Boundary variations: an introduction

摘要

In social theory regional boundaries and other sharp demarcations no longer have much appeal. There are too many of them, they are too porous, and they interfere with one another to produce too many complexities. This special issue of Society and Space is on some of those complexities. Together the papers collected here explore some of the complexity of boundaries in their materialities, their paradoxes, their leakages, their fractionalities, their practical enactments, and their variations. Boundaries may be about geographical spaces, 'here' and 'there'. But they may also be about identities, 'me' and 'you'. Often the two have been linked: 'far away' has been made to coincide with 'different', 'proximity' with 'same'. But this link no longer works well. The character of 'self and 'other' has started to unravel. It is no longer assumed that geography and identity map onto one another. And the resulting complexity—self, other, here, there—defies the cartographic imagination. How can we think this well? How to find good images for boundaries? Obviously we should be looking to the social and its theorising (Society and Space, our emphasis!). But there are other possibilities, too (for instance, in biology). For, despite the instincts of many social scientists trained to fear the reduction and the organicism of biology, the biological imagination is very rich. The biological is all about complex boundaries. For instance, the relations between: predators and preyed-upon; parasites and hosts; food, the body, and excretion; genes and cell plasma; and parents and offspring. Conflict, cooperation, their combinations, their intersections, and their interferences: biology is not simply about functionalism, but is also, and primarily, about combining continuity and discontinuity.