Where the world ended : re-unification and identity in the German borderland / Daphne Berdahl.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berdahl, Daphne, 1964-2007.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social change.

Ethnology.

History.

Boundaries.

Germany (East)--Boundaries--Case studies.

Germany (East).

Germany--History--Unification, 1990--Case studies.

Germany.

Ethnology--Germany--Case studies.

Kella (Germany)--Case studies.

Kella (Germany).

Kella (Germany)--Social life and customs--20th century.

Social change--Germany--Kella.

Germany--Kella.

Physical Description:

xiii, 294 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, [1999]

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-283) and index.

ISBN:

0520214765

0520214773

OCLC:

38948167