Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland

This local study of Borneo’s borderlands has global meaning. It explores how states materialize their territoriality and how people define themselves as a community, nation and ethnic group. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences will learn much from this masterful linking of history and ethnography, and of macro and micro perspectives.

‘Nationalism’ is a contentious and often unanalyzed abstraction, generally treated as something ‘imagined’ or otherwise located on maps, in flags and other symbols, and in collective memory. Between Frontiers restores the nation to the social field from which it has been abstracted by looking at how the concept shapes the existence of people in border zones, where they live between nations.

Noboru Ishikawa grounds his study in the boundary that separates Malaysian from Indonesian territory in western Borneo. His book explores how states materialize their territoriality and how people strategically situate themselves as members of a local community, nation and ethnic group within that territory. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences will learn much from this masterful linking of history and ethnography, and of macro and micro perspectives.