Time and Contingency in the Anthropology of Borders: On Border as Event in Rural Central Asia

Abstract

Engaging with anthropological literature on ‘critical events’, this chapter attends to the experiential contingency of new international boundaries to argue for a temporally variegated account of border in rural Central Asia. Focusing on the experience of a single family at a time of heightened tension along the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan boundary in 2013–14, it shows how border here came to materialize less in permanent infrastructures of state presence than in new prohibitions on trans-boundary movement and on the ‘flying visits’ of security personnel. Such events demonstrate the need to explore the multiplicity of disparate, non-synchronous practices, from road-building to prohibitions on foreign trade and from vigilante road-blocks to the presence of Special Forces, through which living ‘at the border’ becomes as much an experiential as a cartographic fact.

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