Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland

Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland explores what happens when the state actualizes its territoriality based on the fieldwork in, and archival research on, the borderland between Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Borneo. How does the state maintain national space, and how do people strategically situate themselves as members of a local community, nation, and ethnic group in a social field designated as national territory? By posing such questions in the context of concrete circumstances where a village boundary coincides with a national border, this study delineates state-society dialectics and the production of the nation viewed from the margins both as history. A staple of post-war academic writing, “nationalism” is a contentious and often unanalyzed abstraction that has come to be treated as something “imagined”, “fashioned”, and “disseminated”. Between Frontiers restores the nation to the social field from which it has been abstracted by looking at how the emergence of national spaces shapes the existence of people living in border zones, where they live between nations.