Turner in the tropics: the frontier concept revisited

Boundaries in various guises are a mainstay of classical social science theory and have generated a fair share of empirical research. The tremendous transdisciplinary interest in state borders and borderlands that has been apparent since the late 1990s was matched in recent years by a similar upsurge in empirical (and, though to a lesser degree, theoretical) work on frontiers, i.e. loosely-administered spaces rich in resources and therefore coveted by non-residents. Freeing the frontier notion from an exclusive association with the past age of Caucasian colonialism and the pioneer lore of settler nations, the present thesis advances the frontier concept as a frame of analysis for the contests for property and resources and the struggles for cultural dominance which take place at the internal peripheries of developing nations. It insists that these peripheries are very unlike the center, and pinpoints the characteristics that render them highly peculiar geographical, political, social and cultural spaces ...