ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an extension of Fredrik Barth’s ideas about ethnic boundaries to a consideration of national borders. Barth’s essentially transactionalist model of boundary creation and utilization offers one productive path to that goal. If the “liberal” in neoliberalism is thus a deceptive mask for a thoroughly illiberal reality, the “neo” more closely resembles the resurrection of an ancient identity claimed by nationalism. Barth’s analysis of ethnic groups and boundaries could easily be misunderstood as the beginning of deconstruction in anthropology. In Barth’s formulation, people’s sense of living in ethnic groups is contingent on the situational maintenance of boundaries – boundaries that can be crossed in multiple ways, including changes in ethnic identity by individuals and subgroups. Nationalism translates processes of incremental play into fixed entities, that is, why, on the whole, national bureaucrats cannot afford to display much of a sense of humor and are offended when others do so.
