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 person hood, 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.

About the Author
Daphne Berdahl is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.


Book Information
ISBN 9780520214774
Author Daphne Berdahl
Format Paperback
Page Count 307
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 544g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm