1.1.4
1.1.4
1.1.4
Frontiers and frontier zones: WorldFrontiers and frontier zones: WorldFrontiers and frontier zones: WorldFrontiers and frontier zones: World----System Analysis’ blind spotSystem Analysis’ blind spotSystem Analysis’ blind spotSystem Analysis’ blind spots?s?s? s?
A prevailing frustration with Wallerstein’s systemic framework regards its limits “to tell
the history of the concentration of power in particular places without divesting the world's peripheries of agentic capacities” (Adelman 2004, 407). An important critique regarding this
point has been established by Steve Stern, who evaluated Wallerstein’s model as too one-dimensional (Stern 1993, 43). Adelman warns that
“the unum may exist but that its logic doesn't explain life in the pluribus. Instead, a world system requires independent local histories that cannot be reduced to a monolithic model. Particular and variegated local developments do not reflect the absence of a working model or its incomplete penetration of its fringes” (Adelman 2004, 406).
The need for more attention to non-economic bottom-up dynamics has been particularly propagated by scholars dedicated to the study of peasants, indigenous and other peripheral groups. However, if subaltern actors are less present in world-system analysis production, it is not because they cannot or should not, but because no one took the plunge to fine-tune the theory (Hall and Fenelon 2009, 12). The insights distilled from such rare plunges to bring the question of agency in dialogue with the theory foreshadow the idea of “frontier” as world-system analysis’ blind spot.
Recapitulating, understanding historical capitalism implies tracking its rhythm and extension, not just tracking the delineation of the system. The key thereto is the division of labour which acts as the unifying axis of the capitalist world-system, defining not simply its temporal and geographical outlines, but more importantly its expansive and contractive pulse. This pulsating flux is evidenced in the mobilization of frontiers and transformation of frontier zones. In the effort to eliminate the differences between incorporated and new regions and peoples, differentiated zones (external, peripheral and core) come to overlap. As a result of overlapping, interaction between these regions and groups becomes inevitable. The arena of this interaction is the “frontier zone”. Out of this interaction, feedback links are established that nourish the course of incorporation processes. Thus, our attention is directed not only towards the simultaneous production, transformation and erasure of frontier zones of the world- system, but also to how this world-system and its expansion is produced by these frontier processes. In their elaborations on the multiplicity of (forms of) world-systems, Hall and Chase-Dunn unveiled the emergence of dynamic feedback links from the margins of those systems (Hall and Chase-Dunn 1991; 1997). “Given that agentive action is
at its most vigorous in such zones, and given that (sic) world-systemic change stems from border regions,” Galaty states, “we desperately require better models of human behavior in frontiers”
(Galaty 2011, 12).
The notion of frontier builds further on a long tradition in “frontier studies.” This tradition started with Frederick Jackson Turner’s American frontier (1920) and, later, Webb’s Great Frontier (2003 [1951]) which, after a gradual reorientation of these classics in Western studies, has resulted in several historiographical reconstructions of frontiers settings.20 From political-culturalist approaches, the creation of frontier zones is usually traced back to the first developments in state formation, prior to the emergence of a capitalist system (Hall and Chase-Dunn 1991; Scott 2009; Kopytoff 1987, 12-3). While taken over in economic studies, the focus on frontiers and boundaries as contact markers has also resulted particularly fruitful to anthropological research on identity formation – think about Barth’s ethnic boundaries (Barth 1970). Political and anthropological approaches have given light to field of borderland studies, dealing with either tangible or non-physical, formalized or informal separations and underscoring the paradoxical role of borders as both dividers and connectors.21
The contours of what will be defined below as a “world-systems frontier analysis” largely stem from the contributions of “next-generation” world-system analysts demonstrating that the multiple inputs received by core-like entities from marginal zones are constitutive to transitions in the World-System. Although Wallerstein neither denies nor excludes the possibility and potential of peripheral agency, he gives little specifications on this issue, but suggests that the creation of these zones has been constitutive to the modern world-system’s dynamism since it emerged about 500 years ago. Departing from that point and inspired by frontier-related concepts that do not necessarily or even refuse to invoke his model, several world-systems analysts have accurately shifted their to the movement of systemic boundaries and the effects of that movement. This is a shift away from classic core-driven theories of capitalist expansion that tend to fix systemic dynamics, usually stranding in one-sided theorizing.
Three lines of “frontier inspiration” stand out. In the first place, there is Thomas Hall’s very general but true principle that “(f)rontiers are where incorporation takes place” (Hall 2012, 51). Departing from a different academic tradition, Jason Moore reads world- systemic incorporation as an environmental history (Moore 2003), contending that there is a strong parallel between world-systems and earth-systems in that both experience change as initiated from/by frontier zones. In the former, these are
20
Schon and Galaty 2006; see for instance Bartlett and MacKay 1989; Peacock 2009; Pohl et al. 2001; Power and Standen 1999.
21
Important contributions have emerged from the field of Latin-American studies, including Baretta and Markoff 1987; Herzog 1992; Weber and Rausch 1994; Baud and Van Schendel 1997, 211-42; Baud 2004, 41-86.
occurring or felt at the edges of human societies while in the latter at the edges of climatological, geological or biological zones (Galaty 2011; see also Hornborg, McNeill and Martínez-Alier 2007). From yet another angle and without using the notion of “frontiers,” Walter Mignolo’s definition of “colonial difference” expands that notion to include a “conflict of knowledges and structures of power” that acts both in the centre as at the edge of the modern world-system (Mignolo 2000, 16-7). In his reading, frontiers are the fissures that homogenizing pressures aim to erase by legitimizing what he calls the “colonial difference” and that subaltern groups aim to restore.
Let’s go more deeply into these three lines. What started as a research on the American South-West (Hall 1989), grew out to a fertile research field that aspires to “define the “universe” of frontiers” from “a deep global and historical perspective” (Hall 2013). By frontier, Hall refers to “a region or zone where two or more distinct cultures, societies,
ethnic groups, or modes of production come into contact” (Hall 2000, 241). As “incorporated area and peoples experience profound (sic) effects from incorporation even when incorporation is relatively weak” (ibid), frontiers are not only a zone of contact, but also a zone of
interaction and resistance. Whereas Hall, who can be considered as the “godfather” of world-systems frontier theories, seems to use frontiers and frontier zones often as interchangeable.22 As Hall explains, “[f]rom a global perspective, a frontier is a relatively
narrow and sharp, but from nearby it is a broad zone with considerable internal spatial and temporal differentiation” (Hall 2000, 240). Here, I make a distinction between the frontier
as process and the frontier zone as setting of incorporation. Both are highly mobile, suggesting the possibility of a multi-sited encounter.23
From a different, but compatible and more concrete angle, the concept of “global commodity frontiers” addresses the same process of incorporation and differentiation. The geographer Jason Moore seizes the diaspora of silver in the wake of the conquest of the Americas to unveil the periphery as a vast and indispensable resource whose extraction (in order to prevent or mitigate relative ecological exhaustion) requires the transformation of land and labour, “bringing the endless accumulation of capital and the
production of nature in dialectical unity” (Moore 2010b, 59; see also 2010a, no. 1 and 2 and
2010c). His definition of frontiers as strategic containers of exploitable natural resources runs in line with Barbier’s stress on the relative scarcity of those resources as the drive behind world-economic expansion and the consequent agricultural, urban and
22
Where I make a distinction between frontiers (the process) and frontier zones (the space), Hall denominates the former as “incorporation” and the latter as “frontier”, both concepts being “closely connected, but not
identical. Frontiers are concerned with the creation, transformation and elimination of boundary zones. Incorporation is about how new areas and/peoples are absorbed into and resist absorption into the world-system” (Hall 2012, 51).
23
Rather than frontier stricto sensu, Boccara adopts the notion of frontier “space” or “complex” because it includes its “hinterland” (Boccara 2005).
industrial revolutions (Barbier 2011, 7). In that sense, Moore defines historical capitalism as “a patterned and expansionary matrix of nature-society relations that responded
to - and variously enabled and constrained - the gravitational pull of world accumulation”
(Moore 2010a, no. 1, 34). This gravitational pull refers to the commodity frontier which gives shape to a particular ecological and economic place; the place to which I will refer as “frontier zone.”24
Where Moore defines (the creation of) nature and capital as the two “material” (ecological, economic) sides of the same coin, Mignolo points to capitalism’s double “rhetorical” face, with modernity as its celebrated side and coloniality as its darker, silenced side (Mignolo 2011, xviii). And where Hall defines frontier zones as the locus of incorporation, Mignolo defines that setting as the workspace of the “coloniality of power.” With these terms, Mignolo mainly refers to epistemological incorporation and differentiation, agreeing with Wallerstein’s “metaphor” to address the historical and spatial dimensions of that process but renouncing that metaphor for being “perceived
and theorized from a perspective inside modernity itself” rather than from the world-system’s
borders (Mignolo 2000, 37). Mignolo contends that expansive powers detect and organize included-excluded differentiations which they portray through discourse as to-be-erased fissures, which he defines as “colonial difference” (Mignolo 2000, 3; see also 2005, xii and 2011). Think about the difference between the people with history and those without history or the “spaces in between” defined by Bhabha and borrowed by Mignolo (2000, 17-8). This production of internal systemic frontiers -the colonial difference “at work”- stems from multiple intercultural encounters, both physically as imaginary, and provokes de-colonial projects and counter-hegemonic voices (Mignolo 2000 and 2011, 2; see also Raj 2010 ; Ross et al 2010).25
As these diverse “frontier contributions” convincingly put forward as one of the most powerful perspectives to rethink and “upgrade” world-systems analysis, they convinced me to neither add an entirely new critique nor abandon the framework altogether. To conclude this long prelude to the detailed dissection of that perspective:
“the study of frontiers illustrates how much can be learned by the study of peripheral regions and peoples and their roles in system change. Indeed, some of these processes may be visible only in peripheral and/or frontier areas. This then
24
Frontier movement is constituted by “differentiated moments within the geographical expansion of commodity
production and exchange” (Moore 2010a, no. 1, 34). The outcome of this expansive process, that is, the rise of
capitalism, “is best understood through the emergence of a peculiar kind of place, one in which the production of nature
(capitalism as world-ecology) and the production of capital (capitalism as world-economy) were two sides of the same coin” (ibid).
25
A powerful and very personal expression of “border culture” sprouting form the feeling of being trapped between multiple excluding dualities is Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera--The New Mestiza (Anzaldúa 1999).
becomes a method to explore how it is that actions and changes in peripheral areas (and semiperipheral areas) play important roles in world-system evolution. A key point here is that many if not most of these questions can only be asked from a world-system perspective, even if they must be answered in large part locally” (Hall 2013, 50-1).