The Will to Border: Borderwork and Identifications among Cross-Border Commuters

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article provides a deeper understanding of how territorial borders matter for identifications. In an ethnographical investigation, which identifies four othering practices, we illustrate how cross-border commuters construct and negotiate identity by establishing, reinforcing, changing, and/or abolishing self-other distinctions. In these practices, territorial borders become subject to mundane borderwork in everyday negotiation, erasing and building of multiple subject-positions. Borders thus interpret into possibilities for multiple ways of separating, connecting, distinguishing, integrating, being with and being apart, informed by elements of national as well as other forms of identification, even absent ones. Hence, borderwork plays a central role in the commuters’ identifications, and territorial borders come to matter, being active in separating and connecting spaces of interaction, at the same time as they constitute objects the commuters work with, using them to communicate and negotiate identity, relating actors and practices anew.