The Border: Between Hybridization and Separation

Introduction

With the expansion of capitalism, the intensification of the international economy, the evolution of globalization processes, there has been an intense phenomenon of intersections, mutual enrichment and ‘insemination’ between different cultural forms and previously separate (Clifford 1993, Amselle 1999, 2001). Furthermore, the advent and widespread diffusion of information technologies and new information channels contributes and accelerates transformations. Therefore, the distance no longer seems to matter much and space has ceased to be an obstacle. The very meaning of geographical location is beginning to be questioned at any level. We have all become nomads - but still in contact with each other (Benedikt, 1995, p. 42).

However, paradoxically, in this intensification of contacts and displacements it happens that the borders, rather than being zeroed out, undergo a multiplication: in a world that is increasingly stretched in space-time, one thing that is not happening is precisely the disappearance of borders. Indeed, new ones seem to spring up everywhere.

Therefore, it is clear that the question of the border is posed with force and, in some respects, with concern. In fact, it is something much more complex than defining the border as the tool to separate an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’.

The study of borders has undergone a renaissance during the last decade. Borders have taken on a multi-dimensional meaning. No longer the exclusive domain of the geographer, the study of borders is discussed by sociologists and anthropologists, focusing on the functional significance of the bordering process. Contingent upon social and political conditions, borders reflecting the degree to which cross-border separation or contact takes place (Ullrich, 2020; Thomas, 2016; Scott, 2020).

Indeed the border is not only a geopolitical line of separation but it is also limen (inclusive) and limes (exclusive) together; it ‘writes’ our personal and social space; it is that line along which two people can touch (cum-finis), allowing to define an identity and / or differentiate it. Therefore, it becomes a device for organizing one’s identity, for regulating and mediating one’s intra and inter subjective experience (think also of the so-called ‘identity rhetoric’, understood as an irreducible dimension of the ‘Me’ or of ‘Us’) (Español et al, 2021). It is the threshold between real life and virtual life, which disappears in the violation of individual freedoms or is recomposed in the new ‘diasporic public spheres’, that is, imagined super-communities, where the idea of common ethnic belonging is strengthened, without however having any concrete experience of the territory.

Based on these statements, this work wants to emphasize the idea of how much reflection and declination of the concept of border is necessary in different perspectives: social, psychological, geopolitical. A multidisciplinary perspective is necessary since the theme of the border requires a care of the social and relational space as well as a profound ethical and programmatic reflection on the development of the civic and community sense. This objective becomes indispensable, for example, to avoid a reified and reductive vision of individual cultures, and instead increase their capacity for dialogue as well as for understanding the ‘other’ emotions. “The Other will increasingly become part of us in our multicultural societies. The emotional frontiers of the world have become as important as its geographical frontiers” (Moïsi, 2009, p. 228).