Where the World Ended

Daphne Berdahl

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780520214774
• eBook ISBN: 9780520921320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Maps and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 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