Des périphéries « utiles »

• Main Author: Jacques Ivanoff
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2011-09-01
• Series: Moussons
• Subjects: anthropology of borders; ethnicity; peripheries; globalisation; nomads and sedentary populations relationships; temporalities
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/moussons/503
• ISSN: 1620-3224; 2262-8363

Driven by the vision of a large market without borders, the increase in exchanging people and goods has redefined the work of the anthropologist, who must now take into account new reconstructions of borderland populations who were once marginalized. These populations are social groups as much as they are ethnic ones, each of them re-negotiating its place within the nation-state, recalling notions of choice, nomadic ideology and studies on the relationship between nomadic and settled peoples. The anthropology of borders is thus a field of research that must utilize classic anthropological tools while including the ethnic issues of these peripheries that no longer exist. Borders have always been a space where negotiations take place. They are organically linked to various centres and the ethnicities that live there use these new social, economic and political opportunities of “globalization” to build, assert or transcend their ethnicity, which must go hand-in-hand with the new world market. The disappearance of ethnicities is not on the agenda. On the contrary, it reveals the resilience of these peoples, which enables the researcher to observe a revival in the latent dynamics that belong to them. Their ways of appropriating resources, territories and crossing points are means of negotiations for these populations who, despite entering the general movement of today’s new international mobility, reveal no less than their “cultural heart”, their ethnic background that they must preserve.