Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland

Author:   Daphne Berdahl
Publisher:   University of California Press
ISBN:  

9780520214774


Pages:   307
Publication Date:   10 May 1999
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

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Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland


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Overview

"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."

Full Product Details

Author:   Daphne Berdahl
Publisher:   University of California Press
Imprint:   University of California Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780520214774


ISBN 10:   0520214773
Pages:   307
Publication Date:   10 May 1999
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Figures Acknowledgments Introduction 1 1. The Village on the Border 2. Publicity, Secrecy, and the Politics of Everyday Life 3* The Seventh Station 4* Consuming Differences 5* Borderlands 6. Designing Women 7* The Dis-membered Border Epilogue: The Tree of Unity Glossary Notes Works Cited Index

Reviews

"""This is a splendid ethnography which deserves to become a standard source on East Germany. . . . Berdahl's is a lucid and sharply observed study which works from the fine materials of everyday life to answer a series of grand questions which anyone might want to ask of East Germany as it existed before, during and after the Wall.""--""Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute"


This is a splendid ethnography which deserves to become a standard source on East Germany. . . . Berdahl's is a lucid and sharply observed study which works from the fine materials of everyday life to answer a series of grand questions which anyone might want to ask of East Germany as it existed before, during and after the Wall. -- Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute


Author Information

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

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