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Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (Hardcover)
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Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History (Hardcover)
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Despite a half century of attempts by social scientists to compare
frontiers around the world, the study of these regions is still
closely associated with the nineteenth-century American West and
the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. As a result, the very concept
of the frontier is bound up in Victorian notions of manifest
destiny and rugged individualism. The frontier, it would seem, has
been tamed. This book seeks to open a new debate about the
processes of frontier history in a variety of cultural contexts,
untaming the frontier as an analytic concept, and releasing it in a
range of unfamiliar settings. Drawing on examples from over four
millennia, it shows that, throughout history, societies have been
formed and transformed in relation to their frontiers, and that no
one historical case represents the normal or typical frontier
pattern. The contributors--historians, anthropologists, and
archaeologists--present numerous examples of the frontier as a
shifting zone of innovation and recombination through which
cultural materials from many sources have been unpredictably
channeled and transformed. At the same time, they reveal recurring
processes of frontier history that enable world-historical
comparison: the emergence of the frontier in relation to a core
area; the mutually structuring interactions between frontier and
core; and the development of social exchange, merger, or conflict
between previously separate populations brought together on the
frontier. Any frontier situation has many dimensions, and each of
the chapters highlights one or more of these, from the physical and
ideological aspects of Egypt's Nubian frontier to the military and
cultural components of Inka outposts in Bolivia to the shifting
agrarian, religious, and political boundaries in Bengal. They
explore cases in which the centripetal forces at work in frontier
zones have resulted in cultural hybridization or "creolization,"
and in some instances show how satellite settlements on the
frontiers of core polities themselves develop into new core
polities. Each of the chapters suggests that frontiers are shaped
in critical ways by topography, climate, vegetation, and the
availability of water and other strategic resources, and most also
consider cases of population shifts within or through a frontier
zone. As these studies reveal, transnationalism in today's world
can best be understood as an extension of frontier processes that
have developed over thousands of years. This book's
interdisciplinary perspective challenges readers to look beyond
their own fields of interest to reconsider the true nature and
meaning of frontiers.
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