Drawing on extensive and carefully designed ethnographic fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley region, where the state borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikizstan and Uzbekistan intersect, Madeleine Reeves develops new ways of conceiving the state as a complex of relationships, and of state borders as socially constructed and in a constant state of flux. She explores the processes and relationships through which state borders are made, remade, interpreted and contested by a range of actors including politicians, state officials, border guards, farmers and people whose lives involve the crossing of the borders. In territory where international borders are not always clearly demarcated or consistently enforced, Reeves traces the ways in which states' attempts to establish their rule create new sources of conflict or insecurity for people pursuing their livelihoods in the area on the basis of older and less formal understandings of norms of access. As a result the book makes a major new and original contribution to scholarly work on Central Asia and more generally on the anthropology of border regions and the state as a social process. Moreover, the work as a whole is presented in a lively and accessible style. The individual lives whose tribulations and small triumphs Reeves so vividly documents, and the relationships she establishes with her subjects, are as revealing as they are engaging.
"In Border Work, Madeleine Reeves brings a granular ethnographic analysis to the daily practices that surround the border between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikstan as it snakes its way up and down through the remote Ferghana Valley.... She interprets the habitual transgressive acts of border-dwellers who negotiate, appeal to, assert, or bribe their way through the border not as acts of resista
Dominic Martin, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
"Reeves's thorough analysis of the processes and practices of the socio-politics that comprise the continual creation and recreation of borders makes a significant contribution to the anthropological investigation of the state. Her close attention to the temporal trajectory leading to the current political complexities in the southern Ferghana Valley... make this book specifically valuable to spec
Daniel Mahoney, Social Anthropology
"Reeves's fascinating insights on the Ferghana Valley borderlands bespeak of the systematic, long-term, on-site fieldwork that she has carried out, but also of her genuine personal interest and commitment to listen to and to understand the lives of her interlocutors. In the course of the book, we meet border guards, traders, farmers, taxi drivers, teachers, NGO workers, demobilized soldiers.... He
