Choice Reviews Online · 1999 · 182 citations · 0 references
Social SciencesAnthropologyHistoryBorder StudiesCultural ChangeSocial HistoryCultural BoundariesCultural IdentityEthnic Identity FormationGerman Cultural HistoryGerman Cultural IdentityNational IdentityBorder IdentityBorder ZonesBorderland Gender RelationsBorderland TransformationEast German IdentityLiminal IdentitySocial Identity ProcessesTransformations
The fall of the Berlin Wall rapidly transformed lives along the former border, and this study combines ethnographic accounts of everyday life under socialism and after reunification to investigate the paradoxical human condition of a borderland. The study investigates how identity and personhood evolve when a political and economic system collapses overnight, and how people negotiate the liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference. The ethnographic research focuses on a former East German border village, concentrating on how changes have affected border zones of daily life such as social organization, gender, religion, and nationality, where literal borders were once powerful. She finds that borders are simultaneously ambiguous and lucid, that large‑scale political, economic, and social processes manifest locally during rapid transformation, and that people invent and ritualize cultural practices.
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 person hood, 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.