Nonsense of Border and Ontologies in the Making: Production of Difference in the Belarusian-Lithuanian Borderland

Urbanowicz, Roman

doi:0137-4079

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Nonsense of Border and Ontologies in the Making: Production of Difference in the Belarusian-Lithuanian Borderland Urbanowicz, Roman

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Nonsense of Border and Ontologies in the Making: Production of Difference in the Belarusian-Lithuanian Borderland

Urbanowicz, Roman

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology Polish Academy of Sciences

ethnography -- journal ; Belarus ; Lithuania ; state border ; Europeanness ; production of difference

The social sciences have long established that state borders produce, rather than simply reflect, social and cultural distinctions. Rather than examining the distinctions themselves, this article considers how perspectives on new differences are emerging. The state border between Belarus and Lithuania constitutes a distinctive example of a restricted geopolitical border, the external frontier of the EU, which emerged without any historical precedent and is still perceived as an absurdity by the locals who witnessed its emergence. I argue that the operation of the border’s bureaucracy produces estrangement through specific spatialised regimes of uncertainty, undermining the reproduction of pre-border social connections. This growing alienation is often interpreted within the logic of the “civilisational projects” – the European one and its Belarusian counterpart – that the border is supposed to represent, sometimes appearing as accounts of substantial incommensurability. In other words, ontologies are produced from nonsense along the Belarusian-Lithuanian state border.

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