ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author continued to work and teach on ethno-national identity until after the fall of socialist regimes in her field region, Eastern Europe. The publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in 1969 by Fredrik Barth and his colleagues at the University of Bergen launched a remarkably fruitful way of analyzing ethnic group relations and identities. It drew out the arguments of Barth’s teacher Edmund Leach in Political Systems of Highland Burma, concerning identity transformations among Shan and Kachin. The mystery that Ethnic Groups and Boundaries left with, then, is how identities that could fluidly organize social relations could also become the rigid strait-jackets that compel their bearers into ethnic conflict and even war. To study ethnic groups and boundaries means to study not just situational strategizing but the formation of ethno-national ideologies, along with the sentiments and affects that accompany them.
