Introduction: Frontier temporalities

Exploring processes of frontierisation, defrontierisation and refrontierisation in Indonesia and Africa

Abstract

Initially introduced by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 to denote the specific situation of the territorial conquest of the American ‘Wild West’, the concept of the frontier is currently used in anthropology as an analytical means to understand highly insecure and dynamic processes that arise in marginal areas as a result of population transfers, resource extraction, national security interests and nature conservation. This special section draws on recent dynamic and processual understandings of frontiers to explore their temporal dimension by analysing historical processes of establishing and dissolving frontiers, related images of the past and the future, and the sometimes astonishing and contingent afterlife of earlier frontiers.