La cordillera de los Andes no es frontera. Cuerpos-territorios y medicina ancestral mapuche en contexto de pandemia

The article analyzes the campaign «La Cordillera No Es Frontera», promoted by the Indigenous Women’s Movement for Good Living due to the situation of the machi (Mapuche health authority) Mawün Jones, from Ngulumapu (current Chilean territory), who crossed the Andes Mountain range to assist patients in Puelmapu (current Argentinian territory), and was stranded due to the isolation measures decreed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This campaign fostered the machi´s return to her territory and also a debate on the political limits imposed by the Argentine and Chilean States on Mapuche territory and the logic of social control over indigenous women. We propose to reflect on the mountain chain as a political border, as well as a geographical, symbolic, and physical border. This implies reviewing the decisions of the States that affect people who experience ethnic and gender inequalities, and who also practice unrecognized forms of medicine.

Political Territorial Boundary Dispute (Kupang City and Kupang Regency)

This study is to analyze the impact of Political Border Disputes in the City of Kupang and Kupang Regency. Regional boundary disputes that occurred in the Nasipanaf region began since the enactment of Law Number 5 of 1996 Establishment of the Kupang Second Level Regional Municipality. on April 25, but the territorial borders were not taken seriously by the Government. The physical boundary between Kupang City and Kupang Regency on the ground is that there are still unclear boundary points, especially in the Nasipanaf region between Kelurahan Penfui and Desa Baumata Barat which have not been agreed between the two parties. The method used in this research is a qualitative descriptive method based on case studies as the sample in this study there are people from both the research locus and the government as the authorized party for decision making. The findings obtained in this study indicate that there has been a clash between residents resulting in conflict over the past few years. In addition, administrative issues also become a problem for people who are in the border area and infrastructure development also influence in the dispute over this area.

À PROPOS DES NOMS DU RÂTEAU ET DE LA HERSE EN OCCITAN ARANAIS. ÉTUDE DE MICRODIALECTOLOGIE GASCONNE.

This article deals with two designations of agricultural instruments in Aranese Gascon: the rake and the harrow. As expected, to know the names of this type of instruments related to traditional life, we must begin with with Joan Coromines’ research on Aranese. But in this case, we check insufficient data as well as very important gaps, even contradictions. After having carried out numerous dialectological surveys in the Val d’Aran, we can establish the inventory of forms that refer to these utensils and to specify their geographical distribution, which is certainly complex. We count up to a half dozen denominations, some of which do not even appear in Coromines’s work. We are able to make some considerations on the linguistic position of the Aranese languages and on the relations they maintain with the Gascon dialects located on the other side of the political border.

Political vs. linguistic borders

This paper analyses and studies the melodic behavior of five female informants of Mexican origin or descent, three of them residents in the city of Los Angeles in the United States, and two in Mexico, one in Mexico City and the other in Puebla. There are two main objectives: firstly, to contribute to the prosodic description of Mexican Spanish on both sides of the political border between both countries (declarative statements and neutral absolute interrogatives), and secondly, to verify the continuity between the Mexican-American intonation of LA and that of MX Mexican. We followed the methodology developed by the research groups that make up Amper-Mexico and Amper-California Los Angeles, within the framework of the international AMPER project.

Von Staatsgrenze zu Dialektgrenze.

The ANR/DFG cooperation project called “FLARS – Effects of the national border on the linguistic situation in the Upper Rhine area”, between the University of Freiburg and the University of Strasbourg, examined the emergence and the nature of a linguistic border between France and Germany in the Alemannic-speaking regions Alsace and Baden, and its interdependence with the political border. The project data were collected through interviews conducted in 40 localities alongside the political border. The questions focused on what informants think and say about languages and about their use of them; about the current state of the dialects, the way they are spoken, their usefulness, their importance; and also on what they think and say about the way the inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine speak, what may make it different, and their position regarding that. A first analysis shows that most of the French and German informants think that both sides of the Rhine do not differ much linguistically, but that this proximity is not a sufficient condition for evoking a “transnational language”, as other aspects of their lives, lifestyles and identities are considered as different. This article will focus on the discourse produced by dialect speakers about the Rhine as a border and about common or different linguistic and cultural features with their neighbours.

Furthering Internal Border Area Studies: An Analysis of Dysfunctions and Cooperation Mechanisms in the Water and River Management of Catalonia, Aragon and the Valencian Community (Spain)

Cooperation between countries or regions that share a political border is one of the primary concerns of border studies. However, while cooperation between states is a well-established field based on international agreements, the cooperation between internal-state regions is not as well understood and requires more exhaustive study. Cooperation agreements between regions are frequently based on the shared and collaborative management of environmental resources such as river basins. This paper aimed to identify mechanisms of river basin cooperation in the internal border area between Catalonia, Aragon and the Valencian Community (Spain), with the objective of analyzing dysfunctions in their water management and identifying the territorial needs for the efficient management of these resources. Focus group sessions were conducted with 84 public administration stakeholders and a total of 53 border municipalities were involved in the project. In our study area, we identified a considerable number of dysfunctions that affected different levels of water management (e.g., supply, navigation and reservoirs) and which impeded effective cooperation between different administrations (above all, between town councils and the public water agencies). However, we also identified several interesting initiatives to promote water management in both the medium and long term, including river contracts, river commonwealths and river tourism projects managed by border municipalities.

Introduction

This introduction addresses the book’s main arguments and themes and provides historical background on the history of the Strait of Gibraltar as a political boundary. It also outlines the book’s sources and methodology and lays out the chapter-by-chapter narrative arc. The Strait of Gibraltar first became a political border in the sixteenth century, with several smaller borders proliferating on its shores as multiple empires carved out coastal exclaves and spheres of influence. These borders form the crucial starting point for understanding the region’s political geography. Borders are the key sites of negotiation between sovereign power and human mobility. They possess material, legal, political, and metaphorical meaning, all of which are central to the ongoing process of mediating relationships among the empires, ethno-religious groups, and trade networks operating in the region.

A crosslinguistic study of voiceless fricative sibilants in Galician and European Portuguese

This study examines the sibilant fricatives produced by seventeen Galician and twenty-two Portuguese speakers. Galician and Portuguese are closely related languages that present important continuities, although it is in their phonological and phonetic systems that they diverge most obviously. By means of the analysis of spectra and spectral moments, chiefly the spectral mean, postalveolar sibilants and front (alveolar or alveolo-dental) sibilants are differentiated in both Galician and Portuguese. Much variation has been found in front sibilant realizations among speakers and even between different realizations by the same speaker. This variation is especially striking among male Galician speakers, where it was possible to distinguish three different articulations, identified here as an apico-aveolar [s̺], a lamino-alveolar [s], and a lamino-dental [s̪] sibilant. The research results point to a loss of phonetic diversity on the Portuguese side of the political border, while in Galicia it is better preserved, although it is losing ground.

(Un)seeing dead refugee bodies: mourning memes, spectropolitics, and the haunting of Europe

This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.