Borders of Understanding: Re-Making Frontiers in the Russian-Norwegian Contact Zone.

The dismantling of the Iron Curtain changed co-operation and interaction across the Russian-Norwegian border and allowed a huge increase in border crossings. This may be part of what Bauman describes as the liquidizing processes of globalization, namely the making of a borderless world (Bauman, 2000) which includes processes of de-territorialization, implying weakened ties between culture and place. Thus my interdisciplinary analysis of everyday life among Russian labour migrants and Norwegians in a small coastal community in northern Norway asks if we see integration and cultural diversity producing a borderless world or social divisions and territorial segregation. The analysis employs the concepts of bordering practices, intersectionality, lived experience, and finally, power geometry. I suggest that power geometry can be seen as three intersecting axes: power relationships caused by intersecting social positions, mobility, and the spatial layout of the social and cultural power in a locality. I show how bordering practices and social divisions impact on one another; how they are constantly changing; and how they can include as well as exclude. We see that the border and the divisions stemming from it are fluid, contextual and spatially manifested in the community. I argue that the border can describe the interaction between people in everyday life as well as state frontiers in the Russian-Norwegian borderland.

Search web-site

Sitemap
Printerfriendly page