A Thousand Tiny Cuts chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in northern Bangladesh and eastern India, Sahana Ghosh shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the making and management of threat in relation to mobility. Rather than focusing solely on border fences and border crossings, she demonstrates that bordering reorders relations of value. The cost of militarization across this ostensibly "friendly" border is devaluation—of agrarian land and crops, of borderland youth undesirable as brides and grooms in their respective national hinterlands, of regional infrastructures now disconnected, and of social and physical geographies disordered by surveillance. Through a textured ethnography of the gendered political economy of mobility across postcolonial borderlands in South Asia, this ambitious book challenges anthropological understandings of the violence of bordering, migration and citizenship, and transnational inequalities that are based on Euro-American borders and security regimes.
Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore.
"In this stunning ethnography of borderland life, Sahana Ghosh reveals how the India-Bangladesh border is made and felt not only in barbed wire and checkpoints, but also in smuggled cumin and shampoo, in walking and teasing, and in family ties that are both frayed and cemented."—Ilana Feldman, Professor of Anthropology, History, and International Affairs, George Washington University
"This moving, masterful ethnography reveals the layered historical cartographies and social relations of the Bangladesh-India borderlands. From colonial infrastructural debris to gendered intimate relations and illicit economic exchanges, Ghosh poignantly illustrates how national security, surveillance, and policing cut into people’s gendered, transnational, everyday lives on both sides of the 'friendly' border."—Nicole Constable, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
"A Thousand Tiny Cuts is at the cutting edge of scholarship on migration, security, and citizenship. In Ghosh’s account, the Bangladesh-India border is both threat and possibility. It makes the everyday lives of borderland inhabitants volatile and precarious while generating cross-border ties of kinship and livelihood. This exquisitely textured ethnography illuminates a transnational political economy of differentially valued spaces, peoples, and goods. A truly impressive achievement."—Ajantha Subramanian, Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies, Harvard University
296 pp.6 x 9Illus: 27 b/w illustrations; 2 maps; 1 table
9780520395725$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Sep 2023