ABSTRACT
Contemporary challenges related to walling can only be understood properly in a long-term perspective. This chapter seeks to go beyond contemporary approaches in order to locate the social practice of walling, and to examine its artificial moulding processes and their results in the context of human history as a whole, integrating insights from archaeology, anthropology and political theory. Such an approach with its focus on emergence helps to locate the essential dynamics of the walling practice. Given that we live in the modern world, with its borders (such as of nation states) and the enclosures that disciplinary spaces affect, walling is a real challenge. The proposition here is to provide an external, theoretical position from which to consider the phenomenon of walling as representing a moulding procedure which transforms the characters involved. Its power resides in the walling structure itself, independently of the will and decision of its dwellers.
