Frontier Situation Research Articles

Кавказско-Каспийский регион в политике Российской империи в первой трети XVIII в.

The article focuses on the latest findings of the study on the Caspian foreign policy direction of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great. The heuristic work in the federal and regional archives of Russia helped to identify and introduce to academia over 300 original documents that allow to study the Russian policy in the south-western areas of the Caspian Sea in the first third of the 18th century, which became Russian territories after the Persian campaign. Detailed analysis of sources on the Persian campaign and stationing of Russian troops in the Caspian region, first in historiography, revealed the most unrenowned subjects and allowed to study those using newly discovered documented data with the application of new methodological approaches.
 The author studies the administrative practice in the Russian Empire in the Caspian region in 1722–1735, showing the challenges of governing the region associated with the natural and geographical aspects, the remoteness of the region from the main part of the state and the ethno-political structure of the annexed territories. The Persian campaign of Peter the Great resulted in the emergence of a Russian-Turkish frontier in the eastern Transcaucasia,
 which separated the historically developed Caucasian and Persian communities disregardi­ng their economic traditions and ethnocultural contacts, leading to a complex and volatile frontier situation in the region. The study of the behavioural actions of various actors in the frontier region allowed to determine their attitude to the emergence of the Russian and Ottoman empires in the Western Caspian region. The author analyses the specifics of the dual administrative system established in Derbent after it was annexed to Russia in 1722, where both a representative of the local authority via the naib and the imperial commandant performed administrative functions. For the first time in Caucasian studies, the article reconstructs the image of Peter the Great in the historical memory of Dagestanis of the present and of the time of the campaign.
 As a result of the project, two these and a collection of archive documents and materials have been published.

Chemical Reaction, Radiation and Hall Effects on MHD Rotating Nanofluid Past an Infinite Vertical Moving Smooth Plate

We have explored the uneven normal convection flows of the nanoliquids past an unbounded vertical moving soft plate by the permeable material in the revolving frame by convection as well as diffusion frontier situations and considering Hall current in this paper. We looked at two different forms of nanofluids: Ag–H2O as well as TiO2–H2O, respectively. The controlling calculations were done systematically utilizing the perturbations approach, described in detail below. Finally, with diagrams, the consequences of dissimilar non-dimensional parameters on the velocities, temperatures, as well as concentrations sketches and the shear stress, locally Nusselt as well as Sherwood numbers were studied in detailed. The effect of radiating as well as Hartmann quantity has the potential to slow down the velocity. By an augment in the Hall parameters the velocity amplifies. The convective parameters of the movement contribute to the improvement of the temperatures profile of the flows. The concentration reduces if the suction parameter values are enhanced.

Frontier metrics for a process-based understanding of deforestation dynamics

Agricultural expansion into tropical and subtropical forests often leads to major social-ecological trade-offs. Yet, despite ever-more detailed information on where deforestation occurs, how agriculture expands into forests remains unclear, which is hampered by a lack of spatially and temporally detailed reconstruction of agricultural expansion. Here, we developed and mapped a novel set of metrics that quantify agricultural frontier processes at unprecedented spatial and temporal detail. Specifically, we first derived consistent annual time series of land-use/cover to, second, describe archetypical patterns of frontier expansion, pertaining to the speed, the diffusion and activity of deforestation, as well as post-deforestation land use. We exemplify this approach for understanding agricultural frontier expansion across the entire South American Chaco (1.1 million km2), a global deforestation hotspot. Our study provides three major insights. First, agricultural expansion has been rampant in the Chaco, with more than 19.3 million ha of woodlands converted between 1985 and 2020, including a surge in deforestation after 2019. Second, land-use trajectories connected to frontier processes have changed in major ways over the 35 year study period we studied, including substantial regional variations. For instance, while ranching expansion drove most of the deforestation in the 1980s and 1990s, cropland expansion dominated during the mid-2000s in Argentina, but not in Paraguay. Similarly, 40% of all areas deforested were initially used for ranching, but later on converted to cropping. Accounting for post-deforestation land-use change is thus needed to properly attribute deforestation and associated environmental impacts, such as carbon emissions or biodiversity loss, to commodities. Finally, we identified major, recurrent frontier types that may be a useful spatial template for land governance to match policies to specific frontier situations. Collectively, our study reveals the diversity of frontier processes and how frontier metrics can capture and structure this diversity to uncover major patterns of human–nature interactions, which can be used to guide spatially-targeted policies.

Introduction

In recent years, the concept of ‘frontier’ has become an important analytical device to discuss resource-making in connection with state formation, procurement of labour, environmental destruction, transformation of landscapes, and climate change. Current rapidly shifting frontier situations suggest that the frontier becomes a useful concept in connection with territorialization, since frontiers, as open or liminal areas, give rise to efforts to map, regulate, expand, and extract in them. We propose that frontiers are spatial, temporal, and relational situations that involve territorial processes that qualify landscapes and relations between humans and other beings, such as plants, animals, and so forth. In this special issue, the authors focus on different aspects and qualities of frontier making, namely questions about territorialization, the spatio-temporal dynamics of frontiers, and the possibilities of life under frontier conditions in the Indonesian Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Finnish Lapland, and the Brazilian Amazon. In all these areas, large-scale resource extraction and struggle over different tenure regimes are on-going. The various cases show that natural resources are not generic, they are specific natural elements that are revalued as commodities and resources that can be extracted in frontier situations. The articles of this special issue show that these nature elements, beings, and lives bear a great significance on different ways frontier dynamics and territorializing processes unfold in specific locations. The papers argue that these transformative processes lend specific qualities to socionatural relationships and limits to possibilities of life.

Frontier Dynamics: Reflections on Evangelical and Tablighi Missions in Central Asia

AbstractMissionaries have flocked to the Kyrgyz Republic ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Evangelical-Pentecostal and Tablighi missions have been particularly active on what they conceive of as a fertile post-atheist frontier. But as these missions project their message of truth onto the frontier, the dangers of the frontier may overwhelm them. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork amongst foreign and local Tablighis and evangelical-Pentecostals, this article formulates an analytic of the frontier that highlights the affective and relational characteristics of missionary activities and their effects. This analytic explains why and how missionaries are attracted to the frontier, as well as some of the successes and failures of their expansionist efforts. In doing so, the article reveals the potency of instability, a feature that is particularly evident in missionary work, but also resonates with other frontier situations.

Shifting frontier dynamics in Latin America

AbstractThe concepts of resource frontier and commodity frontier are often treated interchangeably. This article suggests the benefits of clarifying these concepts because frontiers remain important analytics for understanding drastic land‐use changes and other socio‐environmental transformations. Based on long‐term field research in different parts of South and Central America, we use frontier concepts as heuristic devices to analyze heterogeneous frontier situations and make broader generalizations. Our synchronic and diachronic analyses of frontier dynamics elucidate different frontier modalities and shifting frontier expansions. The concept of commoditizing resource frontier is introduced to explain recent frontier‐makings in Brazilian Amazonia and Cerrado and in the Nicaraguan Río San Juan. Although earlier frontier research took a short‐term time perspective and created conceptualizations based on a single modality of a particular period, our longitudinal analysis shows that drastic changes and complex overlappings are the hallmarks of frontier dynamics.

In praise of outlaws

Abstract‘Outlaw’ is not a common category of archaeological thought but it is perhaps more useful than meets the eye. ‘Outlaws’ are typically viewed as contingent on legal and capitalist systems; they are, I suggest, also material, affective phenomena that draw our attention to how transgression, dissent and disorder are conceived through archaeological thinking. Here, I outline some ways in which ‘outlaw’ figures are ‘good to think with’, particularly for historical and colonial contexts but also for broader, more global frontier situations. Through three sketches of archetypal ‘outlaws’ in southern Africa's recent past, I consider where these disruptive figures draw attention to how mobility, violence, rebellion and state imagination (and the limits thereof) have been imagined through material misbehaviours.

ОККУЛЬТИЗМ И МИСТИКА НА СТРАНИЦАХ ХАРБИНСКОЙ ПЕРИОДИКИ (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ ЖУРНАЛА "РУБЕЖ")

The paper reveals features of relation to mystic in the culture of east branch of the Russian émigré community. The author addresses one of the most popular editions of the Russian abroad - to “Rubezh” (“Frontier”) journal. “Psychological homelessness” of the emigrants, their frontier situation cause aspiration to maintaining identity and the leaving heritage, Orthodox belief and culture in the world of the Russian diaspora. At the same time, the reader meets spirits and ghosts, gods and deities, hypnotists and soothsayers, clairvoyants and predictors, magicians, alchemists, etc. on the pages of “Rubezh”. On the one hand, it is a peculiar response to the surge of interest to supernatural in its different manifestations: spiritualism and Egyptomania, clairvoyance, mantic and occult practices, creations of theosophic circles and so forth. On the other hand, it was natural reaction of the Russian émigré community to its critical situation as a result of negative sociopolitical processes at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: confusion and need for spiritual bases turns into illusory confidence in a possibility of affecting objective reality by means of various occult and mystical practices and begins to emanate in different forms including literary ones. The author makes an attempt of identification of main subjects set in literary and art and publicistic texts of “Rubezh” journal and try to reconstruct the underlying ideas and images.

Risk and uncertainty from frontier to production – a review

We review the methods used to estimate subsurface risk and volumetric uncertainty over the exploration and production lifecycle. Whilst probabilistic techniques are essential to decision-making, we show they have limitations which must be understood. In frontier situations they are hard to justify and non-technical factors weigh heavily in decisions. As more information becomes available, probabilistic estimates are more justifiable, but results can be very sensitive to small changes in input parameters and to other factors. The nature of the transition to development varies. In simple accumulations, once an economic volume has been discovered, exploration risk is replaced by development execution risk. In the case of extensive reservoir complexes, the risk of not finding an economic volume may persist. In both situations, uncertainties relating to reservoir detail, fluid properties, and natural drive mechanisms become critical. Production data add to the complexity, as do interactions with external factors such as surface facilities. Resolving uncertainty at this stage, therefore, requires techniques to integrate and interpret large amounts of data. Given the subjective nature of much of the input into evaluations, likely human biases must be recognized.

Violência rural e bandoleirismo na Patagônia

O artigo analisa a violência na área rural da Patagônia argentina no final do século XIX e no começo do século XX, ao examinar o mundo do crime numa situação de fronteira, cujo processo de controle e coerção era assumido pelo Estado, sob o olhar atento das classes dominantes argentinas. Bandidos "lendários", venerados por suas ações criminosas; bandidos "estrangeiros", ou chilenos, além daqueles pertencentes às comunidades indígenas, são investigados a partir da perspectiva de Eric Hobsbawm, o que permite identificar no interior do universo bandoleiro da região patagônia, os chamados "bandidos sociais".

Bioética, violência e desigualdade: as biociências e a constituição do biopoder

A sociedade contemporânea está atravessada por contradições e paradoxos, dentre os quais vale destacar a relação entre a alta tecnologia e, a pior situação humana, a miséria. Resultado das escolhas éticas e políticas desta era tecnológica, vive-se em situações de fronteira, nas quais as biociências desempenham papel central, tanto no volume de conhecimentos gerados, como na utilização de seus resultados, que, sem controle social, ampliam desigualdades. O objetivo deste artigo é demonstrar o quanto as biociências articulam-se com o desenvolvimento científico dos países inovadores de tecnologia, criando uma nova relação de poder, violento e desigual para os que apenas a consomem, denominado de biopoder. Daí a necessidade de uma bioética crítica capaz de empreender reflexões sobre os procedimentos técnicos, os fundamentos da atividade científica, sua aplicabilidade e relação com o mercado, oportunizando uma 'ponte' na tomada de decisões para que a própria ciência não se torne um obstáculo à democracia.

The Biocultural Context of Very High Fertility among the Bekaa Bedouin

This research report explores some of the biocultural dimensions of maximum or near maximum fertility among Bedouin tribes in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. The Bedouin case substantiates that very high fertility (completed family size [CFS] greater than 8.0) is found among peripheral peoples in frontier situations generated by major political-economic shifts. While the Bedouin maintained high fertility (CFS > 6.5) for approximately sixty years (1899–1960), very high fertility—linked to greater historical reliance on agriculture—was of shorter duration (1934–60). Comparisons with other very high fertility populations indicate that, at the proximate level, maximum fertility is associated with early weaning, low rates of primary sterility, and high rates of marital stability. Results also point to low subadult mortality in Bedouin society. Low mortality is best attributed to the availability of modern medical care facilities and high-quality weaning foods.

Пугачев: Император Между Периферией и Центром. к Постановке Проблемы

SUMMARY: Non-Marxist historians are convinced that the Pugachev rebellion was not a peasants’ war, but a protest movement on the southeastern steppe-frontier, the periphery of the Russian Empire, against the government’s policy of integration, unification, and modernization. This taken for granted, we are confronted with a peculiar contradiction: the Jaik Cossacks conspired with the Don Cossack Pugachev in September 1773 so that he, in the disguise of the late emperor Peter III, should lead them against the Empress Catherine II, the state, its ruling elite, and its regional strongholds along the border. From its very beginning, the protest movement of the periphery aimed to conquer the “center” of the Russian Empire. For exactly one year, till the end of the movement in September 1774, Pugachev played his role consequently and issued manifestos and orders as he thought a legitimate emperor of the Petrine type would, but not as a Tsar of Moscovy or of the peasants. He and the Cossacks around him had only a vague political or social program for Russia, but tried to win every possible group of combatants in the periphery – Cossacks, peasants, factory workers, inhabitants of the towns and especially the different non-Russian peoples in the Ural and Volga regions – by proclaiming in manifestos what they wanted to hear. It is also important that the Jaik Cossacks, after the rejection of their legitimate claims by the state and after a harsh punishment by the regular military forces in 1772, discussed many ideas about how to make use of the frontier situation: from different emigration projects to an empire of their own on the frontier to an attack on the “center”, by triggering off peasants’ uprisings. At least, the historical realization of a campaign against the state lead by a false emperor was only one of the possibilities offered by the Empire’s periphery.

Local stages to be used for the Wanganui Series (Pliocene‐Pleistocene), and their means of definition

Suggestions to abandon New Zealand local stages, or to redefine their boundaries solely at physically defined horizons, confuse the two very distinct aims of a stage classification. These are objectively to order New Zealand rocks on the basis of New Zealand biostratigraphic or other chronostratigraphic criteria, and to allow correlation of the New Zealand time‐scale with the international one. For rapid, cost‐effective identification of stages in geological mapping and other frontier situations, their boundaries must be characterised by biostratigraphic criteria, supplemented where appropriate by physical stratigraphic horizons (magnetic polarity reversals, sedimentary cycle boundaries, and, in particular, tephras). Carter & Naish resurrected all Wanganui Series substages, but the original reasons for their proposal are outdated. Fleming's choice of subdivisions was governed by the “four glaciations” paradigm of the time, rather than the current Milankovitch time‐scale paradigm. New Zealand Pliocene‐Pleistocene stages need to be redefined at new stage‐base boundaries (standard section and point, or SSP), at horizons that allow them to be characterised by the criteria of greatest utility in New Zealand. Recommended stages and their SSPs (all sited in Wanganui Basin) are: Haweran Stage, base of Rangitawa Tephra (0.35 Ma), Rangitawa Stream, Rangitikei valley; Castlecliffian Stage, base of Ototoka tephra, Ototoka Beach, Wanganui; Nukumaruan Stage, base of Hautawa Shellbed, Hautawa Road, Rangitikei valley; Mangapanian Stage, base of Mangapani Shellbed, Mangapunipuni Stream, Waitotara valley. The SSPs for the Waipipian and Opoitian Stages need to be redefined using integrated molluscan, foraminiferal, and physical stratigraphic horizons in a continuous section in Wanganui Basin, preferably the Wanganui River section.

A Note on the Use of North American Borderlands

JEREMY ADELMAN AND STEPHEN ARON have made welcome effort to bring some intellectual rigor and precision to blossoming historiography of frontier. They propose cutting new slice in theoretical cake by drawing distinction between frontier, a meeting place of people in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined, and borderlands as the contested boundaries between colonial domains.1 The concept of borderland can thus link intercolonial and transatlantic imperial histories to localized intercultural histories. As such, it could provide framework that reminds American historians that their accounts of Indian-colonist relations, be they in Missouri or New Mexico, are as dependent on events in distant Mexico City and Paris as on actions of agents, traders, and headmen on ground. I, for one, welcome such sophisticated marriage of local and imperial perspectives. Yet, in reading through Adelman and Aron's case studies, I was left bit confused as to how they mean to accomplish this. Their essay regrettably fails to maintain consistent distinction between frontier and borderland phenomena. To start with, it is doubtful whether of Great Lakes region was borderland product. On contrary, it seems to have been frontier creation that borderlands repeatedly destabilized. The middle ground grew out of unequal yet interdependent relationship between two groups from very different cultures in decades before British traders entered Great Lakes region. Once they did, advent of borderland dynamics virtually destroyed middle ground. Only restoration of frontier situation after Seven Years' War allowed middle ground to resurface. The return of borderland with rise of American republic, culminating in War of 1812, only put final nail in coffin. Perhaps this is one reason that Spanish in Missouri and Southwest had such difficulty acting like more diplomatically successful French. There, borderland conditions persistently undercut fragile emergence of Spanish middle ground. The unanswered question at root of Adelman and Aron's thesis is: what do borderlands do that frontiers do not? They see borderlands as regions of excep-

Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth-Century American Autobiography (review)

Reviews 267 Susan Clair Imbarrato. Declarations of Independency in EighteenthCentury American Autobiography. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1998.192 pp. ISBN 1-57233-012-0, $32.50. With textual examples ranging from the diary of a woman who began American life as an indentured servant to the autobiographies of Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Susan Clair Imbarrato supplies abundant evidence for her argument about the nature of self-construction in eighteenth-century America. Her interest focuses on the relation between acts of self-representation and the ethos of the new Republic. Pointing out the development from seventeenth-century emphasis on community to nineteenth-century Romanticism, with its stress on the individual, Imbarrato shows how eighteenth-century writing about the self helps to effect a transition between the two. The study organizes its six principal texts into three pairings exemplifying different modes of self-rendition. Elizabeth Ashridge, a Quaker woman, and Jonathan Edwards represent the seventeenthcentury spiritual practice of self-examination in their diary records of conversion experiences. Dr. Alexander Hamilton, an eighteenthcentury bon vivant, and Elizabeth House Trist, a woman traveling alone to the frontier for reunion with her husband, produce personal travel narratives. Adams and Jefferson write poUtical autobiographies, extended accounts of their lives and times that Imbarrato pairs interestingly with samples of their letters. The sequence of works, some intended for pubkcation, others not, moves toward secularization and increasing concern with a world outside the self. The context established for examination of these cases includes autobiographical works of the period (notably Benjamin Franklin's) as well as autobiographical theory. Imbarrato attempts to situate her objects of study historically and to analyze them in relation to the problems always at issue in Ufe writing. She considers in particular the question of fictionality and the tension between the growing authority and the continuing uncertainties of writers about themselves. The six autobiographies she considers at length exemplify varied techniques partly corresponding to their diverse personal purposes and intended audience. Imbarrato's treatment of the travel narratives exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of her book as a whole. The relevant chapter (Chapter Three), entitled "Declaring the Self in the Social Sphere," pretty much takes for granted the participation of travel narratives in the autobiographical tradition, although its introductory section emphasizes the didactic and public purpose of such narratives, even when they are not intended for publication. Imbarrato points out that "the travel narrative vaUdates individual perspective and encourages individual investigation" (40)—a statement undeniably true, but one that does not fully justify including such accounts as "eighteenth- 268 Biography 22.2 (Spring 1999) century American autobiography." Does any first-person factual narrative automatically qualify, no matter what its purpose? The critic does not engage with this fundamental theoretical question. Her account of the actual narratives in question, though, is both engaging and suggestive. She provides wonderful quotations from her texts; she conveys a vivid sense of the personalities that emerge from the stories the travelers teU. Hamilton proves rather disagreeable in his self-satisfaction and self-indulgence, but he is a fine raconteur. Trist, more appealing and far less self-assuming, tells less dramatic stories, on the whole. But her record of, for example, her response to the recurrent necessity, on the road, of sleeping in the same room with men rings with vivid poignancy and iUuminates the frontier situation. Imbarrato seems to disapprove of her for imposing her own standards (she gets up before daylight in order to dress unseen), but her solution to the problem struck me as ingenious and appropriate. Finally Imbarrato suggests that both Hamilton's narrative and Trist's foretell later developments in American fiction. Imbarrato fails, however, to develop this potentially interesting point sufficiently to make it persuasive. This study's most important contribution lies simply in its bringing the specific group of texts to academic attention rather than in its critical analysis. The works Imbarrato considers are by no means unknown. AU have been edited in the twentieth century; Adams and Jefferson are of course especially familiar. But by creating juxtapositions , quoting extended passages, and specifying grounds for attention, Imbarrato invites and enables readers to take the writing of famous and obscure, male...

Frontier Tales: The Narrative Contruction of Cultural Borders in Twentieth-Century California

Maclntyre sought to raise a series of crucial questions in an address before the Eighty-First Annual Meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. What is the best way to evaluate two competing languages, conceptual schemes, or cultural approaches to being in the world? May conceptual schemes or theoretical languages be so radically different as to be fully incommensurable, that is, incapable of intertranslation or meaningful comparison?2Maclntyre, drawing upon the example of the sixteenthcentury Zuni Indian and Spanish colonial frontier, contended that some languages or conceptual schemes might well be partially untranslatable, but this did not necessarily preclude commensurability. His remarks suggest additional questions, namely, what does constitute a frontier situation? What is involved in the symbolic differentiation of one conceptual scheme, one interpretive group—one culture—from another? We might recognize here the familiar problem of boundary construction, the social process of creating a common group identity that marks it as different from others.3

Ideological Adaptation on a Malay Frontier

A number of recent studies concerned with Malay history and culture reflect heightened scholarly awareness of cultural unity and structural similarities in the area we know as the “Malay world”. There remains, however, much to be learnt about the boundaries of this world and, in particular, what happens to Malay political and cultural forms at meeting points between Malay and other cultures. In some instances such interaction has led to an absorption of Malay cultural identity by those living on the fringes of Malay kingdoms. A feature often associated with the Malay world is the ease with which it seems to have been possible for those of non-Malay background to adopt Malay language and customs and thus to “become Malay”. This paper, however, will describe a frontier situation where Malay culture itself appears to have been adapted to accommodate local circumstances. It is a situation which assists us to answer the question: to what extent is the concept of a “Malay World” helpful to our understanding of Malay societies?

Changing nationalism and Israel's ?open frontier? on the West Bank

Changing nationalism and Israel's ?open frontier? on the West Bank

Prehistoric pastoralism in the Southwestern Cape, South Africa

Abstract The Khoikhoi of the Southwestern Cape are well known from historical literature. Large gaps in our information exist, however, and a number of the problems in elucidating these are outlined here. Research design for pastoral archaeology in the Cape is offered and it is suggested that the frontier situation that existed between the indigenous hunters and immigrating herders can be described in terms of adaptive strategies, and the success of the herders was due to increased exploitation efficiency of grasslands allowing larger population densities.