the ethnic and religious categories it was supposed to reflect. Fassin shows that border policing produces the social boundaries between citizens and non-citizens. Khosravi shows that immigration law produces the category of the “illegal” migrant. These insights challenge common-sense understandings of borders as natural divisions and reveal them as instruments of social engineering.

Violence and Care

The readings consistently document the violence of border regimes — physical violence (death in the desert, police brutality, war), structural violence (poverty, exploitation, legal precarity), and symbolic violence (dehumanization, stigmatization, erasure). But they also document the forms of care that emerge in response to border violence: the hospitality of strangers, the solidarity of fellow migrants, the work of humanitarian organizations, and the resilience of border communities. The tension between violence and care is a recurring theme that resists easy resolution.

Method and Ethics

Finally, the course raises important questions about the methods and ethics of border research. Auto-ethnography (Khosravi), multi-sited ethnography (De León, Kalman), archaeological methods (De León), and decolonial critique (Mignolo and Tlostanova, Simpson) represent different approaches to the challenge of studying borders. Each method has its strengths and limitations, and each raises its own ethical dilemmas. The choice of method is never purely technical; it is always also a political and ethical decision about whose voices to amplify, whose perspectives to center, and what forms of knowledge to privilege.

The anthropology of borders, as presented in this course, is a field defined not by consensus but by productive disagreement. The readings do not converge on a single theory of borders; rather, they offer multiple, sometimes competing perspectives that together illuminate the complexity of borders as political institutions, lived realities, and objects of scholarly inquiry. This pluralism is not a weakness but a strength: it reflects the irreducible complexity of the phenomena under study and the richness of the anthropological tradition that engages with them.