{"product_id":"9780520921320","title":"Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland","description":"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?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBerdahl 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. \u003ci\u003eWhere the World Ended\u003c\/i\u003e 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.","brand":"University of California Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47106090467568,"sku":"9780520921320","price":30.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780520921320_p0.jpg?v=1763710038","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780520921320","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}