Where the World Ended - by Daphne Berdahl (Paperback)

About the Book

"Berdahl's vibrant book tackles core themes and weaves together pressing issues in dynamic ways. . . . It is theoretically sophisticated and well-written, [and] there are, to my knowledge, no books quite like this in the field at present. Its contribution will be original, its scholarship unquestioned."--Uli Linke, author of "Blood and Nation"

Book Synopsis

When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference?

Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life-including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality-in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland.

From the Back Cover

"Berdahl's vibrant book tackles core themes and weaves together pressing issues in dynamic ways. . . . It is theoretically sophisticated and well-written, [and] there are, to my knowledge, no books quite like this in the field at present. Its contribution will be original, its scholarship unquestioned."--Uli Linke, author of Blood and Nation

Review Quotes

"This is a splendid ethnography which deserves to become a standard source on East Germany. . . . Berdahl's is a lucid and sharply observed study which works from the fine materials of everyday life to answer a series of grand questions which anyone might want to ask of East Germany as it existed before, during and after the Wall."--"Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute

About the Author

Daphne Berdahl is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.