Borders

"Link: http://www.reis.cis.es/REIS/PDF/REIS_139_011342512331024.pdf
Este artículo analiza los mecanismos de mercado y las constricciones institucionales que condicionan la valoración y extensión social de la lengua española en El Paso (Texas, Estados Unidos). Los resultados se presentan a través del análisis de empresas y sectores de actividad caracterizados por una diferente intensidad lingüística del producto y del proceso productivo. Se realizaron entrevistas en profundidad observando que en los sectores de menor calificación son frecuentes las prácticas y gestión de trabajo «solo en español». Los requisitos lingüísticos de conocimiento de español formal aparecen sólo en actividades muy concretas y profesionalizadas. Los sectores de demanda emergente en español, como los centros de atención de llamadas, optan por el español patrimonial como instrumento de trabajo y como forma de conseguir mano de obra abundante y barata.

This article analyzes the market mechanisms and institutional constraints that shape the evaluation and social spread of Spanish in El Paso, Texas, USA (located on the US-Mexico border). The results are presented through an analysis of labor sectors that have different main characteristics in the linguistic intensity of work and product. Based on in-depth interviews, the study finds that linguistic management policies in low-skilled sectors are effectively «Spanish-only». However, as skills increase and there is a greater need for formal Spanish in the occupational role, we observe more constraints on how Spanish functions in work use. In sectors where demand for Spanish language skills has grown, such as call centers, linguistic management is based on acculturated heritage Spanish as a means to obtain cheap labor.
"

"The study focuses on the republican murals painted on the walls of two cities, Belfast and Derry, in May 2009. The idea for the study was born during a trip to Northern Ireland during which I had the opportunity to observe the murals and to talk with some of the authors and with persons who had actually experienced
the events represented in the murals.
The nationalist murals have been studied by the author under different perspectives: language, iconography, political symbolism and social environment. Murals are, for sure, the community’s reaction to the British political and violent domination on Northern Ireland and they become instruments of rebellion representing
a collective request for freedom and independence. But they also represent a more complex phenomenon as they embody values and perspectives of the entire nationalist community in Northern Ireland. The study analyses the murals both as single artworks and as a collective phenomenon.A strong focus is given at all the political and social themes represented in the murals and at the different linguistic and iconographic styles of communication
as well as how different themes and styles combine. The nationalist murals are also examined under an artistic perspective with a special focus on the figure of the “artista armato”, the artist as a warrior that uses art as an instrument for communicating higher, collective (moral, social, religious, political) values. This
perspective brings the author to draw and analyse a parallel between the phenomenon of nationalist murals and Futurist art: a comparison based on the themes represented in the artworks, on the placing of the art pieces and on the social role of the artists.
If words, pictures and colours used in the nationalist murals become, as analysed in the study, the voice of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland, a voice not so often listened in the EU, it becomes crucial to understand what the artists
want to communicate, why and how. This study aims also to open up to a new research perspective based on a multidisciplinary approach through the integrated use of semiotics and semantics in ethnography in order to offer a more complete and holistic interpretation of the phenomenon of the Northern Irish republican
murals."

"This paper analyzes the production of foreign correspondents in Brazil, and focuses the processes of selection and adaptation
of concepts to cultures that don’t share the same contexts. According to Lotman’s semiosphere concept, foreign correspondents are placed in the borders between different spaces of meaning. Hence, these journalists filter and translate
signs from Brazil in order to send them to their home-countries, after a process of adaptation and re-contextualization that
is necessary so that their publics can understand the meaning of the events they are portraying through approximation"

A pdf can be requested to jmheyman@utep.edu .  Drawing on extensive participant observation and interviews concerned with barriers to census enumeration in colonias (irregular migrant settlements along the United States-Mexico border) and Mexican migration to the United States, we argue that recent ethnography has overemphasized the role of domination and resistance. While power is fundamental to cultural analysis, we also need to examine behavior we call slantwise, that is, actions that are obliquely or only indirectly related to power relations. Ethnographic fieldwork from both sides of the United States-Mexico border uncovered a range of behaviors (including unorthodox building techniques in colonias, hybrid language practices, complex and fluid household structures, nonlinear mobility patterns, and unpredictable political loyalties of migrants) that do not fit neatly into the domination-resistance axis. We argue for the relevance of the slant-wise concept for understanding such behaviors, not as a replacement for studies of naturalized domination and resistance, but as a complement to them.

Das Habsburger und Osmanische Reich sind beide zum etwa selben Zeitpunkt nach dem 1. Weltkrieg aufgelöst worden. Beide Reiche legitimierten sich dynastisch, hatten einen multi-ethnischen und –konfessionellen Charakter und umfassten einen großen Wirtschaftsraum. Jedoch unterschieden sie sich im Grad der Durchkapitalisierung der Wirtschaft und der Ausprägung von Elementen einer liberal-bürgerlichen Staatlichkeit, hinsichtlich der Sozialstruktur, der Art innerer Grenzziehungen und ihrer internationalen Stellung. Diese Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede machen einen Vergleich der Reichsauflösung sehr interessant...

"Although the Mediterranean is considered to be one of the oldest regions in the world, its borders are still the subject of discussion and research. This paper aims to contribute to the definition of the Mediterranean by studying the perception of its spatial coverage in Croatia and its links to the physical and socio-cultural attributes of space. The research was conducted by using the cognitive map method on a sample of 200 participants. The result was a broad border zone separating the so called „real“ Mediterranean from areas which are not part of the Mediterranean. This zone is somewhat similar to a fuzzy set, representing a gradual transition between two ends of belonging to a certain set. The research indicates that the congruence of perception of the borders of the Mediterranean is the largest along the Dinaric Alps (northwest – southeast), except in Istria, and the coastal spread along the entire Croatian littoral. The results also indicate that factors relating to the natural environment take precedence over socio-cultural factors in the perception of borders of the Mediterranean.

SAŽETAK:
Iako se Sredozemlje smatra jednom od najstarijih prostornih cjelina u svijetu, njegove su granice još uvijek predmet istraživanja i rasprava. Ovaj rad nastoji pridonijeti definiranju Sredozemlja ili Mediterana kroz ispitivanje percepcije njegovog prostornog obuhvata u Hrvatskoj i povezanosti s fizičkim i sociokulturnim obilježjima prostora. Istraživanje je provedeno metodom kognitivnih karata na uzorku od 200 ispitanika. Kao rezultat dobivena je široka granična zona koja razdvaja tzv. 'pravo' Sredozemlje od područja koja nisu dijelovi Sredozemlja. Ta zona u određenoj mjeri ima svojstva neizrazitog skupa (engl. fuzzy set) koji predstavlja postupni prijelaz između polova pripadnosti određenom skupu. Rezultati istraživanja na ispitanicima pokazali su da je najveća podudarnost percipiranih granica Sredozemlja s dinarskim smjerom pružanja reljefa (sjeverozapad-jugoistok), osim u Istri, te s obalnom linijom u čitavom hrvatskom primorju. Rezultati također pokazuju da su pri odabiru percipirane granice Sredozemlja faktori prirodne sredine važniji od sociokulturnih."

"Johan Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe
Introduction: Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders
    5
Mieke Bal
Becoming the World Versus Identity Politics
    9
Helena Bodin
Seeking Byzantium on the Borders of Narration, Identity, Space and
Time in Julia Kristeva's Novel Murder in Byzantium
  31
Steen Christiansen
Written in Skin: Suicidegirls
  45
Ruben Moi
Bordering Binarities and Cognitive Cartography: What on Earth Does Literature Have to do with Border Transactions?
  53
Jaume Castan Pinos
Identity Challenges Affecting the Spanish Enclaves of Ceuta and
Melilla
65
Nicole Pissowotzki
Colonial Fantasies, Narrative Borders, and the Canadian North in the Works of Germany's Colin Ross (1885-1945)
  81
Olga Taraskina
From the History of Cultural Cooperation between the Murmansk
Region and the Scandinavian Countries and Finland
  99
Hein Viljoen
Creolization and the Production and Negotiation of Boundaries in
Breyten Breytenbach's Recent Work
109 "

A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers of Mexican ancestry do not identify with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants. Instead, they understand themselves as U.S. citizens who reject both domestic racism and ethnic loyalties that cross national borders. Their self understandings emerge from processes that include U.S. citizenship ideology and social mobility into primary labor market jobs with stability, benefits, and progressive careers. These processes insulate them from the experience of immigrants in casual and insecure labor markets devoid of social benefits. Thus they differ from immigrants not only in being on opposite sides of the bureaucratic encounter but also in being at opposite poles of bureaucratized social citizenship. This suggests that a cause of opposition to immigration in advanced capitalist societies is that citizenship based job and benefit systems restrict the scope of empathy.

A pdf is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  Proposes three perspectives on deportability: anticipation (anxiety, fear, etc.) and coping responses; direct experiences of arrest, detention, and deportation; and memories of self and others concerning deportations.  Argues that these three perspectives are spread across various scales of social organization, both dividing and unifying people in mixed status communities: individual, household and kin group, neighbors, settlement areas and regions.  Examines immigrant community organizing as a way to reorganize and fortify bonds in mixed-status communities at risk of fracture by deportability.

A pdf is available by request from jmheyman@utep.edu .  U.S. immigration and nationality law is viewed as a set of classifications that contribute to the transfer of value between classes. An anthropological approach to the symbolic classificatory process is outlined, emphasizing its performance in situations of state power.  Discursive categories are not self-enacting, but rather emerge from struggles at the point of state and social action.  Ethnographic observations document the actual practice of Immigration and Naturalization Service classification and reveal covert symbolic categories and plausible constructs about migrants. However, migrants are accorded an active role in struggling with and responding to dominant classifications. Three important results of immigration classification are the increased exploitation of undocumented immigrants, categorized as outlaws and obliged to undertake the risk of crossing a heavily enforced boundary; the complex maneuvering and segmentation within immigrant communities induced by the rewards of legal visa categories; and the confirmation of stereotypes about migrants in the dominant society that underwrite their employment as inexpensive labor.

A pdf of this item is available by request to jmheyman@utep.edu .  Chapter is in Spanish.  This chapter examines the entirety of differentiated and unequal mobility surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border.  It starts by challenging the common-sense distinction between migration and mobility.  The chapter includes the unequal mobility of capital and labor seen in NAFTA, as well as unequally treated commodities (e.g,, smuggling).  It looks at inequality of mobility by nationality (unequal treatment of visas between Mexicans and United Statesians) but also privileged mobility of cross-national elites and near elites (wealthy, management, professionals, academics, etc., that spans both countries).  It puts particular emphasis on the concept of privileged and disprivileged mobility and how the latter affects life chances (and death chances), as seen with unauthorized migration.  But it also notes the complexity of the topic, such as the considerable kin-based migration and mobility of legal residents between the two countries that facilitates movement of some transnational peasant-workers.