Sarah F Green

The first paragraph: "This is a story about borderwork, about the way that borders appear, disappear and reappear, perhaps somewhere else, in the course of everyday life. It is about what makes a place feel ‘borderly’, as if there is something in the air, the streets, the walls, the parks, perhaps even in the people hanging around a place, that gives off a sense of borders at work. It is a story that picks out small fragments of that constant activity, which sometimes, perhaps often in some places, feels like nothing is going on at all — the sense that waiting and stillness, and the dull thud of imperceptible decline and decay that comes from abandonment is all that there is, is all that is left. It is a story about senses of danger as well, the smell of fear that often circulates around crossing points — will I pass? — and the hard, sometimes brutal stare of authority as it carries out its checks, classifications, inspections, assessments. This is a journey through the places inhabited by people who sometimes uncomfortably share each other’s spaces, interfere with one another, who cross paths and zones and lines and fences and walls. It is a story about small and large exchanges, transactions, trades, legal and illegal, both in places where the ragged people go and in the limelight, where everyone is looking. Was it a good deal? It is a story about roads, routes and restrictions, of life and the taking care of the afterlife, of the signs and messages scribbled everywhere — by governments, by passers-by, by the activists and pessimists and optimists. It is a story about personal and impersonal journeys, of the attempt to get somewhere, even if that is only away from some­where else."

Maps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps"--places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book explores an iconic example of this in the contemporary Western imagination: the Balkans. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research around the Greek-Albanian border, Sarah Green focuses her groundbreaking analysis on the ambiguities of never quite resolving where or what places are. One consequence for some Greek peoples in this border area is a seeming lack of distinction--but in a distinctly "Balkan" way. In gaps (which are never empty), marginality is, in contrast with conventional understandings, not a matter of difference and separation--it is a lack thereof.

Notes from the Balkans represents the first ethnographic approach to exploring "the Balkans" as an ideological concept. Green argues that, rather than representing a tension between "West" and "East," the Balkans makes such oppositions ambiguous. This kind of marginality means that such places and peoples can hardly engage with "multiculturalism." Moreover, the region's ambiguity threatens clear, modernist distinctions. The violence so closely associated with the region can therefore be seen as part of continual attempts to resolve the ambiguities by imposing fixed separations. And every time this fails, the region is once again defined as a place that will continually proliferate such dangerous ambiguity, and could spread it somewhere else.

The late 1980s in London was a period of heady transition for everyone in that city, and lesbian feminists were no exception. London's radically socialist local government, the Greater London Council, had been abolished by Margaret Thatcher's administration in 1986; the 1980s boom was rapidly declining; and the feminist theories on which lesbian feminist separatists had based their lives were being seriously challenged, particularly from within their own community. Younger women entering the community seemed more interested in sexual desire and having fun and they were in feminist politics, and others constantly accused lesbian feminists of not taking differences between women, such as race and class, into account. The book traces the relationship between changing theories about gender and sexuality and women's own lives, and looks at how lesbian feminists lived through this period, when it seemed as though their community was fragmenting into an apolitical, postmodernist chaos.

The meaning of ‘grey’ as ambiguity, as the outcome of blending and mixture so that no clear differences are discernible anymore, is the starting point of this chapter. That is combined with the idea of grey zones as the spatial expression, or location, of that particular meaning of grey: grey zones as literal or metaphorical locations where there is some sense of uncertainty about the difference between here and somewhere else. In that sense, grey zones contrast with a key intention in the explicit marking of borders, which is to remove such uncertainty.  In practice of course, places marked as borders often become sites of uncertainty, either because their precise locations are disputed, or because they overlap with, or are cross-cut by, other kinds of border-marking. Drawing upon an account of a territorial dispute between the Greek and Turkish governments about two rocky outcrops in the Aegean sea (the Imia/Kardak islets), and on ethnographic work on the Greek-Albanian border, combined with a survey of debates about the shift from the Cold War period to an era of multiple posts (post-socialist, post-plural, post-modern, post-structural) in Europe, this chapter argues two things.
First, it argues that the cross-cuts and overlaps of borders are generated by different epistemological and ideological projects, and that the result is layered border regimes, which sometimes seep into each other, but also sometimes slide past each other in parallel, with neither one affecting the other. This evokes a sense of borderwork operating in three dimensions rather than two. That helps to understand how different border regimes can be operating simultaneously in the same geographical space, which can generate different places in the same location. The Imia/Kardak dispute in the Aegean, which shows how a nation-state border regime can exist in parallel with the European Union’s border regime, is an example of that process.
Second, the chapter argues that the shift from the Cold War period to the ‘multiple posts’ period, which some would say coincides with the rise of neoliberalism, valorizes the concept of ‘grey zones’ by simultaneously valuing the concept of difference above all else whilst denying that any particular differences make a difference. The concept of grey zone in that sense constitutes a political project that attempts to narrow the space in which politics might conceivably make a difference. The simultaneous existence of border regimes in the same place tends to prevent the logic of such rhetoric from succeeding.

This article introduces a special section of HAU: Journal of ethnographic theory. It outlines how the Anthropological Knots debate to which the special section's contributors responded was framed, and offers its own threads for approaching the two questions addressed by it: first, what is it that makes anthropology in the contemporary moment possible? And second, what might intervention in anthropological terms look like? The paper argues that an ethnographic focus is essential to answering both questions. Such a focus is implicitly conceptually comparative, and generates a simultaneous sense that there are no guaranteed understandings which always already hold across space or time; but it also implies that the diversity, endless and complex as it may be, is not random: there are always particularities that make a difference, and which have specific implications for intervention. So while Anthropological Knots generates a sense of endless entanglement, these are crucially historically and socially framed entanglements, both conceptually and in practice. The articles in the special section were written by: Marilyn Strathern, David Graeber, Chris Gregory, Michael Carrithers and Keir Martin. Commentators were: Jeanette Edwards, Jane Cowan, Joel Robbins and Niko Besnier. The section was edited by Sarah Green.

The idea of border as 'line' has attracted a lot of critical attention in borders studies in recent years. Yet the idea of borders as lines still carries considerable power, both conceptually and politically. This chapter takes the persistence of the idea of line in contemporary border politics seriously, while also offering a couple of new ways to think about border dynamics, as 'line' suggests something static.

The concept of 'tidemarks' as a way to think about border dynamics was developed in 2009 by the author at the first meeting of the EastBordNet research network (funded by COST as IS0803). That network, which was focusing on the eastern peripheries of Europe and aimed at developing a fresh way to conceptualise border dynamics there, carried on discussing the idea until 2013, when the network's funding ended. Sarah Green carried on thinking about the problem of how to conceptualise 'border' for several years thereafter. This chapter is the outcome of those 8 years of research and thinking, and summarises the idea.

An analysis of the simultaneous collapse of two infrastructures in Greece in the summer of 2015: the banking system, which was closed during the Greek referendum on whether to accept further austerity measures from the EU in return for more bailout money; and an overwhelming number of refugees and migrants arriving in Greece, leading to an inability to adequately manage the situation. The paper argues that these two 'crises' point to the deep levels of interdependence between locations.