ABSTRACT
In their work on borders and borderlands, political anthropologists Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan recognize Wolf's contribution to political anthropology, to drawing our attention to the informal, the margins, the space between that is symbolically, emotionally and ideologically loaded. Daphne Berdahl goes further and characterizes these frontier spaces in her ethnography of life on the former East German borderzone where the stark and immediate front-tier positionality gives an intensity and a clarity to the social and political forces on either side of the villagers. There, many of the walls are painted with intricate and so are antithetical to Republicans who want Northern Ireland to join the Republic of Ireland and are largely Catholic in religion-. Uniquely, the gable wall has a small window in it one of the soldier's helmets. Both the presence and absence of art and/or graffiti on walls are telling indicators in their own rights.
