Frontiers: hidden, visible, mobile

Frontiers can convey two main sets of meanings. Firstly, they refer to “borderscapes” as complex and historically shaped territorial borders and connected social boundaries. More broadly, frontiers entail a “front line” of division across various levels (from gender and the body to the state) and within diverse domains (e.g., humans/non-humans/more-than-humans, fake/reality, local/global, anthropology/ethnology/folklore).

Secondly, frontiers also connote the concept of the “horizon”. As such, they indicate margins or limits, not only of a territory, but also of an age, of a discipline, or even of knowledge itself. These limits function simultaneously as thresholds, possibilities, zones of liminality, journeys toward the unknown, and situations of transit open toward either utopian or dystopian scenarios.

Whether visible or hidden, borderscapes and horizons are inherently mobile in space and time. They emerge and transform as assemblages of infrastructures, discourses, movements, emotions, and everyday practices. Frontiers are not only material but also narrative and performative. They are produced, incorporated, and enacted through mapping, negotiating, disputing, crossing, travelling, and migrating, as well as through controlling, policing, stopping, even invading, and resisting. Crucially, the mobility of the frontier encompasses its shadow: immobility, grey zone, and the possibility of getting stuck within the machinery of the border.

The history of Bolzano-Bozen and of South Tyrol offers a profound laboratory for these themes. In the 1970s, Cole and Wolf wrote about the ethnic boundaries between two neighbouring rural mountain villages at the border between Trentino and South Tyrol. They highlighted “the hidden frontier” of the Bavarian expansion in the Middle Ages, connecting the two main meanings of frontiers. These local realities point toward broader critiques of internal colonialism and inter-imperiality, positioning decoloniality as a frontier paradigm for anthropology, ethnology, and folklore. Frontiers impact both individual and collective experiences, as well as personal memories and political modes of remembrance.

Frontiers speak to the current global situation, which is affected by the return of nationalist ideologies, imperialist domination, colonial expansionism and wars. This puts into question the value of tolerance, democracy, and international law, suggesting that these have been illusions, or that their supposed cultural hegemony is now under attack. It is timely to address the ambiguities, contradictions and paradoxes embedded in the notion of frontiers, reimagining them as a means to envision and shape a better future for terrestrial life.

Starting from these possible understandings of frontiers, SIEF2027 invites ethnologists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars from adjacent fields, to explore the many ways of framing visible, hidden and mobile frontiers. Some possible questions which could be addressed are:

• In what ways do frontiers function as battlefields, sites of conflict and friction, but also as spaces of counterpoint and laboratories of hope? How might frontiers serve as places where unity in diversity is negotiated and enacted?
• How do frontiers embody both the realities of immobility and stuckedness, and simultaneously facilitate transit, encounters, and dialogue across people, artefacts, and ideas?
• In what ways do frontiers accommodate differences while also providing a common ground—a collective basis for becoming human through relations with others and the environment?
• How can we critically examine the role of disciplinary boundaries within our research fields, and what might be gained by crossing or challenging these through multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary approaches?
• How does fieldwork, as a central practice of folklore, ethnology, and anthropology, operate as a process of border-crossing and as a relational common frontier?